This book tells the story of Fielding Graduate University, an institution that started a radically innovative doctoral program in the 1970s, and initiated many changes that have been widely adopted ever since. Fielding's founders, a colorful group of publicly engaged scholar-practitioners, were visionaries intent on creating a new kind of educational experience for adults. They were utopians who set out to realize a mission of social change and comprehensive institutional innovation. Now that the learning model of this pioneering program has moved into the mainstream of higher education, Fielding's story is particularly pertinent today. Increasingly, questions are being raised about how doctoral education should be delivered, and whether traditional programs are equipping their graduates with the knowledge and competencies they need to succeed. Fielding's experience, which is vividly captured in this highly readable account, offers a lens and a mirror for many people in higher learning who are engaged in institutional innovation and in redesigning doctoral education for the 21st century.
About the Author: A Ph.D. sociologist who graduated from Columbia University, Keith Melville has been a faculty member at the Fielding Graduate University since 1983. He has also worked in the nonprofit and public policy world in senior editorial and administrative roles and as a consultant to several foundations and government agencies. Throughout his career, his main interests have been in the areas of public policy, higher education, and the uses of social science research. In recent years, he has written about the progressive tradition in higher education, education for civic literacy and democratic life, and competency development in higher education. In the 1970s, he worked in the White House, where he was a writer and staff member for the President's Commission for a National Agenda for the 1980s. Subsequently, he worked at the Public Agenda Foundation in New York, founded by former Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and pollster Daniel Yankelovich, where he was senior vice president. Since leaving Public Agenda, he has worked with the Kettering Foundation, where he is a senior associate. As a writer and general editor, Keith Melville has a long list of publications, including trade books, college-level text books, journal articles, and book chapters. He was a contributing writer for the New York Academy of Science's magazine, The Sciences. His first trade book, Communes in the Counter Culture was a featured selection of the Book of the Month Club. He is the author of a college-level textbook, Marriage and Family Today, which in the course of four editions was a leading text in that field. For fourteen years, he was executive editor of the National Issues Forums. In that position, he was senior writer of a series of magazine-length publications on major public issues. He has also written several dozen reports for foundations, including a report on the high school dropout problem for the Pew Charitable Trusts, The School Dropout Crisis; a chapter in The Deliberative Democracy Handbook (Jossey-Bass, 2006), and several dozen other articles and book chapters.