Ramping Up

Once we review the recent attempts at doctoral reforms, it’s difficult not to be discouraged. The defects of doctoral education have remained constant and have resisted any number of solutions. Given the lack of communication among all ­those concerned with gradu­ate school (including the vacuum between the advisers and the eventual employers of students), few incentives or bud­get reductions based on per­formance, and ­little realistic information getting to the faculty members responsible for their own programs, past initiatives have largely failed. One effort (Preparing ­Future Faculty) promised too ­little to deserve the effort and time required by students, while another (The Responsive Ph.D.) asked for more kinds of change than any program might reasonably have achieved.

If the faculty are not fully consulted and enlisted (a major shortcoming of the Mellon effort), suggestions proposed from on high ­will be first resented and then blocked. But even if the faculty engage (as with the Car­ne­gie initiative), talk may lead nowhere but to more talk, and the “stewards” (Car­negie’s flattering phrase for faculty) ­will become stoppers. We academics must be fully involved, but ­we’re rather too good at blocking our own way forward.

­Here’s the good news. Given the right chance, we can do far better. These myriad past efforts shared a defect that hamstrung their process: they lacked a considered strategy for achieving consensus and for moving from consensus to action. They failed to offer a means for agreeing on final goals and a strategy for achieving them. That’s good news ­ because a diagnosis offers a possibility of cure. ­Earlier reforms had no strategy to use ongoing assessment as a means for enacting a plan that could succeed. ­ We’ll outline that strategy in this chapter.

To do that, we need to dust off the term “assessment.” It’s a dirty word to most academics ­ because it is thought to objectify every­ thing that properly resists objectification. Assessment also implies judgment by outsiders, especially negative judgment, and so becomes nearly synonymous with punishment. But the kind of assessment that we propose is largely qualitative (“Statistics are a wonderful servant and an appalling master,” writes Michael Fullan)[1] and is defined and performed by the persons involved. Its criteria are not imposed from without but determined by ­ those whom the assessment is intended to serve. Further, we suggest that assessment should begin not ­after an effort (performed by a scowling examiner) but before it begins (as a communal goal setter). The right kind of assessment is also ongoing (as a constant for corrections along the way) ­ because no one can get it just right from the start. In fact, colleagues ­ will be more willing to try something new if ­there is a guaranteed date by which the group can decide ­whether to maintain, expand, modify, or eliminate it. The kind of assessment we propose ­here is intended not so much to judge as to improve per­formance. In all, this version of assessment should be intellectually engaging and maybe even gratifying.

Ramping up ­will require several activities. ­ They’re especially necessary to overcome a difficulty well expressed by David Damrosch: “We academics are better placed to solve the world’s prob­lems than our own. It is hard to get an analytical purchase on the situation in which we are immersed.”[2] To achieve that perspective, to move past defensiveness to an openness to change, requires a mood that is empathetic, experimental, and optimistic. Getting ­people ready to do the work together is a challenge that needs to be met with planning. ­ Here’s how.

Introduce Mission Time and Guard It

This is a major emphasis in David Grant’s highly readable Social Profit Handbook, the best source we know for advice on setting group goals and achieving them.[3] Grant observes that the most impor­tant aspects of a program’s success usually are not ­ those most pressing at any moment. But ­ those pressing ­ matters ­ don’t allow time for any fundamental thinking, so it becomes easy to stay busy putting out fires while the house slowly floods. In the case of academic programs and departments, for instance, the annual bud­get may be due next week, but the quality of the student experience never is and yet the latter is supremely impor­tant and, apart from ideals, may well affect ­ future budget resources in a major way.

What is most impor­tant may not be most urgent and therefore can be overlooked or infinitely postponed. “How do ­people we know actually accomplish impor­tant, non-­urgent activities on a regular basis?” asks Grant. “They schedule time for them, and that time is inviolate.” There’s an economy to this, he says: “Mission time calms you down and saves you other time in the long run.” It’s also a separate time to step back: “Mission time is where we can achieve thoughtful clarity about who we are, what we are ­ going to do, what we do best, and how we ­ will go about it. We can ask how the world is changing around us and reflect on how we ­ will know ­ whether we are being successful in it.”[4]

Let’s assume the department chair and gradu­ate chair have determined, in discussion with colleagues, that the doctoral program requires a basic rethinking to change some of the questionable norms we listed in our introduction. ­These leaders bring the ­ matter to the full faculty and gradu­ate student body, to begin in the spirit Grant espouses. It well may be that a prime motivation for reform is negative-student enrollment or quality is declining, or academic job results for students have been disheartening, or students are reporting unhappiness and even anger. But while difficulties should be frankly acknowledged, the best way to take a fresh look at the PhD is through an appeal to individual and collective self-­interest. Ease up on the threats to the current program, and emphasize the opportunities—like a more in­ter­est­ing experience for faculty as well as students, a more distinctive program, national leadership, a still more in­ter­est­ing student cohort, and so on.

