Rethinking Doctoral Education with Leonard Cassuto

Doctoral education in the United States works really well... when it works. Many doctoral students experience a significant mismatch between their career goals and the goals of their graduate programs, which is one reason completion rates for doctoral programs are so low.

Why is doctoral education this broken? And what can higher education do about it? Today on the podcast, we hear some answers to those questions from Leonard Cassuto, professor of English at Fordham University and author of the book The New PhD: How to Build a Better Graduate Education with Robert Weisbuch.

I'm joined by special guest interviewer Emily Donahoe, associate director at the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at the University of Mississippi. Emily heads up the center's programs and services for graduate students, and she spends a lot of time in the world of doctoral education.

Episode Resources

Leonard Cassuto’s website, https://www.lcassuto.com/

Len on the Future U podcast, https://www.futureupodcast.com/episodes/the-future-of-the-phd/

Len on the Dead Ideas in Teaching and Learning podcast, https://blubrry.com/dead_ideas/131080109/why-is-there-no-training-on-how-to-teach-graduate-students-with-leonard-cassuto/ 

Emily Donahoe’s Unmaking the Grade blog, https://emilypittsdonahoe.substack.com/

Podcast Links:

Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.

Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe

Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteaching

Find me on LinkedIn and Bluesky.

See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.

Transcript

Derek Bruff (00:05):
Welcome to Intentional Teaching, a podcast aimed at educators to help them develop foundational teaching skills and explore new ideas and teaching. I'm your host, Derek Bruff. I hope this podcast helps you be more intentional in how you teach and in how you develop as a teacher over time. Back in February, 2024, I heard an interview with Leonard Cassuto on the most excellent Future U podcast hosted by Jeff Seingo and Michael Horn. Len Cassuto is a professor of English at Fordham University and a co-author with Robert Weisbuch of The New PhD: How to Build a Better Graduate Education. On the Future U podcast Len offered a cogent critique of American doctoral education saying a lot of things that I would've been hesitant to say out loud on tape. When I heard the interview I thought I'd love to get him on my podcast and ask a few follow-up questions.

(00:58):
As it turns out, I had the chance to interview Len last fall. I don't spend as much time thinking about graduate education as I once did. So I reached out to my University of Mississippi colleague Emily Donahoe to see if she would join me in interviewing Len. Emily, whom listeners might know from our Take It or Leave It podcast panel last summer, is an associate director at the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at the University of Mississippi where she heads up the center's programs and services for graduate students. She spends a lot of time thinking about graduate education at US universities. What I didn't know when I reached out to Emily was that she had also heard Len Cassuto on a podcast, a different podcast, the great Dead Ideas in Teaching and Learning from the Columbia University Center for Teaching and Learning. And Emily also had follow-up questions for Len. She was happy to join me in interviewing Len Cassuto and we had a good time figuring out which of our many questions to ask him. Today I'm excited to share that interview here on the podcast.

(02:00):
Thank you Leonard for coming on Intentional Teaching. I'm very excited to have you here and to talk with you for a little bit. I'm excited to have my co-host Emily here as well. Thanks for being here, Len.

Leonard Cassuto (02:10):
I'm delighted that we could visit this way.

Derek Bruff (02:14):
I'll start with my usual opening question. Can you tell us about a time when you realized you wanted to be an educator?

Leonard Cassuto (02:23):
I can tell you about the time that I decided to become a teacher because educator is a term we learned later, but I wanted to become a teacher when I was in college, and I think this experience is common to a lot of us when we're in college. When we decided to go to graduate school, there was one teacher who I had who projected the experience, not of somebody who was visiting for the day from Mount Olympus and was preparing to take the escalator back up at the end of the day, but somebody who was doing a job and having a great time doing it, that is to say, so I went to a fairly prestigious undergraduate university Columbia, and there was this sense, some of the professors projected that they were going to do their work, they were going to teach their classes, but that didn't mean that they were going to thrill to the work.

