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CARNEGIE INITIATIVE |
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- The Carnegie Initiative on
the Doctorate (CID): what it is and what it hopes to achieve
- Faculty and students
representatives
- Report on the CID's summer
2003 "convening" by David Kurnick
The Carnegie
Initiative on the Doctorate (CID) is a multi-year project aimed at
improving the education of doctoral students. The Columbia English
Department joined the project at its start in 2002, along with 31 other
departments both in English and other fields. This initiative proceeds
first with self-scrutiny as individual graduate departments assess
their current practices; then with conversations among representatives
from participating programs who share the results of their departments'
inquiries and compare their modi operandi; and next with experimental
actions where departments supplement or revise their programs in light
of cross-institutional and cross-disciplinary insights gained through
these various discussions. The Carnegie Initiative guidelines suggest
some issues the department should address: content of the program;
skills or outcomes that students are expected to achieve; preferred
pedagogical strategies to achieve those ends; student recruitment and
retention; how students are assessed; quality and nature of individual
and collective mentoring, career preparation; and expectations of the
dissertation.
Carnegie also points to the kinds of innovations a department might
entertain as a result of its analyses and its exchanges of information
with other programs: new courses; different strategies associated with
graduate student advising, mentoring and matching with a thesis
advisor; additional non classroom educational opportunities (journal
clubs, writing groups, grant proposal seminars, career exploration
opportunities); new assessment strategies (revised qualifying/
candidacy exams, mentoring committee reviews); changes in the nature
and shape of the dissertation.
Columbia English Department's Coordinator for the
Carnegie Initiative: Jonathan Arac
Faculty Representatives: Rachel Adams,
Joseph Bizup, David Damrosch (who is also on the Carnegie
all-discipline advisory committee for the CID), Jean Howard, Sharon
Marcus, Bruce Robbins, Clifford Siskin, Gayatri Spivak, Paul Strohm,
Gauri Viswanathan
Student Representatives: Rishi Goyal and
David Kurnick
English Departments from other institutions participating in the
Initiative: Duke University; Indiana University, Bloomington; The Ohio
State University; Texas A&M University; University of Michigan, Ann
Arbor; University of Pittsburgh
Other disciplines participating in the initiative: chemistry,
education, history, mathematics, neuroscienceDuring 2002-03, the
faculty and student representative for Columbia English Department met
some half-dozen times. For the first open meeting, held in the spring
2003, the following materials formed a basis of discussion:
David Damrosch, "The Culture
of Graduate Education," from We Scholars: Changing the Culture of the
University
Andrew Delbanco, "What Should PhD Mean?" from PMLA vol. 115.5,
"Conference on the Future of Doctoral Education"
Bruce Robbins, "Pretend What You Like: Literature Under Construction,"
from The Question of Literature: The Place of the Literary in
Contemporary Theory, ed. Liz Beaumont Bissell
Edward W. Said, "Globalizing Literary Study," PMLA 116.1
Clifford Siskin, "What We Remember" and "How We Forget," from The Work
of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700-1830
For 2003-04, the committee expects to function at high intensity,
meeting every two weeks through the year. The graduate student
representatives listed above were selected last year by the Graduate
Student Council; other graduate students who may now be interested
should contact the GSC.
Report
on
the
Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate's Summer 2003 Convening
David Kurnick
The Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate (CID) held a "convening" of
participating departments this summer in Palo Alto, where we discussed
changes to the doctoral program that may come out of our participation.
I was the student representative from Columbia at the convening
(Professors Arac and Adams were the other attendees from Columbia), and
I'm sending this report to the graduate student body to let you know
what happened there and to solicit your comments and ideas.
Four main issues came up for Columbia's committee, and they're
discussed below. Some of these (the easy ones) the department has
already acted on. Others will obviously require more time, thought, and
effort. Rishi Goyal (the other student member of the CID committee) and
I will attend the next grad student meeting this fall to hear your
suggestions, concerns, comments and questions. You can also of course
contact Rishi (rkg6) or me (dsk29) at any time. Additionally, the CID
committee personnel is far from fixed, and if you're interested in
participating as a CID committee member, please let one of us know.
Here's are the main issues we discussed at the convening. Many require
a lot of further discussion, both within the department and with the
administration. Only #1 has actually happened as of today.
(The other English departments partcipating in the CID are Ohio State
University, Indiana University, Duke University, University of
Pittsburgh, Texas A&M University and University of Michigan.)
1. Advising
Much of the Columbia group's discussion focused on the responses we
received to the graduate student survey conducted last spring. The
surveys indicated that one pressing, and easily resolvable, issue is
the need for more structured advising in the first year of the program.
Specifically, survey respondents indicated that they wanted individual,
and where possible field-appropriate, advisors assigned in the first
year. We decided that all incoming students would be assigned a faculty
advisor, and that an effort would be made to correlate the advisor's
specialty to the student's declared area of interest. When possible,
these faculty advisors will come from the Committee on Graduate
Education (CGE) that admitted the student, so that the faculty advisor
will already have some degree of familiarity with the student's work
and interests. Professor Adams has already completed assignments for
this
year's incoming class.
2. MA-Year Requirements
Each incoming class is made up of two populations, MA-only students and
Ph.D. candidates, but the department makes no distinction between these
groups in terms of requirements or curricular introduction to graduate
study. This means, among other things, that the only introduction to
doctoral study that English Ph.D. candidates at Columbia receive comes
through general MA seminars and the MA essay; there is nothing
specifically oriented to introducing students to doctoral (as opposed
to "advanced") study, nor is there anything specifically addressed to
students who are only at Columbia for the MA. The CID committee is
thinking about possible curricular changes in the first year that would
address each of these needs without lessening the social coherence and
collegiality of the entering class.
3. Opportunities to Teach
Literature
Most of us will look for jobs teaching literature after we complete our
Ph.D.s, but the doctoral program currently makes no requirement that we
learn to do this kind of teaching during our time at Columbia. Recent
changes in the University Writing Program have opened up the
possibility for devoting at least one of the three teaching years
required by the department fellowships to leading sections in large
introductory undergraduate classes. The structural obstacles to this
are numerous, but the CID committee has broached the possibility of
graduate-led discussion sections with the administration, which so far
has been supportive.
4. Post-Doctoral
Exchange Program with Other CID Schools
The possibility was raised of Columbia participating in a program to
exchange post-doctoral fellows with the other schools participating in
the Carnegie Initiative. The idea is to enhance the professional
development of graduate students by affording them experience of other
institutions, increased teaching opportunities, etc. As with the
restructuring of the teaching requirement, this would obviously require
extensive discussion with the administration.
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