New Book - The Formation of Scholars: Rethinking Doctoral Education for the Twenty-First Century

Recommended reading: Scott Jaschik, in Inside Higher Ed, reports on a new book, The Formation of Scholars: Rethinking Doctoral Education for the Twenty-First Century, which can be purchased here.

Qualifying exams:

Given that departments could develop shared visions on such issues, why don’t they? The surveys and interviews conducted for the study found that it’s largely a matter of conflict avoidance. Professors know that they don’t all agree, and consider it preferable to ignore those disagreements (even if that leaves graduate students hanging) than to actually talk about them. “The greatest obstacle to serious, substantive deliberation about purpose, as a number of department leaders told us, is that some differences are better not discussed,” the book says. “Not talking about purposes, that is, helps maintain a precarious peace.”

Dissertations:

Here again, it finds dissatisfaction among both Ph.D. students and the professors who lead their committees. “Standards by which dissertations are judged are unclear to students, and faculty members complain privately that poorly written, poorly conceptualized, and poorly executed dissertations are often passed to appease a colleague or to simply get a student out the door.”

Apprenticeship relationship:

The current system works well sometimes, the book says, but only sometimes. “When the relationship is bad, it can be horrid,” the book says. “At its worst, it has contributed to murder and suicide, but more common problems are student attrition and the demise of passion and love for the field.” Other problems include the system’s emphasis on the “reproductive model of mentoring,” in which students learn how one scholar thinks more than how to think for themselves.