(03:24):
But I did have one teacher whose vitality and clear joy in doing that job made me think, Hey, I can do that job too. Maybe not as well as I see her doing it, but I could do it. This is something I can think about. And I know that that was the moment of germination for me. And the teacher, I guess I'm hiding the ball here, it was Ann Douglas who went on. She was already a pretty eminent scholar of American literature. She's gone on to become an even more eminent one. But for me, I remember that the moment in her class just saying, Hey, this person's having fun doing her job, and I can have fun doing that job too. And I got lucky. I got a job and it has been as fun and rewarding as I hoped it would be.

Derek Bruff (04:25):
That is lovely. I was going to ask you, did you actually have fun? But it sounds like yes. Yes. It's good work. It's good work. Emily, I think you have our first question.

Emily Donahoe (04:36):
Yeah. So Lynn, you've argued on other recent podcasts that Derek and I have listened to that doctorate education should be student-centered, career diverse and community engaged. And so I'd love to hear what do you mean by those attributes and why do you think they're important?

Leonard Cassuto (04:55):
Yes. Let's start with the first and most important attributes, student-centeredness. Let me say that graduate school as it is constructed, as it has been run for the last almost century and a half in the United States during that time, it has not changed all that much. It's gotten bigger and it's recognizable to us really in the post-war period. But even in those early days, its form and structure are still recognizable. And this speaks for the inherent conservatism of graduate school, small c conservatism. It also speaks in some ways to its rigidity. We'll get to these things. When graduate school was invented, it was invented as a faculty centered activity. It is still a faculty centered activity. This is the conservatism that I just mentioned. It has not changed very much. And so we can say, okay, it's school. How can it be faculty centered? Well, if you are a scientist, a bench scientist, you won't have too much trouble recognizing the idea that if you're a graduate student in the bench sciences, your dissertation is going to be a subset of your lab director, your advisor, the faculty member's research, it's funded research.

(06:26):
You're in that faculty member's lab, you're going to do work that fits the agenda of the faculty member. It does not get much more faculty centered than that. So on the other hand, you're a humanist. If you're a humanist, you have surely had the experience of sitting in a seminar, probably much more than one that has an invisible subtitle. And that invisible subtitle is my next book or possibly my last book. Either way, whose book are we talking about here? I want to add too that if you're a humanist, you take a series of generally very esoteric seminars in which you learn certainly scholarly methods, but you are researching in a capillary or an offshoot from the mainstream because that's where the professor's interests are. And then after you do this for a couple of years, they say, okay, time for general exams. You're going to have to demonstrate that all the fundamental basics of this field.

(07:38):
And you can say, when the hell was I supposed to have learned these fundamental basics? When was I supposed to have read all of these basic books that I'm now being held responsible for? And the answer is, well, I guess you'd better get to your studying now because that's what you have to do right now. So that's a humanistic example of how graduate school is about the faculty's concerns and not the students' concerns. Now, you can tell from the way that I'm telling this story that I don't think that this was very sustainable at any point as a way of educating, except that it has sustained itself. It's sustained itself because of the inherent conservatism of the institution. I don't think it's particularly tenable now, it's particularly untenable because graduate student outcomes are so highly varied. There is an example at the beginning of my last book, the new PhD, in which my co-author, Bob Weisbuch and I, we talk about a hypothetical cohort of eight students who are sitting at a seminar table waiting for their graduate education to begin on the first day.

(08:54):
And they're all raring to go. And most of them had an experience, something like the one I described myself having where you're inspired by a teacher and you want to go to graduate school. And so you go because you want to be some version of that teacher. And there's nothing wrong with that idea, but the problems come with what are you going to do about teaching those students against the reality of their outcomes? And the reality of their outcomes are that half of them are not going to finish the PhD on average. Now, 50% attrition is a pretty disturbing figure for any workplace to confront, and that is its own ethical problem. But let's skip it for now because we have some bigger ethical problems that we need to consider. So out of those four who do finish out of our original cohort of eight, about half of them, according to pre covid figures, post covid figures are likely to be worse.

