Dear Colleagues,
This book review (published in 2003 in Design Research News) tells part
of the story of how medical school made the shift from pure practice
to
research-based practice and more recently to evidence-based practice.
There are lessons here for design schools.
Best regards,
Ken Friedman
-
Bonner, Thomas Neville. 2002. Iconoclast. Abraham Flexner and a Life in
Learning. Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
In the first half of the twentieth century, Abraham Flexner had an
unparalleled position as an expert on higher education. Even today, he
remains a major influence on the world’s great universities, joining
Kant and Humboldt of Germany, Turgot of France, or Newman of England in
defining a vision of the great research university and shaping the
institutional traditions that realize the vision.
Flexner also had a unique role in shaping research-based professional
education at the graduate level. Flexner’s (1910) report on medical
education was a landmark document that remains relevant for any field
that educates practitioners in research-based professions. This role
makes Flexner and his work particularly important to the design research
community.
Thomas Neville Bonner’s Iconoclast places Flexner’s ideas and
achievements in perspective, looking back from today’s world to a life
centered on education and ideas. Abraham Flexner’s role in the
development of today’s universities and professional schools makes
this an intellectual history as well, written by a distinguished retired
professor who dealt directly with these kinds of issues during a career
in which he served as president of three universities.
Bonner (2002: ix) writes that Flexner raised questions about
university-level professional education that remain relevant today.
About college education, Flexner asked “Is it the place to get a
broadly liberal education or does it represent an unnecessary
postponement of serious study?” about the university, he asked “Is
it a uniquely democratic opening of higher education or an undigested
potpourri of academic and vocational units? How is professional study,
especially for doctors, best structured to produce a scientifically
trained and practical yet humane practitioner? What institutional
arrangements stimulate the most rapid advances in research?”
Flexner’s answers to these questions are relevant to university-level
design education and particularly significant for doctoral education in
design.
The past five years have seen two conferences on doctoral education in
design. The first took place in Columbus, Ohio (Buchanan, Doordan,
Justice, and Margolin 1999), the second in La Clusaz, France (Durling
and Friedman 2000) and a third is about to be held in Japan. There have
been spirited on-line debates (DRS 2000, PhD-Design 2000-2003), working
parties (Frayling. 1997; UKCGE 2001), special journal issues (Durling
and Friedman 2002), reports (UCISOD 2002), and an increasing gray
literature of unpublished studies.
Doctoral education in design brings multiple challenges to schools
offering – or planning to offer –the doctorate. The vast majority of
such programs are less than a decade old. Most are far younger.
The design field faces many problems in doctoral education. The largest
of these is the need to build a robust structure for doctorates in a
field that has no tradition of graduate research training.
This is compounded by a unique problem. Many schools that now offer a
Ph.D. in design lack an experienced staff of senior faculty and
supervisors. In many cases, faculty members responsible for doctoral
education have not themselves earned a doctorate, and they have little
or no personal experience with the kinds of graduate level research
training for which they are assuming responsibility. The result is
predictable, and it is most visible in the contrast between two kinds of
doctoral programs, those at universities with a rich tradition of
research education and universities new to the field.
Universities with a rich array of outstanding doctoral programs in
multiple research fields and long experience in doctoral education are
building staff carefully for doctoral education in design and moving
into the field slowly.
In contrast, some new universities and independent art and design
schools are expanding into doctoral programs without sufficient trained
research staff to cover the growing number of research students.
At one extreme, top ranked research universities run small doctoral
programs. These universities view doctoral education as a necessary
expense that mature schools absorb within a larger research mission.
These schools are heavily overstaffed in relation to the number of
doctoral students they accept. While the staffing ratio will shift as
programs grow, it necessarily begins far too high as these schools build
experience and a repertoire of programs for the future. These programs
also use the full range of university resources, drawing on teachers,
courses, and advisors from other fields and encouraging students to do
so on an individual basis. Many schools also draw on visiting professors
and advisory boards that are integrated into the work of the school and
its programs. This is what some call the “go slow to go fast” model.
Building solid programs will allow these schools to expand effectively
in the years to come.
At the other end of the scale, we see a fair number of schools taking
on a large number of candidates for poorly defined programs in which one
or two supervisors handle a more-than-full load of research students.
