Communications
Earlier this fall, Provost Doyle convened a working group of faculty colleagues who are beginning discussions about doctoral education at Brown. You can read more about the convening of this group in his September Priorities letter.
This working group is chaired by Susan Harvey, Willard Prescott and Annie McClelland Smith Professor of History and Religion and a member of the Academic Priorities Committee (APC), and Janet Blume, Deputy Provost and Interim Dean of the Graduate School. The full committee membership and the group’s charge are listed below.
We have begun a series of very productive discussions with department chairs (by division), and are scheduling meetings with faculty in some of the departments that have been most deeply impacted by recent reductions in Ph.D. admissions. We have focused our discussion on three central questions:
- Given what we know about changing landscapes — in higher ed, nationally, internationally, federally, etc. — what are our ethical responsibilities to our graduate students and how do we attend to those?
- What are our ethical responsibilities to departments with regard to maintaining the viability of intellectual life within departments, and the preservation of certain disciplines/areas of knowledge?
- Financial constraints impact graduate education in many ways. How do we assess doctoral programs under these circumstances to guide decisions on resource allocation?
We intend to broaden our outreach in the coming weeks, and we welcome direct input from faculty members. Please send your comments to our email address: doced_workinggroup@brown.edu. We would also welcome the opportunity to meet with groups of faculty members, as schedules allow. If you would like to schedule a meeting, please send the request to this email address as well.
Thank you for your engagement on this important issue.
Sincerely,
Janet and Susan
Charge
The working group is spending the fall semester facilitating a series of discussions with relevant constituencies about the future of doctoral education at Brown. The aim is to identify the key issues and questions that we will need to address to ensure that doctoral education, which is integral to our academic mission and our institutional identity, can adapt to changing circumstances and continue to thrive. The group will engage faculty and students in considering sustainable approaches to doctoral education in the context of University priorities, uncertainties regarding federal funding, a challenging academic job market, and broader societal questions about the value of higher education.
Membership
- Susan Harvey, Co-chair; Willard Prescott and Annie McClelland Smith Professor of History and Religion; Member, Academic Priorities Committee (APC)
- Janet Blume, Co-chair; Deputy Provost; Interim Dean of the Graduate School
- Prudence Carter, Sarah and Joseph, Jr. Dowling Professor of Sociology; Peltz Ruttenberg Family Director, Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America
- Colleen Dalton, Professor of Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences; Member, Faculty Executive Committee (FEC)
- Virginia Krause, Professor and Chair of French and Francophone Studies
- Diane Lipscombe, Thomas J. Watson, Sr. Professor of Science; Professor of Neuroscience; Reliance Dhirubhai Ambani Director of the Robert J. and Nancy D. Carney Institute for Brain Science; Member, APC
- Brandon Marshall, Royce Family Professor of Teaching Excellence in Epidemiology; Professor of Epidemiology; Member, University Resources Committee (URC)
- Monica Martinez Wilhelmus, Thomas J. and Alice M. Tisch Assistant Professor of Engineering; Member, (Graduate Council)
- Kevin Quashie, Royce Family Professor of Teaching Excellence in English
- Elizabeth Doherty, staffing the committee; Deputy Provost for Academic Affairs
- Ethan Bernstein, staffing the committee; Executive Dean of Administration & Finance, Graduate School