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Our Strengths and Weaknesses The CGE's final report brought to light several of our strengths and weaknesses. Some leading strengths, which we would like to protect and build on, include: the flexibility and the mix of collegiality and independence that mark our program, and the full funding of all our sequential M.A./M.Phil./Ph.D. students for six years. Problematic features of our program include the following: Time-to-degree remains high here as at most programs. Advising continues to be a very active concern to our graduate students, many of whom have expressed a desire for better guidance and more substantive and timely feedback on their work. Our students do a lot of composition teaching and relatively little teaching of literature courses.
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Why were there so many recommendations in the CGE's report? Given the strengths of our department, the number of recommedations made by the committee came as a surprise, not least to the committee itself. The CGE tried to assess every aspect of our program carefully, building on everything that was working well, and proposing changes that can work in practice and be sustained over time. As we put these changes in place, there will be a period of adjustment to them, but we believe that a coherent and well-planned program will better serve our students and easier to run than an amalgam of half-forgotten ideas and compromises.
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Identifying crucial issues The CGE studied the results of the Carnegie committee's extensive survey of our graduate students last spring, and the graduate student members of the CGE canvassed their colleagues extensively. Our review of survey data gathered from our graduate students, and of our graduate program in general, brought to light the strengths and weaknesses identified in the report.
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Some recommendations on advising & time-to-degree We should set the adviser for each of our incoming students at the time we first recruit them and receive their acceptance. The CGE should develop a basic set of guidelines to clarify for students and for faculty what should be their mutual expectations as adviser and advisee. We should put forward a better definition of the orals, and give the orals a stronger and clearer structure. Our three fields would be defined as follows: an hour-long "general field" surveying a job-related field; a half-hour "related field" in a contiguous period or another clearly distinct but useful area; and a half-hour "thesis field" devoted to works bearing directly on the likely thesis topic. This would replace the current requirement of one "major" and two "minor" fields. Each of the fields in the department should establish a subcommittee of faculty and students to develop orals general-field guidelines for the field, either as an overall list or as a set of grouped readings on important subfields. The CGE should develop a set of guidelines on orals preparation, so as to give both students and faculty a better sense of the range of "best practice" employed in the department. These guidelines should include discussion of such matters as frequency of meetings, the writing up of short papers or other modes of focusing analysis, and expectations for the written pre-oral. At the end of every successful orals exam, following a brief break during which the examiners confer, the student and examiners should have a twenty-minute conversation about current dissertation ideas and plans. Students and their readers should agree to certain basic parameters of their work together. In order to make satisfactory progress on the dissertation, the student must visit each of the three readers at least once per semester to discuss progress and plans. And in order to satisfactorily meet the responsibilities of service as readers, faculty will make every effort to return draft chapters, with substantive comments, within the two weeks mandated by GSAS if feasible, and in any event within a month. A committee composed of current and past placement advisers should draft a pamphlet on job search preparation and strategies. This draft can be circulated for comment by the full faculty and by experienced students, including those who have had good success on the market in recent years.
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Our aim: improved training for our graduate students The implementation of the CGE's numerous recommendations is ongoing, but our aims are very basic: to better train our graduate students to meet the developing demands of the discipline, and to better prepare them for careers as teachers of literature.
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Our plan to improve graduate student teaching opportunities We should develop a three-part model for graduate student teaching, one that begins with an enhanced TAship, including the teaching of sections under faculty guidance, followed by full-scale teaching in University Writing and then in literature classes in the fifth year. We should evaluate the use of sections after they have been in place for three years, and should report to the department, at which point the faculty will determine whether to continue sectioning on this scale, to expand it to include more courses, to scale it back to fewer, or to eliminate it outright. We should explore opening up more varied funding options for our students, looking close at patterns currently used in other Columbia humanities and social science departments. We should work with the College and the graduate school to build in a year's literature teaching for each of our students, with the goal of having a program in place for fall 2006. We should support proposals now under development by the Graduate School and the College to provide post-docs for new Columbia Ph.D.s to teach in the Core and in other capacities.
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