Filling a Gap in the Doctoral Process

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By F. CHAMPION WARD

Several years ago I completed an instructive 16-year period of service as an adviser to the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation about the conduct of its program of dissertation-year fellowships in the humanities. That role took me often to the graduate schools of arts and sciences at Bryn Mawr College, the University of Chicago, and Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale Universities. Previously, in a career that spanned more than half a century, I had served as acting dean of the graduate faculty of New School University, as dean of the University of Chicago's Hutchins College, and as the Ford Foundation's vice president for education and research.

Looking back now at my experiences with the Whiting fellowships program, I find myself haunted by an apparent gap in the present doctoral process of graduate schools. The vocation for which graduate schools prepare most of their doctoral candidates requires them, on joining a college faculty, to play effectively three distinct roles: as scholars and scientists, as classroom teachers, and as members of a faculty that, in most cases, is responsible for the overall education of undergraduates in universities and free-standing colleges.

What troubles me now is scarcity of formal preparation for the third of those roles, despite the very high quality of preparation for the first role and the understandably uneven but serious preparation for the second.

Today newly minted doctors of philosophy and science, once employed, find themselves members of faculty bodies consisting almost entirely of members of single-subject departments. Among those colleagues, few will exhibit a serious concern for the whole of the education of their college's students.

It is true that in most colleges there are what one might call the "trusted few," faculty statesmen who are turned to when the college faces an issue, such as changing the criteria for awarding tenure or sabbatical years, that might lead to controversy or division. Such men and women have practical wisdom (not the most prevalent virtue in academe) and are considered reliable and fair by both administrators and faculty members. However, they seldom bring with them a wide knowledge of issues, policies, and practices in other colleges in America and elsewhere. Of course, there will be a few colleagues who know and care about higher education's Problematik, but they may be offset by others who have a cultivated disdain for education as a subject matter or discipline. Thus, newcomers may find themselves disappointed by the low quality of the discourse at faculty meetings, particularly by the turf battles, which may remind them of Matthew Arnold's lines: "And we are here as on a darkling plain ... where ignorant armies clash by night."

To elevate the level of faculty discourse, I propose that future requirements for the doctor's degree include, in the candidate's final year, participation in a seminar on the policies, issues, and variant practices in the education of undergraduate students. The seminar would not be a conventional course leading to an exam that tests students' knowledge of a large body of lectures and course materials. Rather, the seminar's purpose would be to enable future college professors, although variously specialized, to form the habit of together seriously discussing questions that higher education faces in their time. At the seminar's conclusion, participants would submit an essay on one or more of the subjects they found important and interesting.

In addition to critical essays and articles, discussions in the seminar could be incited by short and provocative statements like the following:

Subject: The expository lecture as the principal means of instruction.

Inciter: The expository lecture is simply a talking textbook that has endured too long since the invention of printing.

Subject: The student-selected curriculum.

Inciter: According to the interest theory of value, the value of academic subjects is not intrinsic. It is bestowed on them by the interest that students bring to them. It follows that students should study only those subjects in which they are already interested.

Subject: The purpose of a college education.

Inciter: "If then a practical end must be assigned to a university course, I say that it is that of training good members of society. ... It aims ... at cultivating the public mind, at supplying true principles to popular enthusiasms and fixed aims to popular aspirations, ... at facilitating the exercise of political power, and refining the intercourse of private life." (John Henry Newman in The Idea of a University)

Subject: The place of the sciences in liberal education.

Inciter: Years ago, a dean of Columbia College told me that he was close to deciding that there would be no general science course comparable to the college's well-known required courses in the social sciences and the humanities. Why?

Subject: Why the college major? (A 1983 essay in Change, by J.Z. Smith, was titled "Why the College Major? Questioning the Great Unexplained Aspect of Undergraduate Education.")

Inciter: A New School commission, chaired by Robert L. Heilbroner, proposed that the major be placed in the second and third college years, preceded by a first year of seminars and followed in the last year by a senior thesis and comparative studies.

Subject: The globalization of the college curriculum.

Inciter: "Toward a Universal Curriculum; Animadversions, on the Tribal Curriculum," an address that I once gave. Should the canon of great works include non-Western works?

What, then, is the prospect for the foregoing proposal? Defenders of things as they have always been will be relieved to learn that when I once aired it informally to a graduate dean he first said "good idea" but then added realistically, "The departments wouldn't approve." Recently, however, I sent the proposal to five graduate schools and learned from the two deans who responded that specific preparation for classroom teaching and faculty membership is provided in impressive variety by "teaching centers" at Columbia and Princeton Universities.

Perhaps it is not too soon to hope that time will bring similar new ventures to many other graduate schools, enabling the writer, at the age of 94, to join the graduate faculties of Princeton and Columbia in beginning to savor what Oliver Wendell Holmes once called the "subtle rapture of a postponed power."

F. Champion Ward is retired and lives in North Branford, Conn.