Articles On This Page:

• Re-envisioning the Ph.D. Conference in Seattle, April 13-15
• ANAC Faculty Work Project Report to Present Comprehensive Approach
• New WASC Accreditation Standards Emphasize Capacity and Effectiveness
• AACU/ANAC Conference Demonstrates National Models of Effective Practice
• Hewlett Project Focuses on Institutional Impact and Outcomes Assessment

Re-envisioning the Ph.D. Conference in Seattle, April 13-15

As a culmination of a year-long study of doctoral education in the United States supported by The Pew Charitable Trusts, 150 conference participants from all sectors in higher education gathered in Seattle, April 13-15, to seek consensus on needed improvements in Ph.D. preparation. Although such reform efforts waxed and waned throughout much of the twentieth century, this conference did seem to produce agreement that doctoral education takes too long, that doctoral students are too much a victim of the whims of their faculty advisors, that too little information is available regarding career options, and that new Ph.D's are poorly prepared for the responsibilities they will actually assume at their future employer, whether in higher education, government, or industry.

Notably, a will to collaborate emerged among the representatives of the interested sectors who were present: Ph.D. granting research universities, doctoral students, business and industry, government, foundations, comprehensive universities, liberal arts and community colleges, K-12 education, and educational associations. Look for next steps to include a follow-up conference with significant faculty involvement to design alternative models for doctoral education, hiring institutions to communicate more clearly their expectations regarding new Ph.D. capabilities, foundations and government agencies increasingly to require Ph.D. program reviews as a condition for funding, and each sector to develop ways to contribute tangibly to the improvement of Ph.D. preparation, e.g., pre-doctoral internships in colleges and universities, government, and industry with significant emphasis on effective mentoring.

ANAC Faculty Work Project Report to Present Comprehensive Approach

If the Ph.D. re-envisioning conference explored the appropriate birthing of a faculty career, ANAC's Faculty Work Project is examining all other aspects—from hiring and orientation of new faculty to the senior stages of the career lifetime. In the project's final meeting prior to the Woodrow Wilson Summer Institute, twenty ANAC faculty and academic administrators from fourteen member institutions and resource person Jon Wergin met April 5-6, just prior to the PLU Conference, to develop the initial draft of the project report which will be circulated for comment among Institute participants early in June. The report will analyze the full span of the faculty career, including capabilities new faculty should bring from graduate school (such as preparation for institutional citizenship, as well as for teaching) and the implications of adult development theory for the decade prior to formal retirement. With support from The Pew Charitable Trusts, the project is exploring ways that faculty members and their departments or schools can work more effectively as units; how faculty institutional service can be better defined, evaluated, and rewarded; and ways that institutions must invest in faculty professional development in order to realize more fully faculty potential at various stages of their careers.

ANAC's Faculty Work Project report will be based on the fundamental assumption that faculty and their institutions must seek to align their work policies and practices, evaluation criteria and rewards, and governance and management systems optimally with the institutional mission in order to best serve students and most effectively foster faculty productivity and satisfaction. It will focus on the underlying principles and policies that best promote this faculty-institutional mutuality, in the process addressing dualisms and contradictions the academy has lived with almost from its inception in the American experience—dichotomies that have contributed to faculty-administrative misunderstandings that can sap institutional vitality and divert attention from higher education's primary teaching and learning mission.

New WASC Accreditation Standards Emphasize Capacity and Effectiveness

In a move designed to add substance to WASC's recent focus on outcomes in accreditation, the Western Association of Schools and Colleges is moving to adopt new and simplified accreditation standards emphasizing institutional capacity and educational effectiveness. In proposing to move from nine standards to four and to shift the stance of accreditation from compliance to collaboration, WASC is seeking to better engage its member institutions in learning as learning organizations. Thus, WASC is moving, as well, from an accreditation process that consists of two campus visits—one to review the institution and one to evaluate its educational program—to a single integrated visit. This approach seems in line with the direction professional accrediting associations have been moving in recent years—the onus being on the institution to demonstrate that it has developed effective procedures which enable it to fulfill its educational mission and the educational objectives accrediting associations have established for accreditation. The older approach not only established the educational objectives but set standards on how the institution must meet these objectives.

