








































© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2009, Unit 6, The Village, 101 Amies Street, London SW11 2JW

[Expo. 3.2 (2009) 149–154] Expositions (print) ISSN 1747-5368  
doi:10.1558/expo.v3i2.149 Expositions (online) ISSN 1747-5376 

Reforming Graduate Science Education: Start in the 
Classroom

JOHANNA L. GUTLERNER

Harvard Medical School

In his New York Times op-ed, Mark Taylor makes some radical suggestions 
for reforming graduate education. Taylor’s suggestions include a restructuring 
of the graduate and undergraduate curricula to make it “cross-disciplinary 
and cross-cultural,” “abolish[ing] permanent departments … and creat[ing] 
problem-focused programs,” “expand[ing] the range of professional options 
for graduate students,” and imposing mandatory retirement and abolishing 
tenure in order to retain researchers and teachers who “continue to evolve and 
remain productive.”

All of these reforms require one key element to make them work: high 
quality and creative teaching. Unfortunately, great teaching is not a top prior-
ity in many graduate science programs, where the emphasis is instead on top-
notch research and the big grant funding that it brings in. Before dismantling 
departments and completely restructuring curricula, we need to make sure 
that we have great teachers and mentors who can engage, excite, and inspire 
students. So I present a different set of proposals from Taylor’s.

Preparing Experts in Science Pedagogy
Inspired classroom instruction and diligent mentoring equip students with 
the skills to think critically and design creative solutions to problems. How-
ever, university teaching in the sciences is of variable quality. In a study of 
why undergraduate students switch out of science majors, 90% of students 
who switched cited poor teaching as a common concern (Seymour 1995, 
200). This is not because of a lack of effort by researchers, but a lack of pre-
paredness. Most faculty members learn to teach on the job. Teaching require-
ments for science graduate students are often minimal and do not afford a real  
opportunity to learn about pedagogy. Other critical skills for future faculty, 
like mentoring, are also learned on the job. Training our graduate students to 
be competent teachers, mentors, and managers will not only prepare future 
professors for these demands, but will also prepare graduate students for jobs 
outside of academia, as these are skills that improve performance in many 
different professional arenas.



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Excellence in teaching and mentoring requires faculty members dedicated 
to science teaching—people who will put as much thought and effort into 
their classroom as their laboratory. Because so many of the current facul-
ty were not trained for these skills and may not enjoy teaching, a solution 
is to create more positions for full-faculty scientist-teachers. Creating such  
positions would free researchers up to spend more time managing their labs 
and so would lead to more grant money. These teaching specialists could 
also team up with science research faculty to create innovative courses that 
emphasize both cutting-edge research and pedagogy. Grants are gradually  
becoming available for scholars of science education, so teaching faculty 
could be expected to bring in some of their own funding. These positions 
need to be developed, and there need to be postdoctoral fellowships where 
Ph.D. bench scientists can gain the necessary skills to fill them.

Hiring teaching faculty would also bring progress in the use of new peda-
gogy. We all know that computerized slide presentation programs, like Pow-
erpoint, have become the standard format in the science lecture hall. Yet 
educational research shows that students learn best when engaged in active 
learning and that passive formats like a traditional slide lecture leave most 
students disengaged after only fifteen minutes (McKeachie and Svinicki, 
2005). There are responsible ways of introducing new technology into the 
classroom, but this should always be done with an effort to assess the benefits 
to teaching and learning.

Creating courses available for distance learners is a necessity at the modern 
university, but designing effective curricula for courses where the students 
and professors are not even in the same classroom presents a whole new set 
of challenges. Taylor suggests that different universities collaborate to teach 
courses, allowing universities to eliminate staff in a subject area and rely on 
faculty members from another institution to teach those classes via the inter-
net. However, effective instruction in these cyber-classrooms requires edu-
cational specialists who can teach faculty to optimize the use of these edu-
cational technologies so that they actually result in a well-educated student. 
This requires rigorous research into the use and content-specific applications 
of these technologies and their effects on the quality of teaching and the  
improvement of student understanding. Such rigorous research requires 
a path for Ph.D.s to become further trained as educators and education  
researchers.