(09:55):
About half of them, two of them will get some kind of academic job. I'm not going to say professor, because professorships are becoming increasingly thinner on the ground. But two out of those four are going to get some kind of academic job. The other two will find some kind of work outside of the academy. Out of those two, less than one of those two is going to get a research centered job that is something like the job of the teacher who's going to come in and greet that cohort on their first day of graduate school at their research university. And yet the curriculum of graduate school is overwhelmingly shaped to meet the needs of that less than one person who's going to go on to a research first job. So this is a deplorable disjunction between intention and reality that if 75% of your students in your cohort are not going to become academics, then why not make graduate school into an activity that can benefit them as well as the ones who do go into academics? And of the ones who do become academics, let's consider how numerically rare research first jobs are compared to teaching first jobs.

Derek Bruff (11:26):
Let me jump in and relate one de-identified anecdote. I was talking to a department chair several years ago. I'll say it's a STEM department, I'll narrow it down that much. And I said, what are your goals for your graduate programs, your PhD programs? And the chair said, oh, we want to get our students into the top 25 research universities in our field. I said, well, how are you doing with those goals? Oh, we're not getting any. And I thought that's a problem.

Emily Donahoe (11:57):
Lemme relate a fully identified anecdote, which is just that the description of graduate programs that you just laid out resonates so much with my own experience in graduate school and I had a good program and I had fairly good outcomes and I am in a good place. But even still, a lot of people did not make it to those academic jobs that we were all trained for. And the seminars that you described are exactly like the seminars that I took as a student.

Leonard Cassuto (12:26):
It's horrendous on one level. That is you're not teaching to your students outcomes. Now, that doesn't mean that we should be in the words of critics diluting the discipline and teaching vocational skills and other apocalyptic horrors, but rather that if you consider where your students are going to wind up, we can contour what we do so that they learn skills that will help them when they seek the jobs that they are going to wind up with most of them. And again, that doesn't mean that English teachers all have to teach writing that all the seminars in an English department need to be about writing because that's the takeaway skill instead. An example is that in the humanities, collaboration is rarely taught because the model is of a solitary scholar working in the attic until he emerges pale from lack of sunlight with a manuscript in his arms that is ready for the printer.

(13:43):
And anybody who writes knows that this is not a particularly accurate picture of what goes on writing is collaborative. Although one person is taking more responsibility for the final product, usually the collaborators, but humanists don't collaborate that much. Now in certain workplaces, collaboration is valued. So how might we teach humanities courses with a more collaborative component? It's easy to imagine ways to do this that aren't going to have us reading fewer books or spending less time talking about the culture of the Renaissance or something like that. Instead, it's a skill centered approach that still honors the so-called content of the discipline. And I say so-called because skills and content are really not separable and that when we teach skills, we are teaching content and vice versa. And there needs be more of a recognition of that, particularly in the humanities. But more to the point, there needs to be a recognition that our students are not going to wind up in a fantasy world where they're all at research universities teaching students who are themselves and telling each one of them how valuable it was to have you as a professor who helped to create them as a mini me that this mini me ideology is something that we've got to do something about.

(15:24):
And that goes, so you see how in talking about student-centeredness, we've addressed the other two of the elements, the career diversity, because that's real, whether we support it or not, our students are going on to diverse careers and if we support it, then we make graduate school into a more productive and constructive experience for them. And the idea of being public facing, community engaged, well, they're going to be out in the community. Therefore we need to be conscious of where they're going and we need to engage on that level too. And I want to add also as something that's not exactly just a tagline, but something that's also important that if we do those three things, student-centeredness, career diversity and public facing this, if we reinvent graduate school to do those things, then graduate school is also going to become more like America. It's going to look more like America because students from underrepresented groups are particularly concerned about engaging with their communities that the data tells us this. And so if we acknowledge this, then graduate school can diversify us in ways that are in racially, ethnically, socioeconomically, all of these ways that will make it make the society of graduate education more valuable to everybody who's in it.