The first mention of changing the doctoral program, then, should take place outside the shadow of a crisis. The chair and graduate chair can emphasize that the mission time now being carved out for possible reform will become a continuing norm, a periodic practice, for the department. If we do that, they’ll affirm, we won’t have to engage in this soup-to-nuts rethinking again because we will be doing it as we go along.

Accompanying that notion of continuing reassessment is the need to establish a will to action. Time in academia too often resembles a melting Dali clock, where long debate results in poor compromises just to get past an issue. Leaders therefore need to establish a timeline that assures decisions within a period of months and early implementations within a year, while at the same time guaranteeing opportunities for participation by all. To beat the clock requires naming a small committee of, say, six or eight faculty and two or four doctoral students (even numbers so that pairs can work together on specific tasks). They should be respected by their peers and should represent a diversity of interests and expertise, gender and race, and career stages. The committee may also require an outsider, either a consultant familiar with both curricular change and graduate education or a member of the university versed in consensus building. All will emphasize that there will be no secrets, that the members of this lead committee will be communicating regularly with all faculty and students.

To enable an economy of time and a sense of serious purpose, here’s a simple four-part process. We will ask what we know, what this information means, what we should do in relation to that meaning, and how that would look and feel. While the best innovations may bump against institutional limits on resources and even space, we’ll deal with that in stage four; at this point, we won’t allow such concerns to interfere with the creative process of agreeing upon goals and best means for achieving them.

The committee will look at a range of concerns like those we list in our introduction, but one (or at most, two) must be chosen as central. Other program features will receive attention and rethinking in relation to that top priority. For example, a department may decide to focus on diversifying the student cohort, but that will mean rethinking admissions, advising, and the curriculum—and emphasizing public scholarship and career options beyond the professoriate (since studies show both are of great import to students from underrepresented groups).

If the announcement of the project and the committee takes place in, say, March, the committee should be financed to work through the summer and report back at a September two-day retreat where faculty and representative students will engage in a wide-ranging discussion of the committee’s report and early recommendations. That is, the summer will be for collecting information (increasing what we know) and the fall will be for considering what this information means and beginning a plan to act on that meaning.

Enlist Higher Administration and Gather Resources

Ideally, an entire graduate school led by an empowered dean would organize this effort and create networks so that programs could learn from each other across any number of disciplines. But if a program must go it alone, it should husband resources by letting relevant members of the administration—president, provost, dean(s)—know of your effort before you’ve identified your main emphases. Let them know you are engaging in self-examination with an eye to improvement, for we know of no administrator who would not encourage that. There’s a good chance that the administration will support it with the modest finances it might require (such as summer stipends for the small committee that will lead the way).

Making key administrators aware serves another purpose: it encourages their own learning about the doctorate. Provosts in particular may tend to judge programs by counting traditional placements at high-ranking universities, with little awareness of the changed academic job market. Following faculty discussions, even at a distance via periodic reports, will encourage administrators to broaden their own perspectives while the faculty does the same.

Beyond the university, you should also let the national disciplinary association (and any other national organization or foundation that might be interested) know what you’re embarking upon. Some of these groups have their own ongoing reform initiatives. The recent efforts, and lessons learned, by such organizations as the American Historical Association, the Modern Language Association, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (as well as the National Science Foundation) will add to the store of information you’re gathering. And finally, if later you discover that your agreed-upon goals (say, to emphasize public scholarship or create internships at nonprofits and for-profits) may affect the community, then you can inform and engage local and regional organizations and politicians as well.

Increase the Knowledge Base

This is the key first challenge for the lead group. Gathering full knowledge (and chucking false assumptions) is the first task. It’s a truism that the prior learning we bring to any discussion affects the quality of that discussion. Yet most of us have earned our PhDs without spending much time learning the history of our discipline, exploring its relation to other disciplines, or receiving even the briefest introduction to the historical development and landscape of higher education in the United States. Many of the senior professors who wield the greatest influence in a department sit furthest from current realities. Young or old, tenured professors in doctoral-granting universities are not normative or representative: they’re special cases. But it isn’t too late for them, or anyone else, to gain a wider perspective. Faculty members in a graduate program don’t have to become education experts, but every member of a graduate faculty could read a historical summary of the major issues like the one we present in our introduction. (Of course, the lead committee of faculty and students should go into greater depth.) Many national disciplinary associations have published work or maintain websites on doctoral reform in particular fields also. Committee members should familiarize themselves with the most relevant ones. But most of the major challenges cross disciplines—as we do in this book.

It's about Students. Listen to Them

For this unlearning and relearning, we too often neglect a resource that is right in front of us. If you want to know what works and what does not, ask the people you’re doing it for. It is worth reminding ourselves periodically that graduate school is school.

By first surveying current students, recent graduates, and (importantly) some students who did not complete the program, faculty will learn a great deal. In particular, faculty will see the aspects of their program that have not really been planned at all, but that students are experiencing vividly. One obvious example we treat later is the advising of students, the Wild West of the PhD.

