When the Even-Tempered Act

In his new book, Why We're Polarized, Ezra Klein decries the demise of parties and the rise of polarized politics: "Loud gets noticed. Extreme gets noticed. Confrontational gets noticed. Moderate, conciliatory, judicious -- not so much." To the extent Klein is right, the deans of graduate schools in the United States would not succeed in this environment.

For the most part, those of us who have served as graduate deans acknowledge that we are more often the embodiment of even-tempered, some might even say boring, leaders. However, it may also be our typically moderate, judicious and conciliatory approach that positions people like us as innovators in the COVID world. It depends on what counts as innovation.

Research shows that innovation is often less about generating new ideas and more about felling barriers to making ideas already in circulation a reality. In 2018, ideas for innovation in graduate education circulating for decades gained focus and warrant in a report on the future of graduate education authored by a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine committee and chaired by president emeritus of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Alan Leshner. As academic year 2019-20 began, some graduate schools were piloting new approaches across the graduate life cycle: some in onboarding new students, others in curriculum and professional development, still others in imagining new forms of mentoring to ensure good progress through and beyond graduate school. But then the pandemic hit, ushering in the classic conditions favorable to immediate innovation: a sense of urgency to do things differently, including doing things previously viewed as unrealistic, too risky or too difficult, and a willingness to focus on crucial activities while eliminating unnecessary ones.

What do moderate, conciliatory and judicious leaders do in this situation? Graduate deans speaking at the recent Council of Graduate Schools summer workshop about their responses to COVID offered insight. The answer is they innovate! Whether talking about professional development, mentoring training or international students' plight, deans described how they were transforming graduate education from new technology uses to new policies and new processes.

In some cases, the innovation took the form of accelerating or improving an existing program. A dean from Michigan State University described the COVID-triggered evolution of a program to assure excellence in faculty-student mentoring. In December 2019, a graduate school task force reported a thorough review of mentoring at the university that identified some gaps its nationally recognized and highly regarded mentoring training program. The task force called for a greater emphasis on inclusive mentoring as well as embedding effective mentoring more deeply in the university ecosystem. The COVID onslaught placed these thoughtful observations in sharp relief. The intense pressure on individuals ratcheted up by COVID highlighted a mentoring system's weakness when focusing on the dyadic relationship alone. As the associate dean who leads this program indicated, "In the best of times there is a delicate balance between the faculty and the graduate student to achieve good, effective mentoring, but all this goes out the window when people endure the kind of stress that COVID introduced."

Michigan State pivoted quickly to institute elements of the ecosystem called for in the December report. In one initiative, the graduate school convened communities of practice around effective mentoring by conducting training programs with groups of individuals at the college level who would carry that mentoring training to disciplinary groups within departments. In another, they created a group of college liaisons for effective mentoring who will work to help advance good mentoring as a standard expectation for faculty performance. Michigan State had already been thinking about implementing various changes that would redistribute responsibility for effective mentoring, and the stress on the mentoring relationship introduced by COVID made action on this innovation in the system ever more urgent.

Sometimes innovations have been new to the institution. For example, in March, the Cornell University Graduate School's highly regarded writing and publishing workshops for graduate students went remote, and the associate dean directing this effort realized the capacity to enroll interested students was just about unlimited. She promptly reached out to graduate deans from the region she knew were struggling to provide a similar professional development for their students and extended invitations for those graduate schools and their students to join. As a result of Cornell's technology-enabled outreach, students from 25 graduate schools, including some from as far away as Iceland, are strengthening their writing skills and publishing opportunities.

Sometimes the innovations were totally new ideas, approaches that institutions would not have considered at all pre-pandemic. The Global Ambassador Peer Mentor program at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, falls into this category. By early summer, it became apparent that international students residing outside the United States would find it exceedingly difficult to arrive on American campuses by August or September. In response, most universities moved their graduate program curriculum online and registered international students to begin study from their home countries. But, as first-year graduate students know, securing a spot in a class may be the least stressful aspect of the first semester in a graduate program. While remote learning creates mentoring challenges for domestic students, the challenges for newly minted international students, located in their home countries, are enormous.

To meet this challenge, the graduate school, in partnership with the Office of International Education Services and the Division of Professional Studies at UMBC, launched a program pairing U.S.-based international students with newly enrolled students taking classes from abroad. The university hires those Global Ambassador Peer Mentors to help newly enrolled international students negotiate their way through the often challenging first year of graduate study, a challenge magnified by their extremely remote locations.

The Council on Graduate Schools workshop offered a rich set of anecdotes on innovative responses to the difficult disruptions brought on by the pandemic. At NORC, an independent social research organization located at the University of Chicago, we recently completed a national survey under a National Science Foundation RAPID grant to understand better exactly how graduate schools are helping students in programs survive and hopefully thrive, notwithstanding the ravaging impact of COVID-19. At the end of September, we convened over 120 graduate deans, with a few other key stakeholders, to probe and illuminate the preliminary findings. When we finish our report late this year, it will provide a fine-grained understanding of what graduate schools are doing, or not doing, to respond.

However, at this point, we know one thing for sure: promising innovations are underway, facilitated not by the loud, extreme and confrontational but by typically even-tempered graduate deans. When the pandemic softened the barriers to innovation, some graduate schools responded by accelerating and improving existing programs, adopting innovations proven in other institutions and creating entirely new programs. Their innovations could be drawing the silver lining in an otherwise dark sky as the pandemic hovers over our fall term.