Preparing Doctoral Students for the First Job and Beyond

At the core of most doctoral students' studies is a fundamental contradiction. To prepare themselves for an academic career, most Ph.D. students in journalism and mass communication spend anywhere from three to five years learning to conduct research. This conceptualization of the doctoral degree as a research union card is designed, in part, to help ensure that new scholars will carry on and expand the intellectual traditions of the field. On a practical level, a research emphasis assures both graduates and the institutions that hire them that newly minted Ph.D.s are tenurable. While this trend has perhaps come more slowly to journalism and mass communication programs than it has the traditional disciplines of the arts and sciences, it is part of historical progression. "By the end of the 1920s, it had become plain that the intent and usage had grown irrevocably apart: The doctorate trained people only to do research, but was required of those who wished only to teach," (Kennedy 1996) Yet, ask new graduates - and the faculties that welcome them - to analyze decisions about why they were hired for particular jobs and a different emphasis emerges. Aspiring academics are hired because they can teach certain classes. In fact, if the anecdotal evidence of recent years is any indication, what a student can teach - and how that student performs in the classroom-has significant bearing on almost all entry-level hiring decisions. Furthermore, while large, research-oriented universities will grant tenure on a dossier that emphasizes research, other types of institutions put teaching first. And, even the large, research institutions don't ignore teaching. "I've not always been happy with the way that we've handled this in the field," notes Dean Willard Rowland, University of Colorado. "But at Colorado, we are developing a program with a continuing pedagogical component to it. We pay a lot of attention to our doctoral students and what they are capable of in the classroom throughout the program." Colorado is not the only program or institution to begin to pay more attention to training future academics for their classroom responsibilities (Boyer 1990). The political realities of state-subsidized education are such that whether research plays the dominate institutional role, good teaching remains a necessary, if not always sufficient, ingredient for successful academic life. However, recent research indicates that most doctoral programs in journalism and mass communication offer students little, if any, training in teaching and related activities such as course development and curriculum building (Cohen 1997). Indeed, doctoral students earn their teaching credentials by a variety of activities that, at one extreme, give them exclusive responsibility for a key part of the curriculum (such as beginning reporting and editing classes), while at the other extreme, have them doing little more than routine work under the supervision of a more senior faculty member. Kennedy (1996) has pointed out that it is often assumed that TAs and RAs will, in practice, "learn what they need to know from watching journeymen-the mentors under whom they study as graduate students" (p.13). He then identifies two weaknesses in the apprentice/mentor model. First, while most graduate students will find teaching positions in non-research institutions, their mentors' "ideas of what is important come mainly from (the research institution) culture" in which they are working. And second, Kennedy writes, "professors at research institutions tend to be focused on their own primary interest - the research at hand. Discussions of pedagogy ... are rare in the environments in which most graduate training takes place," (p.13), (Cohen 1997, 30). Unlike the research component of the doctoral degree in which reflection, critical analysis and intellectual growth are incorporated into coursework progressing through the dissertation, most graduate student teaching experiences lack a similar mechanism to promote individual reflection and development. …