Whereas Taylor suggests tying different universities together, it appears that 
science graduate students would benefit instead from training from other 
schools within the university. Joint degree programs in science and education 



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would create a training path for scientist educators. Such programs would 
not only prepare scholars for the demands of thoughtful and well-executed 
university teaching, but would also prepare Ph.D.s to go on to teaching at 
other levels. The variable quality of science education in K-12 schools has 
been a pressing issue garnering national attention (Committee on Prospering 
in the Global Economy, 2007). Although many science Ph.D.s might like 
to go on to K-12 teaching, the hurdle of pursuing another expensive degree 
is difficult to overcome. Business consulting is a popular career interest for 
new science Ph.D.s, not only because of the salaries, but because the path is 
obvious. Recruiters come to campus and make the opportunities known and 
clear. Becoming an educator in the sciences, especially in K-12, where science 
and math teachers are in such high need, is a much murkier career path.

Preparing Students for the Job Market
Taylor correctly claims that “most graduate students will never hold the kind 
of job for which they are being trained.” In the sciences, there are too many 
graduate students and too few academic positions. Taylor’s proposal is to 
help prepare students for work in fields other than higher education. This 
fix sounds sensible enough, but how do we train graduate students for these 
other kinds of jobs?

Opportunities for science Ph.D. candidates to seek another degree con-
currently, such as an MBA or M.A. in public health, would help prepare 
graduate students for diverse careers. Many medical schools offer such joint 
degrees. These sorts of practical training opportunities should exist for sci-
ence graduate students as well.

Many science Ph.D.s are going on to diverse jobs, such as industry, bio-
technology, engineering, patent law, business consulting, and teaching. These 
are not alternative careers; by numbers, the academic job is the alternative 
career. However, often it is a struggle for students to identify non-academic 
opportunities and figure out how to transition into them. In part, this is  
because many faculty members of graduate programs still regard careers out-
side of academic research as second best, the jobs for graduates who can’t hack 
the academic route of bench science research. It is therefore no wonder that 
many students feel reluctant to discuss these other options with their advi-
sors. The culture of graduate departments in the sciences needs to change to 
reflect the reality of the job market. Advisors need to be dynamic mentors 
and recognize their students’ particular strengths that will serve them in any 
future career.



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Strengthening Interdisciplinary Science Education
Preparing scientists for the future also requires training flexible interdisci-
plinary scientists who will be able to respond not only to the changing mar-
ketplace, but to the changing world and the host of known and unknown 
problems that scientists will encounter in the future. Anticipating Taylor’s 
example of a Program in Water which would bring together scholars from  
diverse disciplines, graduate programs in the sciences are reforming to be 
more interdisciplinary. This is necessary because, as modern scientific knowl-
edge is so broad, no one person can be an expert in all of it. Programs in 
the mind and brain bring together neuroscientists, psychologists, computer 
programmers, and philosophers. Programs in cancer biology bring together 
molecular biologists, virologists, structural biologists, cell biologists, and 
biophysicists. Programs in synthetic biology bring together microbiologists, 
botanists, molecular biologists, engineers, and physicists. These types of con-
sortia are those likeliest to come up with the solutions to the most pressing 
problems that we encounter today, and to those problems of the future that 
we can’t even imagine.

What is typically missing from these interdisciplinary science programs, 
however, is a link to the humanities. With rare exception, these programs do 
not enlist faculty from political science, religion, or the languages. Unfortu-
nately, the sciences are often geographically displaced from the humanities 
on the university campus. The challenges of the future, like water shortages, 
climate change, pandemic illnesses, and mass extinctions, will require crea-
tive scholars to devise solutions. Scientific knowledge alone won’t be enough 
to deal with the range of ethical, political, and economic issues, and it will 
take the synergy of people with diverse expertise to create novel solutions. 
The typical university-sponsored colloquia on these interdisciplinary prob-
lems encourage faculty from various departments to come together, yet often 
for just a day, after which any momentum is lost. Yet dismantling traditional  
departments, as Taylor suggests, seems like too radical a solution. Instead, 
universities should first make a genuine effort to develop interdiscipli-
nary courses that bring together faculty from diverse departments to teach  
approaches to modern problems. Such courses would foster longer-term col-
laborations between faculty with far-ranging specialties and encourage students 
to broaden their thinking to fields outside of their own. Yet effective instruc-
tion in these types of cross-disciplinary courses requires dedicated and creative 
teachers willing to put in the time and energy to learn new material, coordinate 
with faculty outside of their discipline, and create effective new curricula.



