The Formation of Scholars: Rethinking Doctoral Education for the Twenty-First Century (review)

Just as Ernest Boyer has been largely credited with providing us with a new paradigm for thinking about what constitutes scholarship in academe based on his Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate (1990), I have a hunch that Walker, Golde, Jones, Bueschel, and Hutchings, will be credited with providing us with a new paradigm for thinking about how to educate doctoral students based on their book The Formation of Scholars: Rethinking Doctoral Education for the Twenty-First Century. More specifically, based on the ideas advanced in this book, these authors will be credited with providing a paradigm that shifts our thinking about doctoral education as the training of doctoral students to thinking about doctoral education as the formation of scholars who are prepared to be stewards of their disciplines for the 21st century.

According to the authors, fully formed scholars are capable of generating and evaluating new knowledge, they are capable of conserving the most important ideas that are the legacy of past and current work, and they are capable of understand the ways in which knowledge transforms the world in which we live. In essence, fully formed scholars are capable of becoming stewards of their disciplines.

The Formation of Scholars is the culminating product that came out of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching’s five-year project—the Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate (CID)—and is intended to help us rethink how we do doctoral education in the United States. The CID included 84 PhD-granting departments from six different fields representing 44 different institutions. The book, consisting of seven chapters, is a distinctive amalgamation of research, theory, and practice.

In the first chapter, the authors introduce four major concepts: scholarly formation, integration, intellectual community, and stewardship. These concepts are threads that bind together this notion of the formation of scholars. Woven throughout the remainder of the book, they become the fabric from which a new form of doctoral education emerges in the 21st century.

In Chapter 2, the authors provide a brief but thorough review of doctoral education in America identifying four distinct stages of development: establishment, expansion and funded research, retrenchment and innovation, and diversification and fragmentation. In the discussion of each stage, they highlight the major impact and influences that each period has had on the development of doctoral education. They conclude this chapter with a discussion of some of the major reform efforts in doctoral education, then look toward the future of doctoral education.

The focus of Chapter 3 is reflecting on and identifying the purpose of doctoral education. In this chapter, the authors use three metaphors to aid in the process: mirrors, lenses, and windows. According to the authors, “Mirrors allow us to see ourselves, . . . lenses enhance [our] ability to see by sharpening focus and magnifying details, . . . [and] windows provide the opportunity to gaze at the work done by our neighbors” (p. 43). The chapter‘s primary thesis is that, in order for doctoral programs to improve, the faculty has to be willing to honestly look at and reflect on what they are doing (mirrors), use various forms of evidence to determine if what they are doing is working (lenses), and be willing to share their effective practices with other departments as well as learning about effective practices from other departments (windows).

Chapters 4 and 5 could be considered the focal chapters of the book as they address specific issues pertaining to the training of doctoral students or (better yet) the formation of scholars. The authors begin Chapter 4 by acknowledging the changing nature of the qualifications needed for newly minted PhDs interested in entering the professoriate. From there they turn the discussion toward some of the most salient experiences students need to have during their formation as well as some of the skills they will need upon completion...