The students themselves want and expect to be consulted more than ever before. That’s one reason for the surge of graduate student associations in recent years. Centralized graduate student associations (or councils or congresses) have been around for decades, but lately they have grown and found a renewed purpose: to provide a unified voice demanding changes and improvements in graduate education, including better advising, more resources for wellness and particularly mental health, and wider avenues of professional development [5]. Students are strong advocates for change, and senior-level administrators may listen to students more than they listen to graduate school staff. The graduate student association at Purdue, for example, worked with the university’s Graduate Council to develop and implement a Graduate Student Bill of Rights and a Mentor-Mentee Agreement that spells out obligations and expectations on both sides. It’s worth taking the time to see what students want.

A thorough student survey was modeled impressively almost two decades ago by David Damrosch when he chaired the Department of English at Columbia. Damrosch and his colleagues composed a survey for their current students—80 questions in all, on every facet of the program and, importantly, on their life situation while in grad school. The results yielded many surprising discoveries about the actual circumstances of those students and, said Damrosch, “a wealth of statistical information and many thoughtful, creative ideas for change.”[6] Damrosch confessed that he “had no idea . . . how many hours a week the students in our ‘fully funded’ Ph.D program were working off-campus just to make ends meet (typically 15 and often more).” He was surprised as well by “a widespread dissatisfaction with the lack of advice on courses,” which not one of 50 students described as excellent and only 9 characterized as adequate. The survey also revealed an unexpected dissatisfaction with curricular offerings and with the failure to ask students what courses they needed. (Not surprisingly, course offerings were determined almost exclusively by faculty research interests. We consider that problem more thoroughly in chapter 6.) Damrosch concluded that the students’ survey responses helped to persuade both faculty and administration of the importance of change.[7]

We would modify Damrosch’s survey (as he himself wished to do but could not) by including recent graduates—and non-completers—along with current students. Locating alumni may take some doing, as some programs haven’t always kept track of their graduates. But in the age of social media, the job is much easier than it once was. (We suggest funding a graduate student or two for the summer to track down and survey the last 10 or 15 years of alumni—and also those non-completers, whose stories and choices will also prove valuable.) We would further echo Damrosch’s insistence that junior colleagues take a major role in formulating the survey—and the entire process—as “they are the faculty most likely to retain a sense of the realities of graduate student life” and are “closest, as a group, to new directions in the field.” In the end, said Damrosch, they are “the very real future of our own department.”[8]

Create a Conversation between the Faculty and the World, Beginning with Employers

Grant insists that all stakeholders in an organization’s work should be enlisted in the process of determining goals and strategies. And psychologists have shown, in the words of Steven Johnson, that “homogeneous groups” (and that would include faculty in one sense) “tend to come to decisions too quickly. They settle early on a most-likely scenario and don’t question the assumptions.”[9] That’s why the inclusion of students in the survey (and in person) is important. But also, in the case of doctoral education, as the national convention of the Re-envisioning the Ph.D. initiative at the University of Washington group demonstrated more than 15 years ago, a discussion of the future of graduate school should include an especially vital group: the consumers of doctoral graduates, meaning the people who employ our students, both in and beyond academia. Much research on successful innovation shows, as Ronald S. Burt puts it, that “this is not creativity born of genius. It is creativity as an import-export business.”[10]

If possible, the lead committee should consult a group of recent PhDs during the fact-finding process. These graduates should include not only professors but also (maybe especially) employees of small colleges, community colleges, research and branch universities, as well as nonprofits, corporations, tech fields, K–12, and government. “We need to broaden the conversation,” says Damrosch, “intellectually, experientially, and even in basic personal terms.”[11] Moving the conversation beyond the faculty lunchroom generally proves a friendly and eye-opening activity, and a few sessions can refresh thought and generate a range of perspectives. Pairs of committee members could interview these varied representatives, with the goal of bringing the most interesting of them before the entire faculty in the fall.

Other lead committee members could approach other PhD-granting departments in their own university. Processes vary greatly given the loose (we think too loose), discipline-local structure of doctoral education. That means speaking with colleagues both in neighboring disciplines and in disciplines further away. For instance, a history department may want to learn about how English or political science programs at their university shape and govern themselves, but it may be even more useful to learn about the experience of doctoral students in chemistry or biology. “An idea mundane in one group,” Burt writes, “can be a valuable insight in another.”[12] For example, the norm in the bench sciences of collaborative work may spark creative insight in disciplines where the lone scholar is the assumption.

As a final task, a pair of committee members can use the examples we sketch later in our book, along with disciplinary studies and higher education periodicals, to review successful reforms at other universities. Reform is a steep climb, and there is no disgrace in hauling oneself up by grabbing onto others’ innovations.

