Council seeks to improve graduate education

Since taking office last year, President Larry Bacow has made tying the schools together one of his top priorities. As part of this effort, the Council on Graduate Education has worked to increase ties between the different graduate schools and concentrate resources in signature programs since its inception last year.

The Council, which consists of one faculty representative from each graduate school, has already achieved productive results, according to its chair, Chemistry Professor David Walt.

"We attempted to identify research strengths that crossed the boundaries of individual schools," Walt said.

Bacow created the Council last year in order to "strengthen graduate education through a multi-school initiative." He expects the Council to generate ideas that will improve the graduate experience and gain support for these initiatives.

"We want to knit [the graduate schools] together much more closely," Bacow said.

As it stands now, Bacow says there are not enough opportunities for collaboration between the graduate and undergraduate schools. One of his goals is to make "it more seamless for undergraduates to capitalize on graduate programs," he said. "For talented undergraduates who are in the later stages of their educational career, there ought to be opportunities for them to pursue their interests by taking graduate courses."

The Council wants to change the mindset of undergraduates by spreading awareness of Tufts' graduate schools. "By strengthening graduate education, this will have a positive impact on how undergrads perceive graduate students on campus and the quality of research," Walt said.

The first step to graduate school integration, according to Walt, is examining the programs from within. The focus of the Council this year is to define the strengths of each school and create standards that apply to the entire graduate program.

"Right now, requirements are department specific," Walt said. "There aren't any University standards."

While undergraduate standards for academics are fairly uniform, graduate standards are fragmented between programs. For example, the Council decided that the various mentoring programs that are open to graduate students needed University-wide standards.

Bacow appointed Walt as Chair before the Fall 2001 semester. "It was through mutual discussion that we both agreed it was important to look at graduate education," Walt said. "The University had achieved a high reputation with respect to undergraduate programs."

One problem for many graduate programs is their small size. Schools have suffered from an abundance of "catalog programs," which help to attract students but suffer from lack of funding and competition from larger programs. Yet the Council sees the size of schools at Tufts as a strategic advantage in creating "signature programs" _ programs unique to the University that more resources could be focused on.

The Provost's report on graduate programs last year recommended "the creation of a University-wide entity that would coordinate graduate education," Bacow said. Related courses of study between schools _ like Biology at the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences and Bio-terrorism at the Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy _ are a stepping stone to bring the schools together, he said.

At one of the Council's meetings, the entire graduate student body was invited to discuss their concerns, such as housing and stipends for graduate students. The Council has presented the results of this meeting in a consensus document, which is available online.