Our doctoral programs are failing our under graduate students. (Featured Topic).

RECENTLY, I'VE HAD OPPORTUNITIES to ask faculty and administrators about the qualities they look for when interviewing and hiring new faculty. My sample of roughly fifty faculty and administrators came from community colleges, four-year liberal arts colleges, master's institutions, and research universities, public and private, in the Midwest and on the East and West Coasts.

What stands out from these discussions is the lack of connection between the qualities that are sought in new faculty and the fact that most doctoral programs don't ensure that their graduates have those qualities. I believe that our doctoral programs, in neglecting their responsibility to adequately prepare their graduates to be effective teachers, are failing to serve our undergraduate students.

New Faculty at Undergraduate Institutions

What qualities do faculty and administrators at community colleges, liberal arts colleges, and master's institutions seek in new faculty? I have some answers. Every phrase in the following paragraphs was spoken to me during campus visits.

They would like to be able to hire faculty who are committed to teaching, aspire to be at institutions where teaching is valued, are teaching because they want to, not because they have to, have knowledge and passion about their discipline, understand that in addition to the subject matter, there is pedagogy ("it's like a double-major"), and who are willing to strive to develop their expertise as teachers. They would like new faculty who are knowledgeable about how they personally learn, how their students learn, and about how to facilitate student learning, and who can be reflective about their own teaching and learn from, this.

They would like to hire faculty who are truly, genuinely student-centered, expect the best of their students, are able to help students find out what is right for them, understand what the phrase ''first-generation college" means, know how to work with students for whom English is a second language, know how to work with adult students, have genuine respect for diversity--not lip service, want to work with undergraduate students, understand community college students, and who can be quasi-administrators, advising students who are at different places in their progress.

They would like to hire faculty who can do more than just lecture (who can "resist doing the professor thing"), can teach writing regardless of the subject matter, know how to use technology in the classroom, and who are knowledgeable about and have an interest in teaching online courses. They would like new faculty who can teach the basics and are also knowledgeable about and interested in teaching a range of courses, including general education courses. They would like faculty who are flexible generalists and can promote the spirit and breadth of the liberal arts, not faculty who are only prepared for and want to do niche-teaching.

They would like to hire faculty with doctorates who, along with their teaching, will initiate viable research programs, will stay connected with the research in their disciplines, and whose teaching wilt be informed by research and scholarship. They do not want to hire faculty who would use teaching as an excuse not to do scholarship, or who are doing esoteric research, or whose curricula vitae show only research experience and no teaching, or faculty who are arrogant about their research expertise.

The faculty they would like to hire would understand what it means to be in a community of scholars day in and day out, help make departments run smoothly, understand the institution and be committed to institution building, be good colleagues ("everyone's smart; to be smart and a collegial person is special"), contribute to advising, to faculty governance, and to the campus community, bring out the best in their colleagues and empower them to be better, be agents of change right away and not wait until after tenure, have a sense that what they do--and what the institution does--makes a difference in the community, and would be comfortable juggling a lot of balls at once.

New Faculty at Research Universities

What qualities do faculty and administrators at research universities seek when interviewing and hiring new faculty? They would like to be able to hire faculty with a developing line of research that is of high quality, that is theoretically-based, makes a conceptually important advance in a promising field, has potential for external grant funding, and that can take these faculty into the future. They would like faculty who have a reasonable publication record, have the potential to be international scholars, fit with but don't overlap with interests of the current faculty, provide knowledge and skills that are weak or lacking on campus, and who have some interests outside their own specialty and show interest in others' work.

They would like to hire faculty whose research colloquium is well-organized and interesting (even if the subject matter is esoteric), who don't just read from notes, can use audiovisual equipment properly (the slides should have print large enough to be read easily from the back of the room), and for whom there is some evidence that they can teach--or at least are not a disaster in the classroom. They would like faculty who have taught or are willing to teach courses that fit into the needs of the department's curriculum. They would like new faculty who are well-rounded: In the 1980s, having minimal teaching skills was sufficient; now, many departments are asking candidates to lecture to an undergraduate class in addition to presenting a research colloquium.

