When Professor Carl Kaestle interviewed at Brown eight years ago, he was wary of the undergraduate Education Studies concentration. At his previous institution, the education department prepared students to become certified teachers, and every faculty member could count on having several graduate research assistants. Things were very different at Brown, where teacher certification isn't a standard component of the concentration and where professors don't have a squadron of grad students supporting their research.
Kaestle found - as I did as an education concentrator - that because its professors spend most of their time teaching undergraduates, the department is a vibrant a part of Brown's liberal education. Even though the department houses one of the largest advanced degree programs at the University - the Masters of Arts in Teaching program - the professors invite their undergraduate students over for dinner, involve them in the faculty hiring process and help them find jobs and research opportunities.
Professor Kaestle has been a member of the education department for eight years, where he conducts some funded research with graduate students but enjoys teaching his seminars and lecture courses to undergraduates. As he told senior education concentrators, "I don't miss the grad students at all."
At his interview, Kaestle was told, "You don't come to this department to produce people like you. You come here to work with extremely talented young people who are trying to figure out what to do with their lives."
Indeed, it's because students come to Brown not knowing what they want to do with their lives that the school is such an exciting place. This is a place where the same student can be on an athletic team and do advanced research, where someone can work at the Gate and be a teaching assistant, where an undergraduate thesis can turn into a full-time job revolutionizing campus dining, where a group research project can result in the implementation of a completely student-centered curriculum. This is a place where uncertainty about one's future path allows the student to follow multiple paths.
I transferred to Brown from a large state university where it would have been entirely possible for me take rigorous courses, meet engaged students and work closely with tenured faculty members. But it would have been equally possible for me to graduate without any kind of unifying academic experience, to have selected a major where I could take only courses taught by graduate students, to have moved off campus for my sophomore year and never have participated in the life of the university again.
At Brown, I helped put out every single issue of The Herald for an entire year. I fellowed first-year students through their first research papers. I ruined a pair of jeans while gardening in Philadelphia during a breaks project. I sipped wine while enjoying my classmates' art. I went to a Passover seder - subsidized by the University - with students who had never been to one before. I wrote a thesis about my school's history.
Would all of this be possible as a student at a sprawling, Harvard-like university? Certainly. Would I feel like my experience was the kind that my school expected for its students? Probably not.
It's clear in reading the Plan for Academic Enrichment and listening to administrators that the senior administration has made strengthening the Graduate School its highest priority. "Without question, that's the message from the senior administration, that's the direction they want to go," a University professor told The Herald. And in the section of the plan titled "Faculty Excellence in Teaching and Research," there's a subsection committing the University to "provide increased support for faculty research activities" but no cognate for improving the craft of teaching on campus.
Improving and expanding the grad school will likely have some positive impact on the undergraduate education available at Brown. More money for research could trickle down to undergrads, and there will be bigger names strolling the campus, so students in the future will be able to rival their high school classmates' stories of random encounters with Nobel laureates.
Since 1764, Brown has prided itself on being a teaching university, and I am confident the University will never sacrifice its undergraduate soul to become a big, money-making, pre-professional institution.
But as with anything at Brown, expanding the grad school represents a choice. By diminishing the ratio of undergraduate to graduate students, it's possible that the strong undergraduate program that makes Brown special could erode.
I would love to come back to Brown and see both the best college and the best university in the country.
But if I come back to campus for my 25th reunion and hear members of the Class of 2030 talk about their dedicated but perhaps lesser known professors, see that my donations have contributed to undergraduate education and experience the vibrancy of undiluted undergraduate student life, I will be more than happy.
And I won't miss the grad students at all.
Philissa Cramer '05 was a Herald executive editor.
