Getting Grad Student Voices into the National Conversation

Fordham's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences sponsors an innovative and distinctive Fellowship in Higher Education Leadership that provides graduate students with a two-year experience working alongside the university's senior administrators such as GSAS Dean (and Fordham English faculty member) Eva Badowska, who created the program. 

James Van Wyck

English PhD student James M. Van Wyck has been one of GSAS's first such fellows, and last year he helped to create GSAS Futures, a series of professional development and career-programming events. This year he is working on the curriculum of a Preparing Future Faculty program for Fordham graduate students, as well as on a program titled Public Scholarship for the Common Good. 

Van Wyck has co-authored an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education with his fellow fellow (so to speak), Philosophy PhD student Joseph M. Vukov. "Give Us a Voice in Our Own Future" does more than describe the GSAS program and emphasize its uniqueness (they describe being the only graduate students in the room at meetings of Fordham's Task Force on the Future of Higher Education, at a university reaccreditation meeting, and at a discussion of the Council of Graduate Schools). Their article also issues a ringing call for graduate education across the country to incorporate graduate student voices into the ongoing discussion about the future of graduate education in the United States and beyond. Read it to see where that discussion is going, and to see how Fordham is helping to push that discussion forward.