FYI Listmembers,

Overview of the Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate

Draft 2.1, August 19, 2001
Chris M. Golde & George Walker

The nature of the initiative
American universities have been granting the doctorate for about a
century.  At the end of the 20th century, we take great pride that the
world sends students to the U.S. for doctoral training.  Nevertheless,
concerns about traditional doctoral education have been widespread and
sustained for the last decade. The studies and reports that have gone
before ours have prepared the ground. A common theme of many of these
reports is that Ph.D.s are often ill-prepared to function effectively in
the settings where they find themselves working, whether within the
academy or outside it. The time is ripe to propose and experiment with
enriched forms of doctoral education.

The Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate is a multi-year research program
aimed at enriching and invigorating the education of doctoral students.  A
fundamental premise of the initiative is to focus doctoral education on
the preparation of "stewards of the disciplines."  We share the belief
that Ph.D.-holders ought to be trained to be rigorous researchers and
scholars. But we believe that it is timely for the disciplines to reflect
on improvements that would empower those attaining the doctorate to be
more effective researchers and teachers. We believe that the framework of
stewardship offers a broader conceptualization of doctoral education than
the present graduate experience typically includes. The initiative will
involve research, experiments in departments, and broad discussion and
dissemination of what is learned.  Faculty and departmental leadership in
the disciplines is a crucial focus of the initiative.

The Carnegie Foundation leadership of the initiative
The initiative is headquartered at The Carnegie Foundation for the
Advancement of Teaching, in Menlo Park, California. The Carnegie
Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching is a national and international
center for research and policy studies about teaching. With a focus on the
scholarship of teaching, the Foundation seeks to generate discussion and
promulgate sustainable, long-term changes in educational research, policy
and practice. Foundation programs are designed to foster deep,
significant, lasting learning for all students and to improve the ability
of education to develop students understanding, skills and integrity.

George E. Walker, the Vice President for research and Dean of the
University Graduate School at Indiana University, leads this five-year
study. Walker joined the Foundation as a senior scholar in January of
2001. He will serve in-residence part-time at the Foundation, while
retaining his duties at Indiana University. He is assisted by Chris Golde,
senior scholar at the Carnegie Foundation and researcher on doctoral
education, Lee Shulman, President of the Carnegie Foundation , as well as
other senior scholars at the Foundation.

"Steward of a discipline"
We believe that the purpose of Ph.D. training should be the creation of
"stewards of the discipline." The degree should signal a high level of
accomplishment in three facets of the discipline:  Generation,
Conservation and Transformation.  The Ph.D. holder should be capable of
generating new knowledge and defending knowledge claims against challenges
and criticism; of conserving the most important ideas and findings that
are a legacy of past and current work; and of transforming knowledge that
has been generated and conserved into powerful pedagogies of engagement,
understanding and application.  Moreover, a steward should understand how
the discipline fits into the intellectual landscape, have a respectful
understanding of the questions and paradigms of other disciplines, and
understand how their discipline can speak to important questions.

The formulation of stewardship is discipline-specific.  What it means to
be a steward of chemistry may in some measure be different than in English
or mathematics.  Similarly, the process for creating stewards may differ
by discipline.  We are committed to locating this initiative in the
context of each discipline, recognizing that there will be
discipline-specific lessons as well as cross-disciplinary insights to be
gained.


Major components and timeline
Three components comprise the initiative:
 Defining stewardship in a disciplinary context.  We will select five to
six disciplines for the initial focus of the study.  The first phase of
the initiative will be a conceptual analysis of doctoral education.  We
seek to understand the core processes of research and doctoral education
specific to each discipline. How has doctoral training been conceptualized
and delivered within the discipline?  Discussions within the discipline
guided by a team from within the discipline will refine the concept of
what stewardship of that discipline entails, and how doctoral programs
might be better structured to prepare students. The first project will be
to commission essays about the desired core ingredients of an enriched
form of doctoral education, and publish them in the fall of 2002.

 Implementing programs in multiple departments.  We will select five to
six departments in each of the focus disciplines to conduct "design
experiments" in doctoral education.  Selected departments will commit to
designing and implementing doctoral programs that foster stewardship of
the discipline.  This is a multi-year commitment undertaken as a
partnership with the Foundation, departments, universities, scholarly
societies and cooperating funding agencies.

 Studying the experiments and facilitating the broad adoption of
successful models.  Throughout the initiative, we will be distilling the
results of discussions and research and sharing them with the doctoral
education and disciplinary communities.  We will be closely studying the
design experiments and sharing the lessons learned in order to implement
changes more broadly. One strategy will be to convene three kinds of
seminars: campus-based for each program, cross-site for each discipline,
and program-wide for assessment and integration. A variety of products
will result from the initiative:  models of experimental doctoral
programs, research and analysis of the experiments and seminars,
institutional and policy-level recommendations.

We will begin publicizing the initiative and working with disciplinary
societies in the fall of 2001.  Selection of departments that will
implement design experiments will be completed by the summer of 2002.  We
expect the experiments to be several years in duration with regular
assessment and reports on lessons learned.
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If anyone is interested I can post a word(.doc) version of the file on my
web/ftp site

best,

- John Jay Miller

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