A task force of 10 faculty members will explore ways to form a more cohesive graduate program at the College, Provost Carolyn Dever announced last week.
Consolidating a school of graduate and advanced studies will not entail increasing the volume or range of graduate programs, Dever said. Nor will it require constructing a new building, dean of graduate studies and task force chair Jon Kull said, noting that changes will be largely administrative.
Dartmouth offers 10 master’s programs and 17 doctorate programs, enrolling 1,044 students in 2013, according to an online graduate studies fact sheet. Its graduate programs are tied to the undergraduate departments, and College President Phil Hanlon introduced the idea of a freestanding graduate school at a general faculty meeting in fall 2013.
The task force will examine how best to separate graduate programs from within undergraduate departments, possibly so they report directly to the provost rather than dean of faculty Michael Mastanduno, as is current practice, Kull said.
Environmental studies professor Ross Virginia, a task force member, said the group will seek to centralize all graduate programs under one administrative umbrella.
“If you want to increase quality and interactions between these different graduate programs, it would be best to have them all under one structure, one dean of graduate studies, so that funds could be expended more efficiently, so that new interdisciplinary programs might spring more naturally because people can interact more directly,” he said.
The task force will meet for the first time on Oct. 17. Kull said he expects the team to meet three times before Thanksgiving and another four times in the winter. The task force will then aim to put together a report by the beginning of spring term that offers a structure for the new school.
The task force is focused on graduate programs outside the Thayer School of Engineering, Tuck School of Business and Geisel School of Medicine, which are already separate.
Ph.D. student Britney Tappen said although the graduate community is included at Dartmouth, it may be overlooked due to the College’s focus on undergraduate teaching.
Ryan Tibble ’14, who is pursuing a master’s degree in chemistry at the College, said he is optimistic but not entirely certain about the potential outcome.
“I think that Dartmouth graduate studies is somewhat overlooked by the greater public, and I think that this task force kind of gives the College the opportunity to really focus in and try to understand what they could do to strengthen graduate studies here,” he said. “Personally I think that it should be a separate entity, but I don’t necessarily think it should be Dartmouth’s focus or its main goal — it’s an integral part of the College, and being separate gives it a little more freedom and a little more flexibility than it currently has.”
Virginia said he hopes that the task force will develop a plan that allows the College to better attract qualified students to its graduate programs.
The task force discussions follow a similar recommendation made during Dartmouth’s strategic planning process begun under former College president Jim Yong Kim. A 29-member working group focused on graduate education, which included faculty and graduate student representatives, met 10 times and invited a consulting group from the National Council on Graduate Schools to draw comparisons with other schools. Among other suggestions, the group recommended that Dartmouth create a central graduate school.
Dever said she hopes improving graduate studies infrastructure will help the College better support its students.
“I hope that we have a robust discussion about the place of graduate education on this amazing campus and I think that involves discussion of the significance of research in the lives of faculty, staff and students — what we mean when we commit ourselves to excellence in teaching and research for the generations ahead,” she said.
