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MUCH of administration is taken up with the tyranny of the urgent, usually in a specific, local context. This is true in graduate education: recruiting students in a period of shifting patterns of language enrollments, ensuring a sufficient number of assistantships to cover undergraduate language classes, and finding positions for newly minted PhDs consume the time of the director of graduate studies and of the department chair. Local concerns also include those of the professional disciplines of the department, from literary, cultural, and theoretical studies to second language acquisition. The curricular and research agendas of graduate programs are frequently reflections of current fashion, changing or evolving in a cycle of about ten to fifteen years, although this cycle is speeding up due to global communication and technology. Scrambling to adapt graduate programs to institutional and governmental pressures of accountability, such as intractable guidelines for graduate seminar enrollments or legislative guidelines regarding research time of faculty members, adds to the short-term and often short-sighted approach to graduate education that is imposed by local contexts on day-to-day administration. If an effort is made to move beyond these urgent issues, linked, of course, to survival on occasion, one finds that local concerns are often concrete manifestations of broad, national issues that cross all disciplines.
It is imperative to keep abreast of national discussions of graduate education, not only to keep in perspective the urgent but also to reflect on the fundamental trends that these local problems illustrate. Creative reflection against a broad, interdisciplinary context can do far more to ensure a lively and viable graduate program than mere short-term measures, however necessary they may be. The first step into the broader context of graduate education is to involve the department in the affairs of the graduate school or graduate division, particularly through participation in the governance process. In campus-wide discussion and planning regarding graduate education, cross-disciplinary issues quickly provide an institutional context for what may seem a departmental issue. There is less of a divide between the sciences and the humanities than one might think. And institutional debates quickly become mirrors of the national scene.
The issue of the training of graduate students for teaching positions is an example of an issue that might seem local and discipline-oriented at first glance. Modern language departments have made great strides in the last two decades in the training of their assistants in the pedagogy and theory of second language acquisition. Mandatory classes or seminars and careful supervision and coordination have greatly improved undergraduate language instruction by graduate assistants. In the 1990s students began to ask for further types of preprofessional training—for opportunities to teach courses in literature or cultural studies, for more mentoring, and for help in gaining specific skills related to the job search. Modern language departments have usually viewed these requests as the result of the pressures of a very specific job market. However, some graduate schools or teaching centers have responded with coherent cross-departmental initiatives of which a department, struggling with the tyranny of the urgent, could well take advantage to supplement its limited resources.
One example has been the Preparing Future Faculty (PFF) program, funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts and developed by the Council of Graduate Schools and the Association of American Colleges and Universities. The PFF project was conceived on the premise that the research culture of the graduate university tends to produce replicates of its faculty members when the majority of available teaching positions in higher education are in two-year community colleges, four-year liberal arts colleges, or comprehensive universities. At the same time, the PFF project leaders maintained that the roles and responsibilities of faculty members have changed dramatically, requiring new types of graduate school preprofessional training.
New faculty are expected to demonstrate excellence in teaching, to set clear goals for student learning, and to use assessments to measure learning outcomes.[. . .] Newer active, experimental, technological, and collaborative approaches to teaching and learning are now readily available and faculty members are expected to stay current.
More and more, faculty are expected to be good campus and community citizens from the moment they arrive on campus. (Bogle et al.)
At the same time, the PFF project took into account the changing nature of scholarship and of the knowledge base to include interdisciplinary study. Undergraduate curricula emphasize coherence and collaboration. The student body is diverse and teaching and learning will continue to be transformed by new technologies (Anderson, Gaff, and Pruitt-Logan). The PFF project proposed a series of preprofessional seminars and courses to be developed on university campuses, as well as collaborative alliances with nearby institutions. Mentoring arrangements would be created at nonresearch universities whereby graduate students could learn exactly what the life of a faculty member entails.
The PFF example illustrates that pressures from graduate students, which have appeared to be driven by the immediate pressure of the job market in the modern languages, are really part of a much broader and deeper spectrum of issues. The project claimed that the pool of available graduate students has not matched the requirements of the available faculty positions. On the local level, this has been viewed simply as the tight job market. But at a deeper level, there is a hidden issue not frequently addressed, the conception of the graduate curriculum and of research. The culture of research and of the graduate curriculum has become increasingly specific, narrow, driven by the demands of a particular theoretic paradigm, in short, a complex techné, to cite the categories of Aristotle. This is readily evident in the sciences, where increasingly sophisticated methods must be used by students in their research. However, we can see the trend in the humanities in the nature of graduate seminars that are often narrow extensions of the book the individual faculty member is writing, linked only tangentially to the needs of the students or to the broader curriculum. Spelled out on the local level, the training of graduate students is as much a story of the conflict between poésis, making, knowing, and creating in the broadest, most humanistic sense, and producing, imitating, and using skills in a technological sense. The job of the department chair and of the director of graduate studies is to orchestrate, as in a complicated dance, the working out of these tensions in both the conception of the curriculum and the preparation of students for their exit into the job market.