Beat the Clock

We said this before, but it is worth saying twice. Time is your friend until it is your enemy. You need time to achieve these preliminaries, but don’t let any part of the process drag on. There is no greater source of pessimism about change than endless bickering. Establish the goal of a process that begins in summer and ends the following spring. To do that, create norms of discussion that avoid pitfalls. Stay out of the weeds, embrace a details-to-follow process, and remind colleagues again of the four-part order: what we know, what it means, what we should do, how it looks and feels. Only in the final stages will a small group again fit the ideal within the limits of institutional resources.

Planning Backward: Creating a Culture of Yes

Equipped now with some preliminary knowledge of issues in doctoral education; a sharper, fuller sense of the real-life experience of students in your program; a broadened perspective achieved by a dialogue with those who employ doctoral graduates in different kinds of academic institutions and in other social sectors; and some encouragement and suggestions from within the university and from national and local organizations, you’re now ready for the big discussion of goals. Almost.

Before a weekend retreat for the entire faculty and representative students somewhere off campus, it’s worth issuing a key challenge to all participants. To examine our own practices and question our own assumptions, we must obey a difficult injunction to unlearn what we think we know. It wasn’t really Mark Twain who said, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so,” but it sounds like him. Or again, Tolstoy: “The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already, but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of a doubt, what is laid before him.”[13] To change, we need self-skepticism. A key attribute of design thinking is to become a visitor from another planet who keeps asking, “Why is it this way?” especially when we’ve taken the way it is for granted.

This unlearning is especially important because most professors are motivated by a combination of intense interest in a subject and a sense that our earned expertise will add to the quality of others’ lives. “Social profit” is Grant’s substitute term for “nonprofit,” and it’s an apt descriptor for the motivation of faculty, because a redirecting of the doctorate into a truly student-centered degree stands to not only bring greater happiness to students but also provide greater benefits to the public. Yet somehow it is at the graduate level where academic people often forsake our liberal arts and social ideals for a certain rigidity. Explicitly encouraging and even modeling openness at the beginning and every subsequent stage of the reform effort is a way to show our students how to do the same.

It’s worth pausing over this issue, especially when we recall the millions of dollars and untold hours spent in a previous era of reform that bore so little fruit. The elephant in the planning room is described by Clark Kerr in his second-edition amendment to his classic The Uses of the University. “It is remarkable,” Kerr writes, “not how much has changed but how little has changed on so many campuses in those areas that are under faculty control.” Kerr was speaking generally, but his observation aptly describes doctoral education. He continues, “The more the environment has changed, the more the organized faculty has remained the same. It has been the greatest single point of institutional conservatism in recent times, as it has been historically. Little that it has held dear and that it could control has been allowed to change.”[14]

Damrosch applies Kerr’s observation to PhD programs: “Tenured faculty are prime beneficiaries of the present system, profiting from graduate students’ labor in many ways large and small.” Not surprisingly, Damrosch argues, they have powerful disincentives to lead change. Instead, they’re wrapped in a willful ignorance, with “little awareness of what the system’s disadvantages may have been for the unlucky few—in fact, the many—who have dropped out along the way or who have failed to find a job they like.”[15] Indeed, the tenured faculty at research universities is the academic equivalent of the now-infamous “1 percent.”

Academic habits of thought add further incentive for resistance. Professors are not just expert critical readers; we are very critical readers. We (the authors of this book) often see this in ourselves. Even when we’re almost lost in admiration of an argument, we find ourselves searching for a “Yes, but . . .” Such skepticism, essential for the ongoing life of the disciplines, can inhibit change, especially when it’s coupled with a melancholy consciousness of academia’s declining fortunes. When Groucho Marx played a college president in Horse Feathers (1932), he sang, “Whatever it is, I’m against it.” We see that kind of negativity too often among graduate faculty. Academics who ponder reform sometimes resemble cars whose unbalanced tires steer skeptically toward the curb. We so fear an accident that we may permanently stall there, revving loudly, going nowhere.[16]

True, it’s not always necessary to go somewhere. Academia is conservative (with a small c) for a reason, and upholders of academic tradition rightly observe that universities are one of very few institutions that have survived for centuries. The deepest values of the arts and sciences, rooted in the long history of human thought, deserve to be considered an eternal light. But in a changing world, their various applications don’t. They are candles in the wind.

A further reason for professorial resistance to change has to do with conclusions. Put simply, we don’t know how to end things in academia. Look at any university and you’ll see any number of moribund practices (sometimes whole programs) that wobble on, supported by a few dedicated advocates, consuming resources that might be better expended to serve larger or needier populations. We are not good at pulling the plug. Or, to put it another way, once we start something, it usually stays on the curricular shelf long after its sell-by date. Which can result in conservatism at the planning stage: “Let’s not start it at all, then.”

Such resistance can sacrifice the qualities that have made American higher education so successful: seizing on opportunity, improvising in the face of necessity. Such pioneering spontaneity, David F. Labaree argues in his recent history of American higher education, shot us ahead of European systems burdened by their heavy backpack of history.[17] For doctoral education, we have arrived at a time when the risks attached to innovation are far less threatening than the danger of staying put. We can undermine our own static tendencies by becoming more aware of them. There always appear to be more reasons not to do something than to do it, but appearances may deceive. We’re living in a changing climate, and as we contemplate what to do about that, we should keep in mind that one success can make several failures worthwhile.

