Humanities at Work

Toward a Responsive Doctorate

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By Robert A. Weisbuch

In this column, we generally try to offer practical career advice for making the most of a Ph.D. in the humanities. But if that advice were, "Get more relevant, more responsive," the predictable reply would be: "How?"

The answer necessitates new kinds of connections between doctoral education and the world beyond the academy. Since its inception, the Humanities at Work program of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation has sought to make such connections. We encourage talented humanities Ph.D.'s (on the one hand) to put their broad understanding and acute critical skills to work in settings outside of academe. And we urge businesses, nonprofit and cultural organizations, and government agencies (on the other hand) to mine this rich lode of talent.

Between Ph.D.'s and the nonacademic world, however, stand the graduate faculty members, deans, and institutions. We need them to be a part of this effort while maintaining the academic quality of doctoral education, but the reality is, we haven't yet asked faculty members to the dance.

Remedying that situation and finding sound ways to make the Ph.D. more relevant to the world beyond academe are key objectives of the "Responsive Ph.D.," a new foundation initiative. It takes to heart a key finding not just in the humanities but across disciplines: If Ph.D.'s are to be the strong, adventurous, intellectually resourceful leaders we need them to be, then we must ensure a constant commerce between the consumers of graduate education and those who produce it.

The call for this commerce comes through loud and clear in the interviews with hundreds of leaders that Jody Nyquist and her University of Washington colleagues conducted for the Re-envisioning the Ph.D. project. Listen:

• From a faculty member: "There is resistance to understanding that everyone who gets a doctorate isn't going to be emulating the career of the mentor. We as faculty need to be creative about allowing our students to see a broader range of life and career opportunities."

• From a college dean: "Our new faculty do not understand students for whom school comes after family and job. Sometimes, I don't think they even like this type of student, but they represent our livelihood."

• From a business leader: "The sin is that people get the impression that going narrow and deep is the essence of the doctorate, but the essence is really trying to be critical and original and to do things on your own. We need people who are intellectually adventurous."

• From another business leader: "Graduate education ... needs to skate to where the puck is."

Even if, like me, you believe that graduate education also sometimes requires skating to where the puck is not, a consensus has emerged here with vast professional-development implications for Ph.D.'s and doctoral students in every field.

The implications were well-expressed by a young faculty member at a Woodrow Wilson forum who said, "It's as though they spent years training me to know all there is to know about the roller coaster. But now I'm suddenly in charge of the whole amusement park -- the safety regulations, the ticket sales, the publicity, the staffing, the other rides. No one had taught me anything about all that." Perhaps if you knew something "about all that," you would understand much better the function of the roller coaster in relation to the whole amusement park, and offer a roller coaster more responsive to the needs of the amusement park. It is a call for a more responsive Ph.D. that, increasingly, we hear from all sides.

That said, the intent here is not to point fingers at those who shape the teaching and training, the graduate faculty members and deans who are the "producers" of Ph.D.'s. Graduate faculty members have few formal opportunities to hear the voices of the "consumers" of Ph.D.'s -- businesses, governments, nonprofit and cultural organizations, as well as other kinds of educational institutions (small liberal-arts colleges, community colleges, elementary and secondary schools, all of which employ new Ph.D.'s). Faculty members who teach and oversee graduate students deserve the opportunity to participate in strong dialogue, intelligent inquiry, and a widespread consideration of meaningful ways to make the Ph.D. more responsive while maintaining its scholarly substance.

Hence the approach of our foundation's Responsive Ph.D. project, financed in part by the Pew Charitable Trusts, which seeks both to open a dialogue and to promote action around recommendations for improving the Ph.D. Over the last decade, such recommendations have come from many national projects: the University of Washington's "Re-envisioning" effort; the "Ten Years Later" report by Maresi Nerad and Joe Cerny at the University of California at Berkeley; the report on reshaping graduate education in the sciences by the National Academy of Sciences' Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy; and many others. We've already compiled a long list. We want to marry that list to the outcomes of a series of major dialogues on each side of the doctoral producer/consumer system, and, ultimately, across the divide between producer and consumer.

To give shape to this effort, the Responsive Ph.D. has an agenda of "four pillars:"

• New paradigms: What encourages -- or blocks -- adventuresome, innovative, responsive scholarship?

• New practices: How can pedagogical training be as challenging, intensive, and versatile as scholarly training? And how can knowledge be applied beyond the academy?

• New people: Why does the Ph.D. fail to attract students of color in real numbers? Does the degree unintentionally appear too exclusive, abstract, or socially irrelevant?

• New partnerships: How do we create a powerful, permanent dialogue between the producers and consumers of Ph.D.'s?

In carrying out this agenda, 14 Ph.D.-granting universities -- public and private, diverse in their type and geography -- are working with the foundation as models and demonstration sites.

Each of these institutions is represented on the Responsive Ph.D.'s Graduate Deans Group, a community of leaders from institutions that train significant numbers of Ph.D.'s in multiple disciplines. Meanwhile, the Sectors Group fosters communication among multiple "consumer" constituencies that influence, finance, hire, and care deeply about Ph.D.'s. Each of these groups has already met on its own; in the months to come, they will meet together to discuss ideas, examine findings, and set priorities and next steps. Before the year is out, we plan to publish some of the results of these discussions, as well as a synthesis of the best ideas that these various resources and partnerships have produced.

We hope the project will make possible a new concept of professional development, an opportunity for Ph.D.'s to have an expanded influence on the social reality of our time. The goal is to ensure that our most learned citizens do not become our most irrelevant citizens. Whether we are preparing new Ph.D.'s to teach in institutions that do not produce Ph.D.'s; to lead in businesses that need minds both broad and quick; or to shape public affairs in civic and governmental roles -- in each of these arenas, we need to place more and stronger intellectual leaders who are imbued with the great traditions of our scholarly disciplines and invested with a sharp sense of the contexts and challenges of our quotidian world of work.

Get more responsive, more relevant? It will take time, of course, on the institutional scale, and making it happen will require immediate and insistent involvement by those who are in the thick of learning and teaching and job-seeking, as well as by those on either side of the traditional academic/nonacademic divide. Each of us must anticipate and respond to this enterprise in our own ways.

And yet, for all of us -- students, faculty members, administrators, and those who shape the larger world of work -- this enterprise can be momentous and thrilling, institutionally fulfilling and intellectually powerful. It has precedents in many of the best-known statements of our foundation's namesake, Woodrow Wilson, who, at Princeton's 150th anniversary, spoke words that might have been spoken last week:

There is laid upon us the compulsion of the national life. We dare not keep aloof and close ourselves while a nation comes into maturity. The days of glad expansion are gone, our life grown tense and difficult; our recourse for the future lies in careful thought, providence, and a wise economy, and the school must be of the nation.

Ph.D.'s and doctoral students must, more than ever, be scholar-citizens of the nation and of the world. The Responsive Ph.D. asks that we commit ourselves to meet this challenge. The times demand no less.