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Unlike in the European schools that many modern American universities 
were modeled after, our students are not tracked for science before university. 
Moreover, most undergraduate science majors in the U.S. take a smattering 
of science classes in biology, chemistry, and physics, in addition to classes in 
their specific major. The upshot is that incoming science graduate students 
have diverse backgrounds with very varied knowledge of the basic sciences, 
and often their prior success in the lab is more important in the admission 
decision than their undergraduate coursework. Nonetheless, the quality and 
amount of preliminary course work that is required of incoming graduate 
students in the sciences vary wildly among programs. The nature of the prob-
lems that new scientists will face means, however, that they need some flu-
ency in diverse scientific disciplines. Therefore, programs should offer core 
coursework to make sure that all graduate students have some graduate-level 
interdisciplinary science education before specializing in their small subfield. 
Offering such courses would require bringing together experts in various fields 
who may not be well versed in pedagogy. It makes sense to think, then, that 
faculty specializing in the art and research of teaching and learning should be 
called upon to help facilitate the development of these courses.

Retaining Excellent Teachers and Mentors
Taylor suggests abolishing tenure to encourage researchers and teachers to 
continue to “evolve and remain productive.” Whether tenure is retained or 
replaced by multi-year contracts, retention decisions should seriously take 
into account the teaching and mentoring contributions of teaching and  
research faculty members. It is a myth that a course can be perfected and then 
presented each year without modifications. Content and students change, 
and the instruction and curriculum must adapt with them; this is especially 
true in the sciences. For faculty members to be consistently excellent teachers 
requires constant work and attention. Although teaching is often critical for 
tenure decisions at smaller colleges, many big universities do not really con-
sider teaching in science faculty tenure decisions. Teaching excellence might 
be one category in the tenure decisions, but most tenure committee members 
will readily admit that profitable research trumps bad teaching any day. Hav-
ing faculty lines for scientist-teachers would allow for retention decisions to 
be made on excellence in teaching or research.

Universities are centers for the creation of new knowledge, and much of 
their support comes from grants; therefore the emphasis on high-quality 
fundable research makes sense. However, universities are not just research 



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institutes; they are educational institutions. They have a duty to prepare their 
students with the intellectual and practical skills that will lead to success in 
research and in their careers. Employment in the present and future job mar-
ket requires more specialized training, and thus the university is not at risk of 
losing its consumers. For universities to remain competitive requires that they 
educate well-prepared graduates. This means that exceptional teaching and 
mentoring need to be as much a priority as high quality research.

In sum, Taylor suggests that universities restructure by eliminating depart-
ments in favor of interdisciplinary programs, increasing collaboration between 
universities in order to teach more classes with less staff, increasing professional 
development programming for graduate students to better prepare them for 
the job market, and eliminating tenure in favor of multi-year contracts to  
retain productive teachers and researchers. These are undoubtedly a bold col-
lection of structural reforms. Yet in graduate science education, it is just as 
bold to focus on reforming the basics: outstanding teaching and mentoring.

References

Committee on Prospering in the Global Economy of the 21st Century: An Agenda 
for American Science and Technology, National Academy of Sciences, National 
Academy of Engineering, Institute of Medicine 

2007 Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for 
a Brighter Economic Future. Washington, DC: The National Academies 
Press.

McKeachie, Wilbert J. and Marilla Svinicki
2005 McKeachie’s Teaching Tips: Strategies, Research, and Theory for College and 

University Teachers, 12th ed. Belmont, California: Wadsworth Publishing.

Seymour, Elaine
1995 Guest Comment: Why Undergraduates Leave the Sciences. American 

Journal of Physics 63(3): 199–202. doi:10.1119/1.17954

http://dx.doi.org/10.1119/1.17954

