MR. TOBIN: Hi. The other night Brian Junker and I were chatting and he told me something kind of amazing to me.

He is from Pennsylvania and he says, in Pennsylvania you have to buy wine at one store, but like alcohol at other stores, and neither of those is a food store.

MR. JUNKER: Wine and hard liquor at the state store, and beer has its own beer distributor.

MR. TOBIN: I will come back to that one later. I am not a scholar of higher education. I am an early childhood ed person.

So, I am speaking here as a practitioner, a practitioner who got a doctorate outside of education and has now been laboring in the fields of the school of education for some years, specifically, running a doctoral program, and more specifically, recently being the program director for a Spencer funded discipline-based scholarship in ed program.

The other day I was overhearing some of my students talking. I heard one of them -- they were talking about going for a Spencer dissertation fellowship at the beginning of class.

They were saying, oh, don't even try. You don't have a shot. Spencer really favors students from outside of colleges of ed. I thought, oh, that is interesting, and we talked about it a bit.

Then I thought I would do some quick research. So, I looked at the 2002 annual report from Spencer. What would you guess?

There were 30 that year, 18 from outside, 12 from inside the college of ed. What does that mean? What would we make of this?

It would be interesting to have some more specific data. First of all, I don't think that the answer is that Spencer is prejudiced. It is even hard to say who we mean by Spencer. It is not one person.

I was thinking, it would be interesting to know, for instance, how evaluators from inside and outside of colleges of education evaluated the candidates.

It would be interesting to know how many applicants came from inside and outside. That would be more important than just knowing the raw figures.

It would even be interesting, wouldn't it, to know evaluators who are located in colleges of ed, how they evaluated proposals from inside and outside?

I can see Susan there looking nervous. I am not actually asking or expecting or even recommending that Spencer would release such statistics. I think there would be some good reasons not to.

I brought this example up, even though I know that it creates some discomfort, precisely to create some of this discomfort, and to get us thinking about what I think are key issues that we have to deal with as we move toward having what I call more permeability between the preparations of scholars of education inside and outside of schools of ed.

By the way, I think it is inevitable that there be this sort of speculating and even fantasizing about the Spencer Foundation.

If you are the biggest funder of education, inevitably people are going to spend a lot of their time imagining what you think and believe.

My father is a psychoanalyst and he used to tell me that his patients inevitably have fantasies about him, and I think that is true for Spencer, too.

We are not your patients, but your would-be clients. If you have questions specifically about whether your fantasies are true, we have both the past and current directors of Spencer here, too, I believe, and two of the program officers.

Okay, what are the points of what I introduced, more specifically? It is this. I want to introduce these key issues.

I think that the key issue of trying to get some kind of a synthesis or connection between preparation of scholars of ed inside and outside ed schools is more daunting than the situation David Labaree discussed, which had to do with how students within a college of ed would fuse their practice with theory.

It is more daunting, I think, than Margaret Eisenhart's situation, which is just dealing with faculty who are recalcitrant, but all within one unit, with one dean who can ride roughshod on them.

This is tougher, because the key players are not all located under one administrator, or even at the same table to talk.

In the Spencer dissertation scholarship example we have some of the key points I want to stress. One is that it shows that the scholars in education come from both sides, that is, from both inside and outside.

In a sense, I don't think it is useful to be arguing about which are better. The point is, we need both, and I think most, if not all, reasonable people would argue that we really want the best possible people we can get from inside and outside working on these problems.

The second part of that example is that there are status tensions that complicate creating more connections. David Labaree said we already know this. Yes, we do, but to overcome the problems I think we need to talk more openly and with less fear about saying, in what ways are students better and worse from different kinds of backgrounds.

Third, I think I want to point out that something like the Spencer dissertation program is very rare. It is one of the few sites, within this larger world of studies of education, where people from outside and inside actually come together, and I am thinking both of the evaluators who come together and the students.

They come together, first, virtually through competing for the same grant, which forces them to think, well, I wonder, if I am from outside of ed, I wonder what the ed students can put into their proposal that I don't have. Maybe I had better learn more about ed.

