Chemical Education Today
Editorial Educating Stewards of Our Discipline The American Chemical Society’s Office of Graduate Education (1) is one of many recent manifestations of renewed interest in and scrutiny of graduate education in the U.S. In January’s editorial I mentioned results of two surveys of recent recipients of the Ph.D. (2). These provide an overview of what a self-selected group thinks about the graduate education they received. Within the past few years, the ACS has surveyed Ph.D. recipients and collected information about Ph.D. programs and M.S. programs in chemistry. Results are available at the Web site of the Office of Graduate Education (1) by choosing Special Reports/Surveys. The Chemical Sciences Roundtable has published a report of a workshop on graduate education in the chemical sciences that identified problems and opportunities (3). The Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate has recently begun a major project intended to enrich and invigorate the education of graduate students (4). The Preparing Future Faculty program and its ACS branch aim to enhance the preparation of graduate students who aspire to be faculty members (5). There are probably other studies, surveys, and programs either completed or under way that I am unaware of, but those listed here are sufficient to document the attention currently being paid to graduate education. The Chemical Sciences Roundtable states, “the approach to graduate study in the chemical sciences has changed very little in the last 40 years, but the research and education environment is evolving at a rapid pace.” Perhaps our approach to graduate study in chemistry still works quite well in the new environment, but many suggest that a different approach could work even better. To decide whether that is true we need criteria on which to base evaluations of graduate education, and these are often obscured in the flurry of activity required to accomplish the short-term goals that constantly face us. Both the Chemical Sciences Roundtable and the Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate suggest that departments and faculty should carefully consider what they believe to be the purpose of the graduate enterprise. The Carnegie Foundation provides a useful suggestion: Graduate education should prepare scholars who are “stewards of the discipline”. These are people who can maintain and enhance “the vigor, quality and integrity of the field.” This requires generating new knowledge through creative research, understanding the history and epistemology of the discipline in order to cull and conserve valuable ideas, and communicating, teaching, and applying those ideas. In this view a Ph.D. is not just a ticket to a better-paying, higher-level job, but also an initiation into a long tradition of shared knowledge and values that constitute the discipline of chemistry. Note that stewardship of a discipline implies far more than creating new knowledge. In considering the health of a field, a steward needs perspective from the past and vision for the future. It is essential to be able to communicate within and across disciplinary boundaries and to surmount the information-transfer barriers that separate technical experts
from laypersons and novA Ph.D. is… ices. In other words a steward must be an excellent an initiation into a teacher as well as an excellent practitioner. And it is long tradition of extremely important that a steward participate in reshared knowledge and cruiting and preparing subsequent generations of values that constitute leaders who will carry the discipline to its next level of the discipline of accomplishment. Will all of the attenchemistry. tion currently being paid to graduate education result in real change? The mentoring that is a major aspect of nearly every graduate degree in chemistry is a very personal process, so it is difficult to define in general terms how to change it or improve it. And it is difficult to monitor or influence how individual mentor-student interactions transpire. Nevertheless, it is essential that we continually scrutinize and evaluate both what we do as individuals and what general principles and habits of thought we apply to graduate education. Out of our graduate programs come the leaders and innovators—“stewards of the discipline”—who will enhance both research and education in chemistry for many years to come.
Literature Cited 1. Newsletter, ACS Office of Graduate Education, Volume 1, Number 1, Spring 2002. For a downloadable copy and more information go to http://chemistry.org/education/student/ gradeducation.html (accessed Aug 2002). 2. a. Golde, C. M.; Dore, T. M, At Cross Purposes: What the Experiences of Doctoral Students Reveal about Doctoral Education (http://www.phd-survey.org [accessed Aug 2002]). Philadelphia, PA: A report prepared for The Pew Charitable Trusts, 2001; b. National Association of Graduate and Professional Students, The 2000 National Doctoral Program Survey, http://survey.nagps.org/index.php (accessed Aug 2002). 3. Chemical Sciences Roundtable, Board of Chemical Sciences and Technology, Commission on Physical Sciences, Mathematics, and Applications, National Research Council, Graduate Education in the Chemical Sciences—Issues for the 21st Century, 2000, National Academy Press, Washington, DC. 4. A description of the program is available at http:// www.carnegiefoundation.org/CID/ (accessed Aug 2002). 5. More information is available at http://www.preparingfaculty.org/ and at http://www.acs.org/education/student/ pffweb.html (accessed Aug 2002).
JChemEd.chem.wisc.edu • Vol. 79 No. 10 October 2002 • Journal of Chemical Education
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