Beyond a skepticism of our skepticism, a way to confront concerns about an innovative practice or policy is to lay them out in plain sight. Psychologist Gary Klein argues for what he calls a “pre-mortem.” Klein asks planners to “imagine that it is months into the future and that their plan has been carried out. And it has failed. That is all they know; they have to explain why they think it failed.” In this exercise, the subjects can then “plan around” or fix these shortcomings before actually undertaking the reform.[18]

Sharing this anxiety about inaction with faculty may seem unfriendly, but stated as a common problem (with everyone admitting it), it can raise collective awareness. Alacrity will be one of the ways the department will gain an advantage. We therefore propose the academic equivalent of a prenuptial agreement: establish a stop/sustain/spread date before the concept is launched, with rigorous periodic goals and evaluations baked into the proposal. In this way, David Grant’s notion of mission time as a constant takes on the additional utility of an insurance policy.[19]

We’re almost ready for the first retreat, but we urge a homework assignment beforehand for all participants. Grant lays out this important preparation for the general conversation:

We ask what it would look like to succeed in our mission, goals, and strategies. We ask if there is something that matters a lot to us that resists quantification. We ask if there is something we need to talk about that we haven’t found a way to talk about yet. We ask if there is a key performance in the work of our organization, one that would benefit from being described more specifically so that people can get better at it. We ask if there is an essential question to our work, one we never get to the end of, where we need a vehicle for ongoing discussion and learning. We ask what is the social profit we are trying to bring about.[20]

While we earlier urged inviting the widest range of voices into the conversation, now it is time to listen with special care to the graduate faculty itself—listen, don’t judge—so as to avoid those defensive attitudes of “You can’t make me” and “I’m not doing it wrong.”

In organizing the key discussion, Grant suggests posing three questions in writing to the participants, who will respond to them in kind:

1. Given your organization, with its particular mission, what would success look like for you in the next three to five years? (More playfully, imagine the lead paragraphs of a major story in the Chronicle of Higher Education or Inside Higher Ed that describes your program’s success. What would you have it say?)
2. Whatever you just wrote, can you be more specific?
3. If you haven’t already done so, would you give an example of what you’ve just written about?

Then Grant suggests returning to the first question to ask whether you can go further: “Now describe what it [the success you mentioned earlier] would look like at an even higher level.” And again, he urges, ask the participants to specify and exemplify these ultimate goals even if they have to invent an example.[21] In this particular instance, participants might review the challenges to doctoral education that we described earlier. Again, while solving one or two will become ultimate aims, most of the others will function instrumentally as a means toward the goal. (That distinction will come in handy, for in planning backward, we’ll ask what it would take to achieve the goal.)

Grant calls planning backward “the sine qua non of formative assessment.” It’s necessary to “identify what matters most to us” and “forces us to focus on our primary values and our highest aspirations for the impact of our work.” In the end, planning backward “changes what we do. It changes how we perform.”[22] So before you even examine your current program, you should describe your ultimate goals. We suggest identifying no more than one or two. Then make explicit the task at hand, to think of what few things would be necessary to achieve them, and what would be necessary to achieve those things, and so on backward, so that the group finally can identify a sound place to start.[23] And now, on to the first retreat.

The Fall Retreat

The retreat takes place over two days, and it begins with the three questions we just mentioned, posed to a panel composed of graduates who occupy a wide range of positions within and beyond the professoriate. For an hour or more, they respond to the three questions, after which the lead committee spokesperson carefully prepares and distributes a document summarizing their answers. Panel members are asked whether they would alter their responses in relation to the document, and all participants are asked the same.

These questions then engage the entire group over lunch. This exercise might produce some chaos, but part of the initial retreat should, we think, be devoted to listening to individual faculty. We’ve asked them to do a great deal of listening, sometimes to voices they are not used to hearing. Now they deserve to speak and be heard, generously. Here’s a sample dialogue.

Setting: Anywhere but on campus, a location large enough for a faculty meeting of an ambitious academic department

Dramatis Personae:

Chair of the Department (CH)
Director of Graduate Studies, a senior faculty member (DGS)
Senior faculty member A
Recently tenured senior faculty member B
Junior faculty member C
Junior faculty member D
Very senior, distinguished, but crusty faculty member F

The lead committee spokesperson has just finished summarizing to the group of perhaps 30 professors and 10 students the main findings and results of their summer efforts. Now a free discussion ensues.

As we pick up the conversation, senior faculty member A, who has passed on reading even a summary, asserts confidently, “Our ultimate goal is simple, and I believe we’d all agree. It’s to place the greatest number of students in tenure-track positions at good colleges and universities that value research.”