The students inside ed have to think, I had better strengthen some of my disciplinary foundation, because some of those evaluators that Spencer uses aren't my usual college of ed faculty. I think it is rare that we have one program or one site where we get these parties at the same table.

My thesis is, as you can see already, I guess, that the preparation of educational researchers will be improved by greater permeability between the schools of ed and the disciplines. Each needs to be more permeable to the other.

I am arguing, then, that young scholars in colleges of ed need even more disciplinary grounding than I think they already have, and that scholars outside of education, who anticipate a career in doing educational research need to have earlier contact with education, so that they don't become the colonizing soldiers that David referred to who, for instance, become an economist and then drop in on the field way after they completed their training.

Next section, why doesn't this happen? I think the main problems are that, as Margaret indicated, universities are creatures of habit and traditions. Even the geography of universities keeps us apart.

Colleges of ed are either in the middle of the campus in the old normal school, or they are on the wrong side of University Avenue, but often they are far removed from the units they should be dealing with.

I think another big problem is that colleges of education are curious creatures because they were designed to be sort of self sufficient.

They replicate the whole university in microcosm. So, why do they need to be talking to sociology or philosophy when they have their own sociologists and philosophers and anthropologists, and even lawyers and economists within their very ranks.

I think there is a good reason why this happened, but I think, in an odd way, that doesn't make it easier but makes it harder to build connections.

It is hard enough for the curriculum instruction guys to go over to the ed psych department, much less to the psych department, and it is hard for the ed psych people to go over and talk to their colleagues in psychology.

On the other hand, disciplines have their own problems, including prejudice against education. A doctoral student in psychology, who came into our program, told me that he did so with some trepidation, because one of his advisors in psychology said, the closer you get to ed, the more problems you are going to have in your career. Education is a career breaker.

I said, what do you mean? He said, well, if you are an economist or an anthropologist or a psychologist who gets too close to education, you end up getting contaminated or off the fast track, which is, I think, an interesting perspective.

I have heard this from faculty as well, who we try to recruit from other departments, and they do so with some fear that it may rub off on them.

Next section, discipline based scholarship in ed. There is a real exciting new thing going on. Spencer is now funding something called discipline based scholarship in education.

There are five schools, the graduate school of the City University of New York, Brandeis, Duke, Indiana and Arizona State University.

In a sense, I think these are experiments, I guess it is not random or controlled, but it is an experiment. I am not going to tell you about all of them. Each is different, but they have to do with creating some incentives and the possibility for having different kinds of conversations between and across disciplines than we often have.

These include, in some of the programs, between schools of ed and disciplines outside. Here is quickly what we do at ASU.

We already have some good relationships in math, language art and science ed, where we have faculty who already are split. Some of them are in math ed and some in the math department, and they work together on the preparation of researchers in math education. So, we didn't do those areas.

We took three areas where we have some strength, but we didn't have enough going on collaboratively. The walls between the school of ed and the disciplines were too high.

One was linguistics and bilingualism. We are strong on bilingualism, but the bilingual people in the college of ed weren't really doing as much as they should with linguistics people across campus.

The second is social and emotional development across the life span, where we put together ed psych faculty who work on those questions with people outside in psychology mostly, but also in family studies and some other programs.

Third is equity social justice in education, and we bring together our faculty and social foundations with anthropology, sociology, justice studies, women studies, Latino and Latina studies, and the Center for American Indian ed.

The key to our program is this. We want to create opportunities for people to have conversations and meet different people than they would otherwise.

So, we begin by having 40 students in the fall semester in three seminars, each of these three clusters I described, spend a semester being team taught by faculty who are from one inside and one outside, and then they bring in guest speakers also from inside and outside.

So, you have a different conversation -- these are second and third year doctoral students -- than they would have otherwise.

We then take a smaller group and we put together a group of 15 students, half inside, half outside, the school of ed, to work together on their dissertation proposals.

