The Chronicle of Higher Education - Vitae
July 3rd, 2014
Well, I complained back in the winter that graduate programs don’t spend enough time talking to teaching-intensive institutions about what they need out of new Ph.D.’s. Grad students ought to know how to get jobs and be successful at colleges and universities with 4-4 and 5-5 teaching responsibilities, so why not ask those institutions what “success” means?
It didn't seem as if the problem was going to solve itself in a hurry. So with some help from a friendly graduate dean, I rustled up a bunch of New England deans and other folks from research institutions in my region, some representatives from regional comprehensive universities like mine, and a bunch of faculty and administrators from Massachusetts community colleges.
We all got together in May to talk about a couple of key questions: How do we set up a system that lets us link the three sectors (along with some liberal-arts colleges that expressed interest) to give doctoral candidates more training about teaching at other kinds of institutions? And how can we teaching-intensive schools cultivate helpful relationships with research universities?
We're naming it grandly, which means we have to actually produce something. It's to be called the Massachusetts Cross-Sector Partnership.
At our first meeting, representatives of all sectors talked about the kind of preparation doctoral candidates would need: specialized coursework, visits to the other schools to shadow faculty and participate in workshops, and part-time teaching opportunities. And we began planning how we’d build the structures we'd need to make these links.