“I don’t agree at all,” DGS responds impatiently. “What do we mean by ‘good’? And what if some of our students want a position at a place that emphasizes teaching more than research? That greatest number, as you call it, in tenure-track positions at fancy schools is going to be a tiny number these days.”

“Yes,” adds junior faculty member C. “And some of our students would be better off in careers outside academia. Why would we not honor that? Our goal should be to maximize the number of our graduates who end up with satisfying careers of some import, period.”

“Wait a minute,” cries very senior, distinguished but crusty faculty member F. “We shouldn’t think of ourselves as an employment agency first and foremost. Our goal should be to offer a superb set of intellectual experiences. The rest we can’t control.”

“But,” C replies, “there is a great deal we can control in terms of outcomes. Are we preparing students to replace us at a university like ours? We’ll almost always fail at that. But we can model and develop forms of interpretation and research that are widely useful. Can’t we link best internal practices to desired outcomes?”

“That’s awfully fuzzy,” the department chair objects. “And I have a few more issues to raise. How about the fact that half of our beginning students don’t finish?[24] Maybe our goal should be more modest, to ensure that they all do.”

“But not all,” DGS says. “Some people don’t find a doctoral program to their liking and others may learn that they’d rather do something else besides graduate school. I like the issue, but perhaps we should set our completion goal at 75 percent.”

“I have a further issue no one has mentioned,” junior faculty member D says. “I’ve been reading a critique of graduate education that argues we only go deep and not broad, that we should, as Lee Shulman puts it, ‘cross the T’ and not just produce narrow specialists. ‘T-shaped people’ have specialized backgrounds that they build outward from. How can we do that?”

“Yes,” adds politically minded and recently tenured professor B, “and that reminds me that one of my goals is to make our program respond more vitally to social challenges. We have a lot to offer to civil society, and this is the moment to think about how we can do that. I want to emphasize public scholarship.”

The department chair is both encouraged by the richness of the discussion and worried by its growing diffusion. “Look,” CH remarks, “we can’t do everything at once. Can we choose one concrete goal—lessening time to degree or changing our notion of career outcomes? Or becoming more diverse in admissions and curriculum?”

“Well,” A replies, warming to the task, “that sounds good to me. We need to succeed with something before we can tackle all things. But if we choose that one thing, we will find that at least a few of the other issues will connect to it. We’ll have to solve multiple problems to reach the one we target.”

“Yes,” says B eagerly. “We might find that diverse careers and public engagement aid each other, and that focusing on both makes us more appealing to students of color.”

“Exactly!” CH exclaims. “But we will need to see what we most care about and what comes first, what later. Now let’s return to those three questions. What would success look like?”

And the participants end the day with a dialogue based on their written responses.[25]

On the second day, the participants move to another set of three questions, beginning again by writing responses. These are the three questions posed 15 years ago by the Carnegie initiative, which led to too much verbiage and too few concrete program improvements. But now, the meeting leader says, we can answer them with yesterday’s responses in mind.

1. What is the purpose of the doctoral program? What does it mean to develop students as stewards? What are the desired outcomes of the program?
2. What is the rationale and educational purpose of each element of the doctoral program? Which elements of the program should be affirmed and retained? Which elements could usefully be changed or eliminated?
3. How do you know? What evidence aids in answering those questions? What evidence can be collected to determine whether changes serve the desired outcomes?[26]

These questions are well phrased, we believe. We challenge only the assumption, conveyed by the word “stewards,” that all students will become steward-professors in turn, and so we suggest eliminating that sentence from the first question. Even with the change, that first question could lead to much back-and-forth over familiar ground, but sometimes it’s worth rehearsing familiar performances to prepare for new ones.

Accordingly, the leader could allow that conversation to segue into the same question rephrased: “Given what we have learned from the lead group and given our discussion yesterday, how would we define the purpose of the doctoral program?” If responses cause some new differences of opinion to surface, then welcome that range and urge their coexistence for now, and remind people that it might be possible to design by “both/and” rather than “either/or,” if we can find a way to do so that serves the interests of the students.

The third question may become unnecessary, given the student survey and other fact-finding efforts of the lead group. Or it could be altered to say, “How will we know whether any of our innovations are working well?” and thus point forward. But it is the second question that requires most attention, as it moves the department from redefining a general purpose to how to achieve it in specific terms.

Over the ensuing hours, any number of disagreements will likely emerge. Planners tell us there is an inevitable period of disorientation, when everything seems confused, but this constitutes an opportunity for re-orientation. In particular, it provides an opportunity to take a fresh look at a problem and perhaps change its terms or to examine a silent habit. “What should we do with the dissertation?” might lead to the reformulation “What are some alternatives to the uniform dissertation model we now impose?”

It’s useful to encourage disorientation in a bounded space and time: “trust-no-habit” questions unsettle, and that’s why they’re useful. Identifying and challenging assumptions either allows for bold change or else thoughtfully reaffirms a valuable status quo with new energy. Both are positive outcomes. When a degree of consensus is reached, it carries the assurance that comes from exposing the depths of the foundation of the attitudinal edifice.