I think here they have a profound effect on the kind of proposals that they do. They are writing these proposals with feedback from faculty, and especially from other students from inside and outside.

Then, the ones who get the fellowships, we have 10 first cohort students who are not ASU Spencer Foundation scholarship in ed fellows.

We have them, in the year they are doing their dissertation writing, continuing to come back and talk about how it is going.

So, you see the idea, then, over these two years that these students participate, we will have brought together not just the students, but their mentors, in ways that wouldn't have happened otherwise.

Is it going well? I think it is going very well, in that we are having new kinds of experiences, and I think students will do different dissertations than they would have done otherwise.

I hope they will end up having different kinds of careers than they would have otherwise, but we don't have data on that yet.

I think what I just described -- and the other schools are doing similarly exciting things -- it is necessary but not sufficient to make a big difference.

I am not even sure that this is going to end up making a lasting difference at ASU, because there is always the problem that, after the money runs out and the excitement of Spencer or Carnegie's backing goes away, what will be left.

So, I am concerned. Let me go back, then, to the alcohol and Pennsylvania problem. There was a point.

I think we could probably imagine good, historical reasons why it is that way. We could probably also think about all the different kinds of interests that are being served right now by that peculiar way of buying alcohol in Pennsylvania.

We could probably also agree that it would be a pretty odd way to create a system for purchasing alcohol and food.

I think we have sort of the same dilemma here. We could think of good reasons why the colleges of ed and the disciplines are separate, and we could see all sorts of people who are benefitting by the current structure, and who would be distressed by having to come together.

If you want to have a party in Pennsylvania and you want to serve different kinds of drink and food, you have a problem, and I am suggesting we have sort of a similar problem.

I am not suggesting that we get rid of colleges of ed. I don't think, for some of the reasons mentioned, that that is the way to go.

I think we have to create much more permeability and getting people thinking much more creatively about people in ed not being afraid to go outside, not being afraid that they will end up being accused of being inferior.

People outside, we have to think about how we get them to be less concerned about the stain of education rubbing off on them.

Here are a couple of practical ideas, for instance. One would be that we require for our doctoral students in education that they have a cognate or a minor. Some schools have this and some don't, but the cognate or minor, minimally, would be in another specialization or subdiscipline within the college of ed, but maybe we should be more ambitious and require that all of our students have a cognate or minor outside the college of education. I think that, for a start, would make a big difference. This would be, what, three to five courses, something like that?

Number two, for students outside of colleges of ed, who are thinking about becoming researchers in education, I think they should have a minor or cognate in ed. I think that would be harder to achieve.

Maybe more useful would be we could set up a certificate program, so that people could take a block of courses within the college of education, who are outside, and get a certificate.

Is that worth anything? Well, it could be. For instance, many of these people, some of them are going to end up being employed in colleges of ed, as I ended up coming from outside to inside.

Maybe we could put in our ads in the future as a desirable qualification that, if we are going to hire people from outside, that they show they have had some engagement, maybe even a certificate.

We need to obtain something much more radical, which is really thinking about, not blowing colleges and schools of education, and not getting rid of them altogether, but substantially restructuring them.

I think that, as we discussed before, the teacher ed function is a different problem, but we can think about how the preparation of researcher problem be separated somewhat from the teacher ed problem, and we think of creating some kind of new research training units that would be more truly interdisciplinary and more permeable, and contain joint appointments, and common experiences for students and faculty inside, as well as outside.

Will this come? I am not very optimistic. I don't see many incentives. You know, meanwhile, we are hoping that Spencer is even going to renew us for another year.

I am even wondering like how much of it will be sustained after three years of funding. In a sense, we are hoping the stock market goes up so Spencer's portfolio is big enough so we have a better chance of getting more money.

That is this kind of fantasizing about winning the lottery kind of approach, and I don't think that is really the solution.

I think we really have to think that, without even getting paid to do so, how can we create the kind of energy and pressures within our own units, and across the university so that we could really be even more imaginative about creating a more adequate system. Thanks.

[Applause.]