Some Principles for Graduate Instruction
by a Retiring Distinguished Professor
Bruce Thompson
1.Faculty should treat all doctoral students with the respect and courtesy normally afforded to all adult professionals.
Doctoral students should not be infantilized, patronized or treated as "like my child." Doctoral students are adults. Infantilizing professional adults is damaging to both the people doing the patronizing and the patronized people. The (very) commendable need to nurture children can instead be met through healthy outlets, such as faculty serving as a foster parent, adopting a child, or serving as a volunteer child advocate in family court.
2.The function of the faculty is to serve the doctoral students; it is not the function of the faculty to be served by the doctoral students.
Doctoral students attend graduate school to learn from and be mentored by faculty. Doctoral students are not "owned", and doctoral students are not property. One lesson of history is that treating people as property does not end well.
3.Faculty must recognize that some doctoral students may sometimes not fully appreciate the sacrifices that faculty may make on behalf of students.
Faculty often makemyriad sacrifices to help doctoral students. Faculty may sometimes feel a narcissistic injury when these sacrifices are not fully appreciated by students. But the pain of lack of appreciation is more acute when the sacrifices are made in service of recognition rather than instead in service of benevolence and simple generosity.
4.Faculty should accept that rights to authorship credits are created by intellectual contributions to manuscripts, and not simply by virtue or formal position or authority.
The ethical standards of professional organizations, such as those of the American Psychological Association or the American Educational Research Association (see Section 8.12: Publication Credit, or the American Educational Research Association's Code of Ethics, Standard 15) offer important principles. Only persons who made a substantial contribution (i.e., not things like proof reading, or simple copy editing) to the manuscript may be listed as co-authors. And all person who made substantial contributions must be listed as co-authors. And status (e.g., being a dissertation advisor, or a department chair, or a student) should play no role in deciding who will be co-authors, or the order in which co-authors are listed.
Twenty five years ago TAMU faculty may have received less merit award recognition for articles co-authored with students. Later it became standard operating procedure to underline student co-authors in vitae, and these articles may even have received extra award compensation. The ever increasing pressure on faculty to publish also may create a dynamic favoring a perverse outcome in which doctoral students may be viewed by some as property or employees, needed for academic survival, rather than as students.
These ethical principles serve as a counterweight to human frailty. However, some faculty may offer the view that they are not members of either APA or AERA, and therefore not bound by these principles. Thus, departmental faculty might adopt and promulgate such standards, or the CEHD Graduate Instruction Committee might adopt and promulgate such standards. Doctoral students may know their rights if such standards are promulgated, and doctoral students, who otherwise often feel quite powerless and vulnerable, may feel protected by such standards.
5.Doctoral students have a (virtually) absolute right to nominate the members of their advisory committees, and to change the composition of their advisory committees from among the approved graduate faculty for Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board-approved doctoral programs.
Advisory committees should be appointed or modified to match the evolving research plans of doctoral students on their journeys to conduct "independent research... which must be the original work of the candidate." Students' research interests may change over time.
And the mentor relationship is the most critical aspect of the doctoral experience. Mentor relationships are not created by formal advisor assignment. Instead, mentorship relationships blossom in unexpected places in unanticipated ways. Thus, the membership in doctoral advisory committees must remain flexible when necessary to accommodate the needs of the clients of doctoral programs: the students.
An exception might be students who fail the preliminary examinations, and who then seek to shop for new committees. The check against this abuse is paying Heads big bucks to review and approve or disapprove all graduate petitions.
Faculty can feel hurt or insulted when students ask to remove them from advisory committees. Or faculty may feel that their faculty peers will think less of them, and that their reputations will be lessened when they are removed from advisory committees.
Such hurt feelings are lessened when everyone recognizes that academic plans and mentorship relationships naturally evolve over time. And the reputations of faculty who accede to the requests to drop off a doctoral advisory committee are lessened only in departments where the culture puts faculty before students and faculty focus on self over service. Sometimes in life when we care we may demonstrate the genuineness of our concern by wisely letting go when we are asked to do so.