At the end of the second day, the leader will summarize some reactions and ask participants to write down what the lead committee should plan next. By this point, a main goal or two should have emerged, and various parts of the program will have been discussed in relation to the ultimate goals. These goals and discussion will shape the lead committee’s work for the next few months. An alternative is to spread that work and assign those aspects of the program targeted for change to a trio of additional faculty not in the lead group, so as to get more faculty and students involved. The lead committee itself will summarize the retreat in writing, including the evaluation by participants, and will continue to provide detailed minutes of its ensuing meetings, leading up to a second retreat.

Between the first and second retreats, the faculty will meet to discuss the program further. (Time can be set aside for this at regular department meetings. It’s important to have such discussion time that isn’t followed by a vote.) Perhaps more important will be something less formal but more continuous—namely, talk in the halls. The leaders of the department and the members of the lead committee should simply reach out to their colleagues for informal conversation. Have lunch, have coffee, stop in people’s offices. Now is also the time for both written and in-person reports to the dean, provost, and perhaps the president. These meetings also offer a chance to raise important questions about available resources.

Breaking Better: The Second Retreat and Next Stages

The second retreat occurs in a single day, preferably at the same setting to suggest continuity. The participants will consider the recommendations of the lead committee, which will include reworking aspects of the program. Here we hope that the planning-backward process will prove a shortcut to action. We suggested earlier that guarding mission time will save time later, and this second retreat should illustrate that.

For example, let’s imagine a department that wants to challenge itself with the goal of shortening time to degree without weakening the essential experiences of the program (which is a frequent objection to this intention). To determine what is essential and what isn’t, the Carnegie initiative’s second and third questions would come into useful play. The faculty could brainstorm means for streamlining the degree in ways that might actually add to the intellectual experience and to students’ professional abilities, especially because real-life tasks in and beyond academia often have deadlines. The Mellon Foundation report on its Graduate Education Initiative provides a storehouse of ideas for programs seeking to shorten time to degree, from summer financial support to clear program guidelines with a strictly enforced timeline, to a comprehensive exam that includes the prospectus for the dissertation. Such possibilities arise when you start by planning backward.

In determining the changes that will inform the larger goal, the leader should insist that the plan must not become a Rube Goldberg contraption with impossibly intricate moving parts that all depend on each other. Here we invoke an admittedly awful planning neologism, “simplexity,” which means keeping practice simple in response to complex matters.

Like everything else here, keeping it simple is a complex challenge. That’s why, while we urge alacrity, we also suggest realism, a need to stay sensible about how much can be done at once. While the main goal(s) may require changes in several aspects of a program, these changes can be staged, with careful attention to how current students will be affected.

Most important, even if a major assessment has been promised for three years hence, continuing assessment—data, sure, but also regularly scheduled qualitative feedback from all participants—will allow for timely adjustments. We wrote earlier that no one gets it all right from the start, but we do need to start, and so an expectation of continuing adjustments may quiet panic and encourage boldness.

Even so, it is possible to reach a point of informed and honest conflict. At that crucial moment, the leaders will need to distinguish between bad compromises and good ones. A bad compromise weakens the innovation in a way that empties it of its potential for energy and action. (This frequently happens in negotiations of undergraduate core requirements, for example.) A good compromise, bolstered by the promise of continuing monitoring, says, “Let’s try it.” Strategic planners are unanimous in urging trial by experience rather than inaction through more and more talk. At the very least, allow for alternatives to be adopted, to be measured against each other as students choose to fulfill one or the other. Their advocates will then take them up with energy and spirit. In a bad compromise, everyone is dissatisfied and dispirited, and drained of the excitement that can fuel action. The second retreat should end with a sense of shared expectation in which participants feel heard and valued—and ready to move.

We’ve tried to write the rest of this book with an understanding that different programs in different disciplines in different universities will have their own best sense of what matters most. We don’t want to dictate your priorities. But our title, The New PhD, suggests an overall redefinition of the degree’s purpose, and so we encourage departure from a status quo that doesn’t serve us anymore. As our review in the previous chapter shows, career diversity powers every single national reform effort of the last few years, and it represents by far the greatest number of institution-specific initiatives as well. Something is going on, and even if yours decides to take another path, every program needs to contemplate why so many academics consider a broadened sense of professional opportunity crucial to the future of the degree—and of our society.

Notes

[1] Michael Fullan, Change Leader: Learning to Do What Matters Most (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2013), 127.

[2] David Damrosch, “Vectors of Change,” in Envisioning the Future of Doctoral Education: Preparing Stewards of the Disciplines, ed. Chris M. Golde and George E. Walker (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2006), 35.

[3] David Grant, The Social Profit Handbook: The Essential Guide to Setting Goals, Assessing Outcomes, and Achieving Success for Mission-Driven Organizations (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2015).

[4] Grant, Social Profit Handbook, 41.