At research universities they would like to hire faculty who seem to be interpersonally skilled, interact well during the interview with potential colleagues and graduate students, don't rub people the wrong way during the interview, have a high probability of turning out to be good colleagues and department citizens, whose personalities are compatible with the current faculty, and who are not overtly sexist, racist, or homophobic, or have other assorted prejudices.

New Faculty Profiles

Those are not my words, but the words of faculty and administrators on several college and university campuses. As I noted earlier, every phrase in the preceding eight paragraphs was spoken to me. The contrast between research universities and community colleges, liberal arts colleges, and master's institutions, in the qualities that faculty and administrators seek in new faculty, is not a simple contrast between "research institutions" and "teaching institutions," for both teaching and research are acknowledged on all these campuses.

However, regarding teaching, there is a profound contrast between community and liberal arts colleges and master's institutions, on the one hand, and research universities on the other. At the former, teaching and being a teacher are highly valued, teaching is student-centered and requires a rich repertoire of teaching skills, and the role of faculty is to be change agents with their students and for the institution and the larger community. In the research university, teaching is the same as lecturing, and it is course- and content-centered; the role of the faculty is to complement each other's research expertise and fit comfortably among each other's personalities.

All of these differences result in a profound disconnect between what research universities address in educating the next generation of faculty members and what most in the higher education community want in order to fulfill their missions. Most doctoral programs and faculty would not acknowledge, much less assume, responsibility for ensuring that their graduates have any of the qualities that community, liberal arts, and master's campuses are seeking. By failing to adequately prepare their graduates for their first positions as new faculty, our doctoral programs are failing both their own students and the millions of undergraduate students and their families who are counting on these new faculty to be effective teachers. I have no doubt that there are, here and there, doctoral programs in some departments, as well as dedicated faculty mentors, that provide a wide variety of opportunities for a small number of students to acquire many of the qualities that undergraduate colleges are seeking as well as other s kills and understandings that will enable them to be effective teachers. But these are exceptions, not the rule.

What Can Be Done?

Whose responsibility is it to provide the understandings and skills for becoming an effective teacher and to properly prepare new faculty for our colleges and universities and for the undergraduate arts, letters, and sciences departments at our research universities? Is it the responsibility of the "sending" institutions, the doctoral programs, or the responsibility of the "receiving" institutions, those that employ new doctoral graduates as teachers?

From having raised this question on several campuses, I know that the doctoral program faculty and administrators believe that it is not their responsibility to prepare their graduates to be effective teachers. Their reasons include numerous concerns; for example, the potential for drawing time and effort away from students' research endeavors and the perceived threat to these programs' National Research Council and similar rankings. However, I believe that the core concern is that most faculty in doctoral research programs don't know how to instill a passion and commitment for teaching in their doctoral students, or how to mentor novice teachers to be student-centered and to acquire a repertoire of teaching skills beyond lecturing, or how to prepare their graduates to be change agents for their students, their institutions, and their communities.

Graduate faculty are primarily researchers-- and very good at what they do. But in their own training, they weren't prepared to be effective teachers. Most would not know how to be good teachers for the students in a community or liberal arts college environment. To ask doctoral faculty at research universities to prepare their students to be effective teachers would be to ask for what most are not able to do.

Where are the best teachers in higher education today? At community colleges. There, faculty know that their teaching can make a difference in their students' lives: Will they remain in school and perhaps transfer to a four-year college or a research university? Or, will they drop Out? And the best teachers are at liberal arts colleges and master's institutions, because these faculty know that their own careers and the welfare of their institutions can't ride on their research productivity and visibility alone. These faculty have no choice but to become excellent teachers. In order to survive, many of these colleges have no choice but to ensure that the curriculum is effective in providing their students with the learning outcomes promised in freshman recruitment materials.

Can the PFF Movement Bridge the Divide?

The Preparing Future Faculty program has pointed the way toward providing doctoral students with an introduction to teaching and other aspects of faculty life. The concept of cluster or partner institutions has played an important role in linking doctoral students with the teaching strengths and opportunities of nearby community and liberal arts colleges and master's institutions. Components of Preparing Future Faculty programs with the greatest impact have included being mentored by one or several faculty at the cluster institutions, spending time following cluster faculty through a typical day on campus, participating in high-level graduate seminars on teaching and faculty life, preparing a course syllabus and having it critiqued, being supervised in teaching by excellent teachers, engaging in self-assessment and self-reflection as a teacher and potential faculty member, and assembling a teaching portfolio that includes a statement of teaching philosophy.