One teacher in a “practice-based” doctoral program boasts of
supervising fourteen doctoral research candidates as though this were a
mark of the program’s excellence (and profitability) rather than a
declaration of poor standards and a demonstration that she has no
comprehension of doctoral education and research training. Another
school attempted to manage nearly fifty doctoral candidates with two
supervisors on staff. The solution was to rent doctoral advisers from
nearby universities, paying for five hours of thesis supervision per
student per year for the planned three years of the degree program. Yet
another school has signed up doctoral candidates who will live and study
at other schools while technically being enrolled at (and partially
supported by) a studio school that plans in this way to demonstrate that
it can graduate successful doctoral candidates.
In some cases, the effort to hide the quality and workings of poor
programs reaches astonishing levels. These practices are often rendered
obscure by the differences in education law governing universities in
differing nations or even within nations. This is visible in a growing
number of situations and cases. One is particularly interesting.
Two common criteria the Ph.D. are a contribution to the knowledge of a
field and proof of the ability to conduct research. This is demonstrated
by the doctoral dissertation. For centuries, publishing a dissertation
has contributed to knowledge public while providing proof of research
training. Accredited research universities in Canada and the United
States file copies of doctoral dissertations at UMI in Ann Arbor. These
copies form a permanent public record accessible through Dissertation
Abstracts International and UMI dissertations are available on order in
several formats. In Europe, most departments publish the dissertation in
book form, placing copies in key national and international libraries.
The UK uses neither system. Instead, the candidate’s department is
expected to archive a copy of the doctoral thesis in the university
library. From there, it should be accessible to anyone who wishes to
read it.
A recent attempt to locate examples of finished Ph.D. dissertations at
several UK universities disclosed that some universities have no copies
of their doctoral dissertations in design. One might well suspect that
certain art and design schools do not wish the field to examine their
Ph.D. awards too closely.
Doctoral education in design involves a field in transition. It also
involves an explosion of doctoral awards relative to a baseline set only
five years ago. Some degrees are awarded to outstanding candidates
capable of independent research and well prepared to teach the next
generation of research scholars in our field. Others are not. Since most
of these awards are designated as a Ph.D., this is burdening the field
with improperly credentialed doctors who are gaining research positions
without the requisite background.
As problematic as this is, the history of education offers several good
models for ways to move forward. Thomas Neville Bonner’s biography of
Abraham Flexner tells the story of one distinguished educator who
examined – and helped to rebuild – a field that was one in an
equally chaotic state: medical education in the United States.
From this side of the new century, it is difficult to realize just how
bad most American medical schools were at the dawn of the last century.
While professional education in all fields must continually be evaluated
in the light of changing times, new technology, shifting resources, and
growing knowledge, medical education has done reasonably well in
producing well trained doctors to meet the demand for medical care. This
is certainly the case in North America, where medical schools are
located within research universities and linked to teaching hospitals.
It was not always so.
In the first decade of the 1900s, the United States and Canada had more
than one hundred and fifty medical schools with over twenty-five
thousand students. These were the survivors. They remained from nearly
five hundred medical schools that had sprung up across North America
since the early 1800s. Many schools had vanished as quickly as they had
emerged. By 1910, the schools that remained accounted for well over half
the world’s medical students.
Things were not all bad. “A dozen universities offered quality
instruction, and another twenty stood out from the rest. Still others
were making valiant efforts to improve. But changes had not reached a
large number of the marginal schools. These schools were typically
housed in a single building, often in poor repair. Classrooms were bare,
except for chairs, a table, and perhaps a blackboard. Laboratories were
tiny or non-existent. Equipment was sparse” (Bonner 2002: 70). Those
who have been to visit a wide range of design schools may recognize the
sound of these facilities. The comparison also extends to teaching
staff, where the “schools’ faculties, chiefly local doctors,
lectured at stated hours but were otherwise not to be found.”
The question was what to do to improve the situation. Henry Pritchett,
head of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, had the
answer. In 1908, Pritchett, former president of Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, hired Abraham, Flexner to study medical education in the
United States and Canada.
Flexner had already shown himself to be a rigorous and intelligent
thinker on the subject of education. After graduating from Johns Hopkins
University in 1886, Flexner started an experimental school in
Louisville, Kentucky. This was four years before John Dewey launched his
famous laboratory school in Chicago, and this brought him the attention
of Harvard’s president, Charles Eliot. In 1908, he wrote a
controversial critique of American undergraduate education titled The
American College.