[5] A recent well-publicized example is the 2019 protest by graduate students in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. See Emma Pettit, “Columbia Had Little Success Placing English Ph.D.s on the Tenure Track: ‘Alarm’ Followed, and the University Responded,” Chronicle of Higher Education, August 21, 2019, https://www.chronicle.com/article/Columbia-Had-Little-Success/246989.

[6] Damrosch, “Vectors of Change,” 41.

[7] Damrosch, “Vectors of Change,” 42–43.

[8] Damrosch, “Vectors of Change,” 43–44.

[9] Steven Johnson, “How to Make a Big Decision,” New York Times, September 1, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/01/opinion/sunday/how-make-big-decision.html.

[10] Ronald S. Burt, Neighbor Networks: Competitive Advantage Local and Personal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 257.

[11] Damrosch, “Vectors of Change,” 36.

[12] Ronald S. Burt, “Structural Holes and Good Ideas,” American Journal of Sociology 10 (2004): 355.

[13] Leo Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God Is within You, trans. Constance Garnett (New York: Cassell, 1894), 46. The fake Twain quotation has an uncertain provenance. Both quotations—the misattributed Twain saying and the actual one from Tolstoy—relate to The Big Short: the Tolstoy quotation appears in Michael Lewis’s 2010 book, while the quotation misattributed to Twain appears in the 2015 film adaptation. See Alex Shephard’s explanation in the New Republic: https://newrepublic.com/minutes/126677/it-aint-dont-know-gets-trouble-must-big-short-opens-fake-mark-twain-quote.

[14] Clark Kerr, The Uses of the University, 5th ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 99. Kerr amended his great book several times on a decade-by-decade basis until his death.

[15] Damrosch, “Vectors of Change,” in Golde and Walker, Envisioning, 35–36.

[16] Hence the nasty old joke told by frustrated university administrators: “How many faculty members does it take to change that light bulb?” Answer (grumpily): “That light bulb doesn’t need changing.”

[17] David F. Labaree, A Perfect Mess: The Unlikely Ascendency of American Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019).

[18] Gary Klein, “Performing a Project Premortem,” Harvard Business Review, September 2007, https://hbr.org/2007/09/performing-a-project-premortem. Johnson cites earlier psychologists on the importance of generating alternatives. In 1984, he reports, Paul Nutt studied 78 decisions made by high-level planners in corporations and nonprofits. Only 15 percent allowed for a stage for generating alternatives to a basic yes/no choice, and fewer than one in three contemplated more than one alternative—yet the rate of success in contemplating at least two alternatives was two-thirds while the yes/no had a success rate of less than half.

[19] Grant’s own formula for overcoming a resistance to sensible change is a modification of a formula known as the Beckhead model, after Richard Beckhead, a leading practitioner. It goes like this: Dissatisfaction times Vision times First steps overcomes Resistance to change. D × V × F > R. In the case of the doctorate, an agreed-upon dissatisfaction results from our gaining a better sense of the actual experiences of our students in doctoral programs. V: The vision is our goal setting from which we plan backward to F: the first steps, which Grant defines as “concrete, manageable actions . . . knowing how to begin, and what to do next.” Grant, Social Profit Handbook, 128–29.

[20] Grant, Social Profit Handbook, 58.

[21] Grant, Social Profit Handbook, 29–30.

[22] Grant, Social Profit Handbook, 31.

[23] To this model, Grant adds responsible leadership: “Only leadership can create and sanction mission time. It is up to leaders to create the spirit of ongoing learning that characterizes an assessment culture.” He cites the notion that dissatisfaction with the status quo coupled with a consensual vision and some successful first moves will overcome the fear of change (128–29). When that active leadership includes administrators (a university president, provost, and graduate dean, together with a department chair and director of graduate studies), we have an ideal situation. Even without the top administrative rungs, an energetic chair and the DGS will be sufficient—if the higher levels are at least authentically interested and supportive.

[24] No hyperbole here. That’s the national average attrition rate for doctoral students in the arts and sciences.

[25] A variation on Grant’s process—or an addition to it—is suggested by Johnson. He urges all participants to write down the values most important to them—in our case, perhaps the list of PhD challenges—assigning to each a value from 0 to 1. (If you find, say, encouraging public scholarship a good idea but not a seminal one, you might give it a 0.4, while you view recruiting a more diverse student cohort more important and assign it a 0.8.) Then each participant considers how well each of the three or more alternative plans tackles each value on a scale of 1 to 100. Then you multiply the two figures (that is, goal priority and value of plan to meet each goal), add everyone’s scores together for each item, and discover your best plan. This math is used not to be definitive but to serve the conversation. In disciplines whose members distrust quantification, use it only in the case of a stalemate.

[26] George E. Walker, Chris M. Golde, Laura Jones, Andrea Conklin Bueschel, and Pat Hutchings, The Formation of Scholars: Rethinking Doctoral Education for the Twenty-First Century (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2008), 45.