Nevertheless, most doctoral research institutions do not have Preparing Future Faculty programs. For those that do, the programs are often not securely institutionalized and independent of external funding, and in many cases, only a small proportion of doctoral students on campus can participate.

On that basis, I propose that the Federal government and private foundations should provide future PFF funding not to the research universities but to community and liberal arts colleges and master's institutions for the development of innovative programs for preparation of the next generation of teachers for American higher education. These learning-centered communities can prepare teachers who will be passionate about their teaching and their students, highly skilled as facilitators of student learning, and comfortable with their role as change agents for their students, their campuses, and their communities. These programs should be developed at community and liberal arts colleges and master's institutions because currently this is where can be found faculty highly committed to teaching and to their students, who already have the understandings and skills for effective teaching. Today's outstanding teachers on the campuses of America's best teaching institutions, many of which are AAC&U member institutions , are the best models and the best teachers to participate in preparing the next generation of outstanding college and university teachers.

Prom talking with several doctoral students, I believe that programs for the preparation of effective teachers that are based on community and liberal arts college campuses that are geographically close--within an hour of travel time--to research universities could quickly become self-sustaining. Why? Because many doctoral students would willingly pay for a coherent sequence of courses on teaching along with supervision and mentoring of their beginning teaching experiences. These graduate students know that their own success both in the job market and in their first faculty positions would be markedly enhanced by their participation in such a program of teacher preparation. Within a short time, the student demand would lead graduate schools at many research universities to arrange formal, long-term contracts with nearby colleges to provide their doctoral graduates with the professional training that they themselves are not able to provide.

What is to stop a department or group of departments or the graduate school at a research university from formalizing a program of courses and supervised teaching experiences that would lead to a certificate in college and university teaching and then contracting with nearby colleges to provide courses, mentors, and teaching opportunities? A certificate program might require, for example, completion of 150 hours of preparation for undergraduate teaching, including seminars, workshops, courses, and supervised teaching, with the 150 hours to be distributed across five of seven areas such as student diversity, aims or outcomes of higher education, collaborative learning, educational technology, motivating students, student advisement, and assessment of student learning.

Those doctoral programs that can be among the first in their disciplines to develop and publicize strong and coherent opportunities for preparation for college and university teaching within the framework of current doctoral research training will be flooded with applications from outstanding undergraduates. Those applicants will be absolutely delighted to discover and apply to programs of graduate study that promise to prepare them for the job and the career of their dreams, teaching at institutions like those that have been so instrumental in their own education and development as young adults. Yes, some of these well-prepared and highly-motivated new doctoral students will get hooked on research. And so my proposal for stronger preparation of doctoral students for the careers that many will have as new faculty and effective teachers will simultaneously strengthen the research mission of America's doctoral institutions.

RELATED ARTICLE: MAJOR FACULTY REFORM INITIATIVES

The Preparing Future Faculty movement represents a major approach in a wider cultural shift towards preparing graduate students for faculty roles that require effective leadership in the classroom, the institution, and beyond the academy. Other initiatives have approached the same goal from different perspectives:

* The Compact for Faculty Diversity, a collaboration of three regional higher education boards dedicated to preparing more persons of color for faculty positions;

* Re-envisioning the Ph.D., a project of the University of Washington, which has collected and disseminated data about graduate student education and the multiple efforts at reform nationwide;

* The Forum on Faculty Roles and Rewards, sponsored by the American Association for Higher Education, and which functions as a clearinghouse for faculty reform;

* Preparing Future Professionals, an informally linked network of university-based programs that prepare graduate students for non-academic careers;

* The Responsive Ph.D., a project of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, involves fourteen doctoral universities (nine of which participate in PFF programs) in a national dialogue about reforming the doctorate in ways that address the needs of the wider culture;

* Pedagogies of the Disciplines, sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching focuses on the "stewardship of the discipline" in a variety of academic fields as the context and means for reforming doctoral education.

JACK MEACHAM is SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo.