Dean of the Reviews

Recently reappointed to a third five-year term as dean of the Graduate School, Lewis Siegel has a unique position among the university's academic leadership. He doesn't appoint any faculty members, he can't create new academic programs and independently of other deans he directly administers a fraction of the scholarship and fellowship money that is available for departments. In many ways, he has to work with what is already available in the other schools. But according to Provost Peter Lange, in the last decade, Siegel has used that situation to carve out a position for the Graduate School dean, most notably as an "honest broker helping make independent and impartial assessments of program quality. Through his supervision of external reviews of departments, and his position as an ex-officio member of the Appointments, Promotions and Tenure committee, Siegel has made the deanship a critical voice for promoting scholarship at Duke." Siegel notes that the school has no interest to defend in these discussions other than ensuring the quality of the faculty, the students and their scholarship. "In the end, the Graduate School rises and falls on the national reputation of the faculty and its graduates," he says. In an interview with Dialogue editor Geoffrey Mock, Siegel discussed this and other issues related to the Graduate School:

DIALOGUE: Let's start with the broader context. What's happening nationally in graduate education, and how are these matters playing out at Duke?

SIEGEL: Graduate education is going through a period of nearly five years in which there has been a heavy decline in U.S. citizen applicants to graduate schools. Most of the schools with which we compare ourselves have dropped between 10 and 25 percent in applications for Ph.D. programs. The drop is pretty much across the board, although there are some exceptions. It seems to be a result of the great publicity of the difficulty of the academic job market coupled with the booming economy. Historically, applications for the Ph.D. tend to decline in boom times, but the magnitude of this drop hasn't been seen since the 1970s.

Duke is part of this trend. Our numbers are at the higher end, closer to the 25 percent range. The real issue is how to maintain quality. This national downturn coincided at Duke with our desire to decrease the class sizes from peak populations, particularly in the humanities and some of the social sciences. We decided to reduce the size of the graduate school to raise the financial package we can offer graduate students. That reallocation of funds turns out to have been quite fortunate because the drop in admissions in those areas means we have not really experienced a serious loss of selectivity. At the same time we're able to increase our offers to these students. The result is we've become much more competitive.

At Duke, there are three fields that have increased significantly in their applications pool, and they are the ones you would expect: computer science, electrical and computer engineering and statistics, which at Duke is very heavily science-oriented. All of these fields are associated with new technologies, entrepreneurship, and the majority of students at Duke often end up with high-paying jobs in non-academic positions.

Our principal goal is to continue to maintain - and improve where possible - our quality. We've made our basic financial goals, so that we now offer competitive financial packages in the humanities and social sciences. We'll clearly increase our student body in areas where the application pools are high, and that's mostly in the sciences and technical areas. But, I don't anticipate we'll see increases across the board.

But despite all the talk of a downturn in graduate applications, we actually took in the largest Ph.D. class in history in fall 1999, and it's a class of very high quality. That's largely due to record enrollment in the physical sciences with increased grant support to pay for most of those students. In engineering and medicine, we've also seen large enrollments. These also are areas in which there is external funding to support more students. So long as this type of funding is available, we can afford to expand, when the application pool is large enough to maintain student quality.

DIALOGUE: How is the application trend playing out among minority students?

SIEGEL: Over the last five years, there has been a drop among minority student applicants that parallels the drop among all applicants. We've tried to do a lot of things to reverse that. Most notably, we brought [Associate Dean] Jacqueline Looney back. She had administered our very successful program until 1994 and then went to the Mellon Foundation and worked on its minority program. Since Jackie came back last year, she has been able to increase Duke visibility again to a large group of minority undergraduate students who clearly had dropped Duke from their thinking. There are extremely talented students she knew from the Mellon Foundation programs, and she made us visible to minority students in a number of undergraduate research programs. Some of the departments have become absolutely fascinated with the students she's brought in for a visit.

We have an excellent record of selectivity among minority students, and we are committed to continue that. Indeed, while we have stabilized the number of minority applicants, the quality of those applicants has shot sky high.

For example, we have three types of fellowships. The most prestigious, the James B. Duke Graduate Fellowship, goes to the top 10 percent of students. James B. Duke Fellows are selected by an elected faculty committee. We're going to make 90 offers this year. We're also going to make 35 Duke Endowment Fellowship offers, which go to the best of our minority applicants. Again, these fellows are selected by an independent faculty committee. Historically, we have one or two students who get both fellowships. This year we have 11. That's phenomenal.

In addition, last year we established the University Scholars Program thanks to a generous gift from trustee Melinda Gates and her husband Bill. The University Scholars goes to an even more limited group of students. Those are people of James B. Duke quality, but with extraordinary interdisciplinary interests. Last year one person received all three of our major fellowships. This year, three people have won all three.

These are remarkable students we've attracted to Duke and in large measure it reflects the extraordinary work that Jackie has done to introduce them to our faculty.

DIALOGUE: Where would you like to be in five years on funding goals for graduate students?

SIEGEL: In the university's last long-range plan, Shaping Our Future, in 1994, we said that we would try to make our offers for Ph.D. support in the middle level of those dozen top private universities with which we compete. Stipend support this academic year is right smack in the middle across the board. The five-year guarantee also is right in the middle.

Last summer, in anticipation of the current planning process, I visited 10 of our principal competitors. I learned that while our support during the academic-year is competitive, many institutions are trying to compete at the margins. For example, in the humanities and social sciences, some of the schools offer summer support for Ph.D. students, which is virtually non- existent at Duke in those areas. We need to attend to this.

We also need to be more competitive in areas that affect student life, such as housing, social space and child care for graduate students who need it.

We also feel it is important to find a balance between fellowship support and teaching service. We need to ensure that graduate students are not just supported with adequate stipends, but are supported in a way that allows them to concentrate on their work as graduate students and research scholars. We want them to gain teaching experience, but we don't want them to be so consumed by it that they can't do their dissertation in a timely fashion. So we try to have our Ph.D. students get at least two out of their first five years as fellowship years in the sense that they are not required to do teaching service or anything that isn't directly related to their research.

The last element of support that is missing in a number of disciplines - particularly the humanities and social sciences - is after the fifth year. We have found that five years of financial support gets students through their course work and well into their dissertation research. While our "times to degree" figures are shorter than most of our competitors, some students can "fall off the table" after the fifth year. They have to go out and scrounge for support. That's difficult for many students, and some have to devote so much time to other duties, in order to eat, that they take "forever" to complete their degree or are forced to drop out completely. That's a loss both for the students and for their departments.

We have two means of helping them. Some of our budgeted teaching support is being extended past the fifth year. Of course, if students do too much teaching, they may never finish the dissertation. Therefore, we now can offer some students a semester of dissertation support when they are close to the end. This allows them to spend full time writing. We initiated the program last year, and it was very popular. I think we offered 30 of these fellowships. We plan to expand the program.

DIALOGUE: Most of the new programs at the university over the last decade have been interdisciplinary. How does that coincide with Graduate School planning?

SIEGEL: Our focus over the last decade has been in interdisciplinary graduate programs. This reflects the importance of interdisciplinary approaches to many of the most interesting intellectual challenges. This focus will continue in the future, especially in places where interdisciplinary scholarship plays to Duke's strengths.

For example, the ecology program has been the model. To make these programs work, we have to provide competitive graduate fellowships. That's one of the reasons Duke has set a target to raise $20 million in the Campaign for Duke for graduate scholarship support. A lot of the fund raising is designed to get people to give in areas in which the university has a specific interest. The ecology fellowship was an endowed fellowship specifically for students working in that field. Graduate support has always been part of the total package with which you increase the effectiveness of the intellectual area at a university by attracting students who help attract faculty and vice versa. So if we're going to have any growth at this university, we expect there will be some level of equivalent expansion of the graduate program.

DIALOGUE: On the issue of faculty quality and development, could you discuss the role the Graduate School plays?

SIEGEL: The Graduate School doesn't have to negotiate with the faculty member directly on most things that are important to them, such as salary, space or positions. The only thing we directly deal with is the number of graduate students in the unit to which the faculty member belongs.

It's much easier for us to deal with the merits of what is the scholarship of the faculty member or of the department and how is the department positioned to enhance the level of that scholarship than it is to negotiate space needs and compensation. The external reviews are a fundamental way of addressing scholarship, and the responsibility of the external review rests with the Graduate School as an arm of the provost's office. We look very carefully at the department, and focus on all aspects of its functioning, not just on the graduate program; we try to be very firm in raising issues. Sometimes they are very difficult issues, but it's easier for us to do that than anyone else.

In this way, I think we are a major resource for the provost. We are now well into the second round of the external review process. Virtually every department has been reviewed once. When we bring in the external teams, they read the first review report and see the responses to the report, and what has happened in the intervening five to seven years. If it looks like the department promised to do things and hasn't done them, or if the administration has promised to do a number of things and hasn't done them, the review team lets us know! We have seen some really strong critiques in these second reviews.

DIALOGUE: What are the teaching issues you look at?

SIEGEL: We've been reasonably successful in regularizing the amount of teaching required by graduate students. We now are working closely with departments to ensure that the graduate students' teaching experiences are beneficial to them in their careers, as well as to the undergraduates in their classes. We don't want them always teaching the first level course in the discipline, always teaching the same thing.

A year ago, we asked departments to articulate "ideal" sequences for use of graduate students in the classroom and for mechanisms to train students for their instructional roles. While not all graduate programs have yet instituted formal training programs, many have begun this effort and others have made extensive use of pedagogical workshops offered through the Center for Teaching, Learning and Writing. In three departments, formal teaching certificate programs have been developed that provide additional training for graduate students interested in furthering their teaching skills.

Curriculum 2000 provides us a tremendous challenge as the departments organize their courses in a new way. The creation of the Writing Through the Discipline courses has the potential to greatly broaden the teaching experiences of our graduate students. Now they'll be teaching writing in their subject matter, and they can be much more imaginative and inventive in their courses. DIALOGUE: How have we been placing our graduates in this tight job market? SIEGEL: Our record has been quite good. In the humanities, for instance, where the job market has been particularly tight, we continue to place about 70 percent of our Ph.D.s in tenure track faculty positions, and about one-quarter of our graduates get such positions at research universities. This is encouraging because due to the large entering classes of the early 1990s, we are now graduating twice as many humanities Ph.D.s as we did a decade ago. The fact that we're placing this many students ‚ particularly in the tight humanities market - is a tribute to their quality and their experiences at Duke. We also are seeing an increasing trend toward postdoctoral study ‚ and a lengthening of the period of that study ‚ in nearly all disciplines. Unemployment itself is relatively rare. We have been working actively with the Career Development Center to make our students aware of all the job opportunities available to them, and to make the faculty comfortable with the fact that many of their Ph.D. students may pursue successful careers outside academe. DIALOGUE: How would you sum up your nine years as graduate dean at Duke? SIEGEL: I consider myself fortunate to be in this role at this critical time at Duke. Graduate education at Duke during this period has really made significant strides. We have had to do some unpleasant repositioning of a number of programs, downsizing some and shifting support to others where it was most needed. It also has been a struggle to maintain quality in the face of declining applications. But, all in all, I think we are much better positioned to compete for the best students, and to treat them fairly once they are here, than we have ever been.