CHRONICLES OF HIGHER EDUCATION POINT OF VIEW Mentors and Tormentors in Doctoral Education By DAVID DAMROSCH Like many ecosystems, higher education develops in fits and starts, through what evolutionary biologists call patterns of "punctuated equilibrium." A major reform sweeps through the system, then stays in place for decades or even centuries until pressures for change grow great enough to force a new round of reform. American graduate education achieved its essential modern form in the late 19th century, when the Ph.D. degree was imported from Germany. Adapted to the needs of American academic culture, the basic requirements -- and assumptions -- of the Ph.D. took root, and remain largely in place to this day. For over a century, those requirements and assumptions served so well that the Ph.D. became the dominant mode of preparation for professorial careers, even for jobs in teaching-intensive undergraduate institutions that offer little opportunity to exercise advanced research skills, still less to pass them on to students. Pressure for substantial change is mounting, however, fueled by a host of distinct but interconnected factors. These include: * The perennially high dropout rates from many Ph.D. programs and the endemically weak job market for their graduates. * A renewed attention to the specific needs of undergraduates and a corresponding decline in the unquestioned dominance of graduate education. * A rapid increase in interdisciplinary approaches to complex problems that may not be well suited to study from the perspective of a single, departmentally based subfield, which is still the norm for much graduate training. The old German system was unabashedly hierarchical. A single professor would typically rule an entire department, with a paternalistic attitude toward students that is well expressed in the common term for a dissertation's sponsor: Doktorvater, or "the doctor's father." American universities democratized that system at the level of the faculty -- lots of full professors per department -- but left the paternalism toward students largely in place. In many disciplines, graduate training is structured in a pattern of progressive isolation, from the group study in seminars, to one-on-one work with several faculty members during preparation for doctoral orals, all culminating in a long period of solitary effort on the dissertation, typically under the active guidance of a single sponsor. A kind of scholarly machismo is involved in that progression, all too well encapsulated in Henry Rosovsky's description of dissertation work in his 1990 book The University: An Owner's Manual. "Research," he wrote, "is a lonely activity, especially when the location is a library rather than a laboratory. Few experiences in our working life can be more isolating than gathering materials for a dissertation deep in the bowels of some large library. No one can help; no human voice is heard; the only constant is that very special smell of decaying books." At its best, that isolation is leavened by the growth of a close working relationship with one's sponsor, and the result can bring the student to full intellectual maturity while keeping the mentor's mind young. One enters a discipline, on this model, by becoming a successful disciple. Full article at: http://chronicle.com/free/v47/i12/12b02401.htm Louis Proyect Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org
