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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.

Reviews

“This volume, a lucid and compelling account of Fielding Graduate University, offers a valuable mirror, lens, and window on the experiences of a pioneering institution. At a time when many educators are rethinking doctoral education for the 21st century, this volume is an important contribution to the future of graduate education.” — George E. Walker, Director, Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate.

“This well written and insightful case study of the evolution of Fielding Graduate University takes us on a journey into the thinking and values of the Institute’s visionary founders, and the challenges they and the others who joined their dream faced. This story allows us to see the difficult reality of innovative programs as they evolve and grow, as new people join its faculty and leadership, as accreditation was gained and federal guidelines changed – in brief, what happened as Fielding evolved from a small community into a fiscally and educationally viable institution, and at each step struggled to stay true to its founding values and its educational soul. As one of the academic leaders who helped to create another innovative doctoral program with similar educational and social values, I can attest that Fielding’s model was very important in our planning at the turn of the 21st century. While the Fielding program is relatively small, it has had a large impact on graduate education.” — Alan E. Guskin, Distinguished University Professor, PhD Program in Leadership and Change and University President Emeritus, Antioch University

“Several decades before the current sea changes in higher education, Fielding Graduate University was a pioneer in developing a radically new approach to graduate education for mid-career adults. Ever since, Fielding has been recognized as a rigorous and innovative scholar-practitioner program that emphasizes real-world problem-solving. This vivid and engaging chronicle tells the story of an upstart institution that challenged the tradition-bound world of higher education, and has been an influential catalyst for change.” — Michael Goldstein, co-chair of the Higher Education practice, Cooley LLP

About the Author

Keith Melville, Ph.D.

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.

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