Project White Paper

White Paper Report ID: 2885146 Application Number: ZA-250723-16 Project Director: Eva Badowska Institution: Fordham University Reporting Period: 9/1/2016-9/30/2017 Report Due: 12/31/2017 Date Submitted: 6/30/2017 The Next Generation PhD Planning Grant White Paper The Living Humanities PhD for the 21st Century Eva Badowska, co-PI Matthew McGowan, co-PI Melissa Labonte Samantha Sabalis Table of Contents The “Living Humanities” PhD for the 21st Century .............................................................................. 1 What Happened? ...................................................................................................................................... 1 What Worked and What Didn’t? .............................................................................................................. 3 What Does It All Mean? ............................................................................................................................ 5 What’s Next? ............................................................................................................................................. 8 Appendix 1: Project Timeline ............................................................................................................ 11 Appendix 2: Project Members .......................................................................................................... 12 Appendix 3: Meeting Agendas .......................................................................................................... 17 Appendix 4: Reading Lists ................................................................................................................. 26 Appendix 5: Meeting Minutes .......................................................................................................... 29 Appendix 6: Blog Posts ..................................................................................................................... 89 Appendix 7: Short Reports with Recommendations ........................................................................ 100 The “Living Humanities” PhD for the 21st Century What Happened? The “Living Humanities” PhD project convened for seven three-hour meetings between September 2016 and May 2017 (Appendix 1). Each meeting was open to members of both the Core Planning and Constituent Advisory Groups of the project, and of the thirty-four active members, approximately twenty attended each meeting (Appendix 2). In advance of each session, the Co-Principal Investigators, Eva Badowska and Matthew McGowan, disseminated detailed preparatory agendas, key questions, and readings (Appendices 3 and 4). Throughout the project, communication took multiple forms to keep as broad a community as possible informed of our work. For example, following each meeting, the project’s graduate assistant, Samantha Sabalis, shared detailed minutes (Appendix 5), which were posted on the project website. Key themes were featured in a blog post and published on the Fordham GSAS Outlook Blog (Appendix 6). Dr. Badowska also provided updates on the project to the members of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) Council, which is constituted by department chairs and directors for all GSAS programs, including the five PhD-granting departments in the humanities. Dr. Badowska gave a presentation on the progress of the work on December 8, 2016 at the CGS annual meeting in Washington, DC; and, Drs. Badowska and McGowan disseminated information about the project in January 2017 sessions in Washington, DC organized by the NEH and the Council of Graduate Schools (CGS). The project’s inaugural meeting on 14 October 2016 began with an overview of the challenges facing doctoral education in the humanities, presented by Leonard Cassuto, Professor of English and American Studies at Fordham University and author of The Graduate School Mess: What Caused It and How We Can Fix It, and Core Planning Group member. After Cassuto’s talk, participants used the World Café method to discuss five key question areas for revitalizing doctoral education: 1/ the goals of doctoral education; 2/ the skills that it develops; 3/ its teaching mission and pedagogy; 4/ how to connect what is taught with career outcomes; and 5/ how to make the PhD more public-facing. The second meeting, held on 15 November 2016, focused on the planning theme of “Ensure Access and Inclusion.” For this session, participants read selections from Julie Posselt’s Inside Graduate Admissions: Merit, Diversity, and Faculty Gatekeeping and were divided into two discussion groups: 1/ Recruitment, Application and Admissions; and 2/ Retention, Mentoring, and Student Support. The working groups presented a slate of specific recommendations to design better practices that integrally support access and inclusion from A (the admission funnel) to Z (graduation, placement, and alumni support). The third meeting, which occurred on 30 November 2016, engaged the planning theme “Revitalize Learning Outcomes.” It featured Sidonie Smith, Mary Fair Croushore Professor of the Humanities and Director of the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan. Following a talk based on her recent book, Manifesto for the Humanities: Transforming Doctoral Education in Good Enough Times, Smith facilitated a workshop for participants to brainstorm, in broad strokes, what a new model for doctoral education might entail. Smith called on participants to re-imagine the purpose and function of the PhD degree, and what skills should be developed as part of the degree. While participants upheld the view that a doctoral degree in the humanities is a professional credential for future scholars, they also affirmed that it cannot be thought of as serving exclusively that goal, and put 30 June 2017 1 forward new models that included required internships, transferrable skills development, and individual study plans. The fourth meeting, held on 18 January 2017, focused on the planning theme of “Inhabit the New Learning Ecosystem” and was led by Steve D’Agustino, Director of Online Learning at Fordham University and Core Planning Group member. The meeting was based on a series of seven quotations, extrapolated from the assigned readings for this session, on teaching and learning in higher education and the development of new learning ecosystems. While the groups debated the issues raised by the quotations, they focused on how we in academia can “unlearn” the traditional assumptions about career outcomes, doctoral pedagogy, and goals. There was a particular focus on communication, which acts as a fulcrum, allowing us to engage doctoral students in speaking to different publics. The fifth meeting, which occurred on 22 February 2017, focused on the planning theme of “Mentor the Whole Person: Career-Wise Counsel, Promising Partnerships” and featured Jason Pedicone, President of the Paideia Institute for Humanistic Study. Pedicone described the development and results of the Legion Project, an initiative designed to create and sustain an online community of former graduate students in Classics by tracking their career pathways over time, and providing a forum for those who have sought careers outside academia to share experiences and insights with one another. Project participants brainstormed about the various ways Fordham could develop its own networks of alumni and industry partners to help doctoral graduates forge industry contacts and find employment opportunities beyond the professoriate. This session also included individual presentations prepared by participants from Classics, English, History, Philosophy, and Theology that centered on how each program undertakes mentoring, including the goals underpinning their efforts and the resources they utilize to achieve those goals. The sixth meeting, held on 29 March 2017, focused on the planning theme of “Incorporate Service and Community Engagement” and featured Matthew Jacobson, William Robertson Coe Professor of American Studies and History and founder of the Public Humanities Institute at Yale University. In his remarks to the group, Jacobson charted his experiences creating the Institute, examined how student and faculty produced works of public scholarship, and discussed how the Institute engages a variety of communities and institutions in New Haven. The group arrived at a preliminary consensus that the public humanities model offers a valuable alternative for doctoral education in the humanities in general. In preparation for the last planning theme, “Cultivate and Curate a Living Humanities PhD Model,” participants were divided into six groups of five, each centered on a key theme that carried across the discussions at the previous project meetings: 1/ Holistic Career Preparation; 2/ Internal Coordination for External Partnerships; 3/ Holistic Mentoring; 4/ Digital Learning as Method and Object/Collaboration; 5/ Public Scholarship; and 6/ Admissions (Recruitment, Application, and Retention). Each group worked independently for a month to distill the key conclusions about its assigned theme and develop three concrete recommendations for how the theme should be integrated into the new doctoral model. In addition, each group was asked to tackle the issue of how their group would adapt the dissertation and foster interdisciplinary scholarship through the reshaping of this capstone goal of doctoral education. The groups each created a short report (see Appendix 7) and presented their findings at the final project meeting, held on 17 May 2017,

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