Julie Posselt

Disciplinary societies have convening power and are well-positioned to influence culture within their fields. One way they do so is through statements issued following social crises. In this interpretive content analysis, we explored and categorized rhetorical strategies that six STEM disciplinary societies used in statements written in association with three major events: the COVID pandemic, Black Lives Matter movement, and US Supreme Court decision in Students for Fair Admissions . We found four patterns in societies’ rhetorical appeals, used to facilitate sensemaking and legitimate organizational actions. We discuss how crisis communications may help encourage cohesion and motivate cultural change within disciplines.

Though structural barriers to equity in doctoral education vary somewhat by country, discipline, and university, the underlying sociocultural mechanisms of elitism, social closure, and homophily are common refrains. This chapter describes a collaboration between researchers in the United Kingdom and the United States to address these sociocultural barriers through the development and translation of an equity-minded approach to holistic review, piloted and refined in each country through a regional consortium model. Toward an understanding of how admissions policy may meaningfully diffuse across national borders, we outline our work, lessons learned, and preliminary outcomes for partner universities.

Increasing the representation of racially minoritized groups and women in STEM graduate education is insufficient to make STEM fields and academia inclusive and equitable spaces, where all feel supported and thrive. This study was motivated by a phenomenological examination of support for graduate students, focusing on programs that admitted and graduated higher proportions of underrepresented students than their fields. We used negative case analysis to document the interplay of interpersonal and institutional interactions that define what racially/gender minoritized students experience as unsupportive. Guided by an intersectional interpretation of structuration, we uncovered three mechanisms—withholding support, doing racialized and/or gendered harm, and neglecting to take action when students faced known threats/harm—that underlie the unsupportive experiences faced by graduate students of color and women in STEM doctoral education. This typology of unsupportive mechanisms, alongside an understanding of positive types of support, can help practitioners and scholars rethink what constitutes support, moving toward creating equitable and inclusive graduate education.

Despite a growing body of research on the outcomes of holistic admissions and eliminating standardized test score requirements throughout education, few have documented how organizations transition to holistic review. Implementation, however, may help explain variation in impacts of holistic admissions. This article draws upon theories of organizational routines to examine adoption of holistic review in 13 STEM PhD programs from five universities. We conducted 60- to 90-min interviews with admissions leaders, including a COVID-19 transcript review activity. Data reveal change is multilevel, involving new policy/structural, practice/cultural, and cognitive/interpretive routines, which carry promise for disrupting institutionalized inequities where the politics of changing these routines can be managed. We discuss implications for policy, organizational practice, and future research on academic evaluations.

There is growing awareness that established structures of higher education are often predicated on problematic assumptions about merit, excellence, and rigor. Doctoral qualifying exams, for example, are required to advance to candidacy in many Ph.D. programs despite decades of documented concerns about the implications of standard modes for student equity and well-being. As more Ph.D. programs move to reform these exams and candidacy requirements, it is important to understand how Ph.D. programs, as academic organizations, construct the significance of the qualifying exam. A sociocultural lens suggests qualifying exams and the learning that enables their passage are symbolic rituals that move doctoral students from legitimate peripheral participation toward full membership and belonging in academic communities of practice. We conducted a comparative case study to understand how two Ph.D. programs in the physical sciences that have reformed their candidacy requirements—one elite and one middle ranked but striving for respect—constructed the significance and purpose of their qualifying exam and the broader transition to candidacy. Our inquiry included the contexts and mechanisms that mediated student learning. Through interviews with faculty, staff, and students, we found that the Ph.D. programs’ recognition of their status within their respective disciplines emerged as a crucial component in constructions about the significance of exams and candidacy. The middle-ranked Ph.D. program changed the exam and candidacy structure to reflect legitimate practices in their discipline. The elite Ph.D. program created multiple pathways toward candidacy to mitigate long-standing concerns about gender equity and student well-being. Despite the structural changes, the Ph.D. programs left intact cultural understandings of merit, excellence, and rigor that maintain inequity in doctoral socialization. Our findings suggest that researchers and practitioners should pay more attention to designing and implementing structures that facilitate faculty assessments of doctoral student learning.

This paper examines the creation and negotiation of disciplinary culture, through ethnographic fieldwork about socialization in a critical learning environment: scientific fieldwork. Field-based science has received scant research attention relative to its importance as a degree requirement, a professional rite of passage, and a site where sexual harassment and assault are disturbingly commonplace. We conducted a comparative ethnographic case study of two field-based geoscience courses, one each for undergraduate and graduate students. The data include 264 hours of participant-observation and 34 interviews with students and faculty. Three prominent qualities of the culture — eroding temporal and spatial boundaries, navigating challenging conditions, and normalizing alcohol — reflect and/or reinforce disciplinary norms of informality, togetherness, and toughness. We observed these qualities and norms could be leveraged for exclusion or inclusion; they are tools that, together, create a gendered disciplinary culture. Some women resisted the narrow definition of these norms, reframing toughness to include mental toughness, for example. Implications for course design and field leadership, as well as the possibilities and limits of disciplinary cultural change, are discussed.

Additional analysis confirms that GRE-Q and GRE-P scores have limited reliability in predicting Ph.D. completion in physics.