Collaborative Futures: Critical Reflections on Publicly Active Graduate Education

Collaborative Futures places graduate education at the center of ongoing efforts to legitimize publicly engaged scholarship within the academic profession. It is indispensable reading not only for graduate students seeking inspiration, resources, and usable frameworks for their engaged scholarship, but for the faculty who are called upon to mentor them, and for university administrators seeking encouraging answers to questions about the future of graduate education.

Against the common perception of American higher education as a disconnected and elitist Ivory Tower, groups like Campus Compact and Imagining America have emerge to lead a national movement reconnecting universities with their local communities and the larger society. At the same time, given the erosion of the tenure system and the casualization of teaching labor, graduate programs and professional organizations in many fields now recognize the imperative to prepare doctoral students for careers wholly or partially outside academe. This book powerfully indicates both the need and the means to change institutional cultures and forge a publicly active path for graduate education.

The volume brings together foundational documents in public scholarship (Ernest Boyer, the Kellogg Commission), critical essays by key figures in the public scholarship movement (Jan Cohen-Cruz, George Sanchez), and original contributions published here for the first time. Many of the latter are the work of current graduate students and address their specific situations, perspectives, and emergent concerns, such as the need university-community partnerships during and after graduate school.

Topics include:

public scholarship and academic freedom

the engaged dissertation

the historical roots of public scholarship

mentoring the engaged graduate student

career trajectories of the public scholar

graduate education and radical politics

sustaining university-community partnerships

public scholarship on/as art