Minutes (Redacted)
University Council on Graduate Education
December 12, 2006
Sackler School – Boston Campus
Present: David Walt (chair), Arthur Donohue-Rolfe, Larry Feig, Shafik Islam, Ayesha Jalal, Bill Moomaw and Vin Manno (Peter Walker-absent)
The minutes of the November 6th meeting were approved.
Agenda Item I: Proposal to implement a new Ph.D. Program In Economics
[The UCGE reviewed a draft version of a proposal for a new Ph.D. program in Economics as part of its advisory role in assessing new Ph.D. programs. The details of the UCGE’s review comments are redacted from these minutes as they will be transmitted to the administration and the department by V. Manno.]
Agenda Item II: Best Practices Documents of the Sackler School for their Ph.D. Programs
A discussion involved how relevant these practices are for non-Sackler Ph.D. Programs. Reviews of two Practices were begun, “Guidelines for Program Review Preparation” and “Best Practices Recommendations for Student Training”. The overall conclusion was that many of these practices are relevant but others are not. Electronic copies of these two guidelines were sent to committee members for more discussion in the future.
Issues related to these recommendations were discussed:
1) One feature of the Sackler School that attracted attention of members of the committee is the idea that Ph.D. Programs are entities distinct from Departments. This is not usually the case in most non-Sackler graduate programs.
- advantages of this setup that were discussed included
- easier for programs to be multidisciplinary.
- easier to recognize contributions of faculty research in a way that is distinct from their contributions to departments
- every program has a program director that reports directly to Dean instead of chair, and meets with program directors of other Ph.D. programs.
- potential disadvantages of this arrangement is figuring out how to fund them.
2) It was recommended that Naomi Rosenberg (Dean of the Sackler School) be invited to next meeting to give pros and cons to separating Programs from Departments.
3) Research graduate education, i.e. Ph.D. programs, is always a smaller part of the educational programs in all schools of the university (e.g. undergraduate education in A&S and Engineering, professional and terminal masters programs in The Fletcher and Friedman Schools and professional school training on the Grafton and Boston campuses.
That characteristic of Tufts needs to change:
- How do you promote more emphasis on graduate education in these settings?
- How do you address critical mass to avoid isolation of graduate students?
- How then do you reward faculty for graduate training?
- Idea - making a research training community pervasive can make the program more attractive to applicants.
Next Meetings:
Feb 5 at 8:30 AM in Medford - Further discussion of Programs vs. Departments- with Naomi Rosenberg
Meeting after that on Mar 5 at 8:30 AM in Grafton