Addressing the WASC meeting, Lee Shulman proposed that campuses join the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CASTL), a means to document and analyze teaching effectiveness as a form of faculty scholarship in keeping with the spirit of the new standards. Shulman's proposal is also consistent with ANAC's Faculty Work Project call for an integrative faculty professional model where teaching, research, and service are evaluated according to a single scholarly standard such as the six criteria in the 1997 Carnegie report, Scholarship Assessed:

• Clear goals
• Adequate preparation
• Appropriate methods
• Significant results
• Effective presentation
• Reflective critique

Integrative standards also reflect the aims of the AACU/ANAC PLU Conference and the curricular, faculty development, and student outcomes objectives of ANAC's Hewlett project, now entering its third year of implementation.

AACU/ANAC Conference Demonstrates National Models of Effective Practice

Not only did Sheldon Rothblatt assert in his keynote remarks that professional education in the medieval guild may have been the original form of liberal learning because of its emphasis on the whole person, but in focusing on competence ("Do it until you get it right!"), reflection, and teaching (the public disputation), he argued, the medieval university in alliance with the guilds engaged in the original integration of liberal and professional studies. Clearly, it seems, the modern university can learn from a higher education tradition that is centuries old. What the PLU Conference, April 6-8, did demonstrate is that the present-day integration of liberal and professional studies is more than rhetoric, as revealed in case studies from institutions as disparate as Northeastern University and Inver Hills Community College, or Drury and Mercer universities and the University of Texas at Arlington and Philadelphia University.

The Conference provided models of integrating general education and professional majors where professional faculty play central roles in teaching general education, and examples of new majors being created collaboratively involving liberal arts and professional studies faculty (Drury and the University of Hartford). The Northeastern model is particularly engaging because it adds cooperative work experiences to curricular integration. The session with employers (from start-up companies to Microsoft) was intriguing, as each panelist stressed the need for graduates able quickly to fit the organizational culture (values, workstyle, collaborative environment) of their employing organization, to assess quickly what needs to be done in order to "add value," to be comfortable with continuous change, and to understand who the competition is. In meeting the needs of this work world, higher education's competitive and individualistic learning mode appeared out of step.

Hewlett Project Focuses on Institutional Impact and Outcomes Assessment

The ten ANAC member institutions who are participating in ANAC's William and Flora Hewlett Foundation project have discovered just how difficult it is to integrate two traditions in higher education that spent most of the twentieth century gravely suspicious of each other. Yet, successes in the project to date have demonstrated just how powerful learning outcomes resulting from the integration of liberal and professional studies can be, not simply through general education requirements all students must satisfy, but in collaboration bridging the majors in both areas where students and faculty "really live." Yet, if the messages from WASC, employers, and educators who are "doing it" are to be believed, the liberal learning of the twenty-first century will be all about improving student competence, reflective capacities, ethical judgment, and adaptive leadership abilities simultaneously. All this has become necessary to enable a complex, fast-paced society to function well, a society that has moved in less than fifty years from a high school diploma almost to a master's degree as the standard credential.

A lot to absorb in on-the-ground implementation of ANAC's Hewlett project! With help from resource persons, Jon Wergin (Virginia Commonwealth University) and Karl Schilling (Virginia Council on Higher Education), Hewlett project campus coordinators developed a plan for project completion during their April 6 and 8 Tacoma meetings that will have sustainable institutional impact, created a framework for assessment models to measure student outcomes in the project, and discussed plans for project evaluation. Coordinators will meet again at the Woodrow Wilson Summer Institute in June to review and evaluate campus plans for project completion and to plan for a national dissemination conference sometime in the next fifteen to eighteen months to share project results with the wider world of higher education. Considerable dissemination has already occurred through such venues as the ANAC Deans Forum on Liberal and Professional Education held in conjunction with the 1998 and 1999 AACU annual conferences and this month's conference with AACU at PLU.