Envisioning the Future of Doctoral Education: Preparing Stewards of the Discipline—Carnegie Essays on the Doctorate (review)

The Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate (CID) is working with departments in selected disciplines (mathematics, chemistry, neuroscience, education, history, and English) in the United States to reconsider the purposes, processes, and outcomes of doctoral education. For the CID's first product, Research Director Chris Golde and Project Director George Walker invited 16 eminent scholars from the six disciplines to address two provocative questions: "What is the purpose of doctoral education?" and "If you could start de novo, what would be the best way to structure doctoral education in your field?" (pp. 16–17). The essays are interspersed with useful descriptions of the state of current doctoral education in the six disciplines, including the number of doctoral degrees awarded per year, average time to degree, course of study and the nature of the research, and relations between doctoral students and their advisors.

In her introduction, Golde says that doctoral education should prepare stewards of the discipline, scholars "who will creatively generate new knowledge, critically conserve valuable and useful ideas, and responsibly transform those understandings through writing, teaching and application" (p. 5). Stewardship involves both competence with the roles and skills of a discipline and a sense of moral purpose. Three integrative commentaries make sense of the 16 disciplinary essays for stakeholder groups. Kenneth Prewitt argues that disciplinary leaders should focus on reforming what is taught (content) and that institutional leaders should focus on reforming how it is taught (process). Reform in either case, he says, will require aligning external funding and institutional budgets with desired changes. From a faculty perspective, David Damrosch notes that the eminent scholars asked to envision doctoral education reaped rewards from excelling in the current system, so they may not have the most creative ideas for improving it for others. Damrosch would prefer ideas from current doctoral and recent doctoral students, including adjunct, not-yet-tenured, and recently tenured faculty. Similarly, Crespin Taylor argues that doctoral students as stakeholders should be part of developing reforms and that efforts should be informed by doctoral education outside the United States.

The lone international voice is provided by Yehudi Elkana, rector of the Central European University, who argues that the centrality of philosophy and epistemology to the "Doctor of Philosophy" degree has been lost in overspecialization, pressure toward consensus, and rigor in the name of objective science. Mathematician Hyman Bass asserts that stewards must attend to both the discipline (a knowledge domain) and the profession (a community of human practice). Tony Chan thinks a math doctorate should be more appealing to a wider variety of students but is uncertain whether current faculty have the will to effect change. Alvin Kwiram outlines a curriculum to incorporate professional skills during doctoral education in chemistry. Ronald Breslow summarizes a 2003 National Research Council report on chemistry and applies it to current doctoral training in that discipline. Disciplinary leaders should be expert learners according to chemist Angelica Stacy, and she argues that doctoral students with the most potential may be leaving programs that require them to fit narrow expectations.

Several authors discuss interdisciplinarity, but neuroscientist Zach Hall suggests that development of interdisciplinary doctoral programs served as a catalyst for transforming the conduct of research. Neuroscientist Steven Hyman agrees, asserting that "the key to coalescence of a new discipline is the graduate program. . . . The students themselves force integration" (p. 234). Education also spans disciplines, but Virginia Richardson wonders whether it is a field of study or an enterprise. Nevertheless, she includes a table that specifies what an education doctoral student should learn in terms of knowledge, skills, and habits of mind. David Berliner focuses on educational psychology, which is concerned with "learning, motivation, and assessment" (p. 280), but he misses the opportunity to use his relevant disciplinary knowledge to address improving the learning and motivation of doctoral students or assessing the effectiveness of reform...