Within a month of accepting his new position, Flexner was at work, and
his surveys of – and reports on – medical education and other issues
set a new standard for critical inquiry into professional education
(Bonner 2002: 69-113). The survey also had practical results. Quack
medical schools rapidly began to vanish, many as swiftly as they had
arisen. Flexner’s report recommended that 120 of 155 medical schools
should be closed, and most of the 120 schools he labeled as inadequate
did, indeed, close. In one notable example, eleven of Chicago’s
fourteen medical schools simply disappeared.
The report also led to positive improvements as universities
strengthened professional education for medical practice. These
improvements had worldwide influence as the new vigor of North American
medical training also influenced the rest of the world. Flexner himself
went on to survey medical education in Europe, and his views were so
influential that one British medical school dean in the 1960s credited
Flexner with the evolution of British medical education to its modern
state.
In the years following the report, Flexner took on a central role in
building medical schools, as we know them today. In a central position
at the Rockefeller-funded General Education Board, he helped to raise
– and spend – over 600 million dollars. While this sum was vastly
more impressive in those days, half a billion dollars goes a long way in
education circles even today.
In 1930, Flexner published his major book on university education in
the United States, England, and Germany. This book once again had an
impact that was unrivalled until 1936, when Robert Maynard Hutchins
published The Higher Learning in America. Flexner’s (1994)
Universities is still in print.
Later, Flexner established the Institute for Advanced Studies in
Princeton, New Jersey, and served as its first director. In this role,
he brought Albert Einstein from Germany to the United States.
Born in 1866, Abraham Flexner died in 1959. He lived through a
turbulent century that began just after the American Civil War and ended
just as the Soviet Union and the United States entered outer space. Over
the course of nearly a century, he lived a productive life of education,
research, writing, and public service.
Flexner reshaped medical education from what it once was to what it
remains today. He helped to shape a debate on undergraduate education
that continues productively to this day. He was a leader for
improvements in public education, and he was an early advocate of
medical insurance for all.
For all these reasons and more, this book is an important study in the
evolution of professional education, higher learning, research
education, and postdoctoral training. Given recent debates in design
research, readers will find Bonner’s chapters on the 1910 Flexner
report particularly useful for universities making their first steps
into doctoral education in design.
-- Reviewed by Ken Friedman
References
Bonner, Thomas Neville. 2002. Iconoclast. Abraham Flexner and a Life in
Learning. Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Buchanan, Richard, Dennis Doordan, Lorraine Justice, and Victor
Margolin, editors. 1999. Doctoral Education in Design. Proceedings of
the Ohio Conference. October 8-11, 1998. Pittsburgh: The School of
Design. Carnegie Mellon University.
DRS. 2000. Archives of the DRS Discussion List. JISCMAIL. URL:
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/drs.html Accessed 2003 July 30.
Durling, David and Ken Friedman, editors. 2000. Doctoral Education in
Design. Foundations for the Future. Proceedings of the La Clusaz
Conference, July 8-12, 2000. Stoke-on-Trent, United Kingdom:
Staffordshire University Press.
Durling, David and Ken Friedman, editors. 2002. Best Practices in
Doctoral Education. Art, Design, and Communication in Higher Education,
Vol. 1, No. 3. [Special journal issue].
Flexner, Abraham. 1910. Medical Education in the United States and
Canada. Bulletin No. 4. New York: Carnegie Foundation for the
Advancement of Teaching.
Flexner, Abraham. 1994 [1930]. Universities: American, English, German.
With a new introduction by Clark Kerr. New Brunswick, New Jersey:
Transaction Publishers.
Frayling, Christopher, editor. 1997. Report of the working party on
practice-based doctorates in creative and performing arts, UK Council
for Graduate Education. Lichfield, Staffordshire, UK: United Kingdom
Council for Graduate Education.
PhD-Design. 2000-2003. Archives of the PhD-Design Discussion list.
JISCMAIL. URL: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/phd-design.html Accessed
2003 July 30.
UCISOD. University of California Irvine School of Design Committee.
2002. Proposal for a School of Design at the University of California,
Irvine. November 2002. Irvine: University of California, Irvine. URL:
http://www.evc.uci.edu/growth/design/SoD-proposal.pdf Accessed
2003 May 2.
UKCGE. United Kingdom Council for Graduate Education. 2001. Research
Training in the Creative and Performing Arts & Design. Castle View,
Dudley, UK [now at Lichfield, Staffordshire, UK]: United Kingdom Council
for Graduate Education. URL: http://www.ukcge.ac.uk Accessed 2001
December 15.
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