These contexts for the conceptualization of graduate study and for its actualization on the local level suggest what may seem a simple, but what is perhaps a radical, guideline. Graduate education must be student-centered. The 1998 Report and Recommendations of the Association of American Universities Committee on Graduate Education first noted that there have been long-standing criticisms of graduate education and then it made a telling point:
the balance between institutional and departmental benefits from and responsibilities for graduate education has in many cases shifted too far in the direction of institutional and departmental benefits, to the detriment of graduate students and programs. Concerted efforts should be and have been made to right this balance. (18)
The challenge for department chairs is to keep before their colleagues the vision of a student-oriented program, articulated in a series of ever-broadening contexts. All good practices and all strategic planning should flow from this vision.
Departments have histories and cultures that determine their individual flavor. Large, mature departments can do many things well, but even they have to carve out reputations based on particular areas of excellence. Smaller or less mature departments must give even more attention to what defines their reputation. Reputation is essential to the graduate enterprise and it is traditionally defined in terms of the identity and scholarship of the members of its faculty. Superstar talent can be bought if one does not have the time to nurture from within. Rigorous, demanding, and exciting scholarship and teaching are to be cherished at the graduate level, but student interests should not be sacrificed to gain them. Only occasionally have I heard a department recommended because it treats its graduate students well, mentoring them wisely and according them access to faculty members. Much more often, I have heard junior colleagues tell stories about their absentee and busy famous professors who often caused them stress and anguish. Reputation is both a faculty and student affair.
The AAU committee report set forth a series of recommendations that are excellent guidelines for any department chair and that can be translated easily to the modern languages. Even at a time of enrollment pressures, admissions should be based on quality. Particular care should be taken in mentoring graduate students from abroad and in recruiting underrepresented groups from the United States. The length of a program of graduate studies is between six and seven years in most cases. Support is often for the first five years of study in the humanities. Departments have a responsibility to develop alternative resources when the standard fellowship or assistantship runs out. Student programs of study should not be extended because of neglect by faculty advisers or because of poor advising. Faculty mentors should give regular feedback to students regarding their progress toward their degrees and should involve them in collaborative research, giving students their due recognition in published work. The graduate curriculum should reveal breadth and depth, training students for a range of careers. Departments should be accountable, gathering data systematically on progress toward the completion of the degree, the placement and tracking of students, and the achievements of students and alumni. Regular external reviews, including self-studies by the department, should occur. Finally, the AAU report calls for renewed external support from federal, state, and private sources for fellowships and assistantships (adapted from the AAU Report and Recommendations, esp. 21–23).
One of the most important decisions by a department chair is the choice of the director of graduate studies (DGS). Depending on the size of the department and the available staff, the DGS is involved not only in advising and in keeping track of the progress of students but also in recruiting and admitting them, in overseeing examinations, and in coordinating theses and defenses, especially if faculty directors are lax. The DGS must be a mature scholar, capable of working with faculty advisers to make sure that students receive good advice as they build their programs of study. But the best DGS is also a builder of collegial relationships, fostering academic exchange, encouraging early papers and publications, and keeping student interests before faculty members. The group psychology of graduate students is a reflection of the department’s values and practices and not just of the personalities and abilities of individuals. The DGS and the coordinator of language instruction are frequently the key figures who encourage graduate students and serve as their sounding boards. A good adviser or dissertation director can do this as well, but such faculty members are rarer than one would care to admit.
If one accepts the premises that graduate education must be kept in context and student-centered, what are some of the practices that ensure the academic and administrative integrity of a department’s programs?
The foregoing list may sound utopic, but every department does some of these things and does many of them well. The life of the graduate program is organic, never fixed, and liveliness should be its hallmark. The chair is both a visionary and an entrepreneur in this process, seeking the resources to improve the ability of the department to engage in effective practices and calling forth the best from both faculty members and students. Two or three practical examples may help. The chair of a department of Romance languages initiated a new program abroad and was able to convince the administration to permit the department to manage the budget. With savings from the budget, the department was able to finance new fellowships for graduate students. Another chair circulated information regarding internships in North Africa. A student interested in francophone literature applied for an internship and spent a summer in Tunisia, followed by a short-term scholarship to begin the study of Arabic, and then a year-long Fulbright scholarship. Another chair of a large language department began to publish an annual newsletter that eventually generated yearly revenue of approximately $25,000.
Vision, values, and administrative structures are always accompanied by shrewd and insightful management.
Association of American Universities Committee on Graduate Education. Report and Recommendations. Washington: Assn. of Amer. Universities, 1998.
Bogle, Enid E., et al. A Memo to Graduate Students Preparing to Be the Faculty of the Future. Occasional Paper 5. Washington: Preparing Future Faculty, Assn. of Amer. Universities, 1997. N. pag.
© 2001 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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