The Carnegie Foundation has chosen four departments at the Ohio State as part of the Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate, a program designed to help reconstruct doctoral programs at major universities across the country. Those departments are mathematics, English, education and chemistry.
“It’s a multi-year research and action program on graduate education,” said Chris Golde, the research director for the Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate. “What we’re trying to do is work with departments to think about what’s working well, and what areas need to be changed.”
The Carnegie Foundation will fund efforts to study the education process as well as organize meetings between the schools selected in each department.
“The Carnegie Foundation is one of the most prestigious foundations concerned with higher education,” said Bruce Bursten, the chairman of the department of chemistry. “One of the main things they do is give their name to the program. That puts our name with Carnegie, and that’s a fabulous umbrella to be under.
“We want to re-examine the courses that we teach in our graduate program,” he said. “We want to look at certain aspects of our examination program and better ways that we can incorporate new areas of science — in particular, multi-disciplinary areas.”
Burston said historically OSU is one of the top 20 chemistry departments in the country, and the fund is an opportunity for the department to become better.
According to the foundation’s Web site, the purpose of doctoral education is “to educate and prepare those to whom we can entrust the vigor, quality, and integrity of the field.” The Carnegie Foundation refers to such a person as a “steward of the discipline.”
A doctoral graduate should be able to creatively generate new knowledge, critically conserve valuable and useful ideas, and responsibly transform those understandings through writing, teaching and application.
“We’ve been doing doctoral education for 100 years,” Golde said. “The best graduate education is to be had in the U.S., and we need to ask ourselves how we can keep from becoming complacent.”
OSU and Michigan were the only two colleges that were selected in all of the four fields of study.
“I think what’s nice about that is it emphasizes that, football aside, these are really two fine institutions,” Bursten said. “You’ll notice that five of the seven schools selected for the chemistry program are public universities. Those five have big graduate programs in chemistry, and have an influence on how things are done nationally.”
The Carnegie Foundation plans on adding two more fields of study to its program, but is still in the process of choosing the universities that will participate.