Derek Bruff (17:02):
Yeah. I'm thinking of some examples of undergraduate engineering programs that built community engagement in the first year service learning types of projects and how those programs have seen much more success from women in engineering, from underrepresented minorities in engineering. And it's easy to imagine that more public facing community engaged graduate work would have similar success.

Leonard Cassuto (17:29):
Absolutely. And you could say, well, why don't we do this? Well, now we get to questions of values that I get. It has often been said by me that I get more credit for writing an article about teaching than I do for doing it, and the value system rewards me for doing research and publication. And so if we talk about how are we going to re-engineer graduate school so that it's more sensitive to the needs of the people who are actually in graduate school, we have to confront the fact that the considerable time and effort that is required to do this is not rewarded in the workplace. So it's a distorted sense of values graduate education.

Derek Bruff (18:27):
So Len, you mentioned a little bit about the conservatism of American higher education, especially research universities. I went back and checked on some old notes of mine. There was something called the Re-envisioning the PhD Project sponsored by the Pew Charitable Trusts. They reviewed doctoral studies, national studies on doctoral education, and they argued for what I think you would call at least the student-centered career, diverse parts of your three parts. That was 2001. There was the Preparing Future Faculty Project, which supported 45 doctoral institutions in preparing students for diverse academic careers, which is not the full array, but at least more than just the professor jobs. That started in 93. Why are we still talking about this?

Leonard Cassuto (19:16):
Yes, there is a chapter in the new PhD, the book that Bob Weisbuch and I published in 2021 that covers a whole litany of failed initiatives including some of the ones you mentioned and a whole bunch more too. And so why are we still talking about that? Indeed, an excellent question, and I think one of the reasons is that there is a consistent disjunction between the work we believe we're doing and a thoughtful consideration of who we're doing it for and what their needs are. My new book is called Academic Writing is If Readers Matter, and it is contiguous with all of the reform work that we've been discussing and the need for reform because it's the same thing. Anybody who's been in academia knows that there's a lot of really dreadful academic writing that's out there, and something that's common to almost all of it is that it ignores the needs and desires of the people who would read it that.

(20:24):
Now there are all kinds of reasons for it, but mostly academic writers are not taught to take care of their readers just as graduate school teachers are not taught to take care of their students. When I was in graduate school, the prevailing value was you don't exist until you're on paper. And when you're on paper, we'll tell you whether it's good or not, and one of your jobs is to go ahead and get yourself an education. We'll help you if it suits us. I went to a fancy graduate school and I really enjoyed my time in graduate school chiefly because I spent a lot of that time teaching, but I was poorly professionalized, partly because no one really asked me what my needs were or took time to sit down with me, to figure out with me how I could go about fulfilling them. I had to take a lot of wild guesses.

(21:25):
So I've written two books about this, the graduate school piece of this, The Graduate School Mess, and The New PhD, and this new book, Academic Writing as if readers Matter is widening the field because really all of academia is afflicted by this lack of concern for audience, for the needs of the people who would be engaging with the work that we do. We need to pay more attention to this if only because it's a matter of ethics. Academia is a caretaking culture, but we too often abjure the caretaking aspect of it, particularly as you go higher and higher up the food chain and get into the world of research universities.

Emily Donahoe (22:15):
Speaking of writing and audience and professionalization, I have a really practical question, which is what does a dissertation look like in a student-centered career, diverse community engaged doctoral program? What do the curriculum and comprehensive exams look like? What are the kind of practical pieces of what students are doing in these programs if it were to be a truly student-centered doctoral program?

Leonard Cassuto (22:39):
So you are talking about the way that everything connects and in a truly student-centered graduate education, there's unity and there's coherence, and there's a transparency of purpose. Now, your first question was about the dissertation. Well, many students are going to write dissertations that look a lot like dissertations that people have been writing for a long time. But if you have a student whose particular interests lead them to pursue an outcome which the student and her advisors have already identified, then we ask, how can the dissertation project best support this outcome? For example, let's say that a political science graduate student is saying, okay, I want to be an academic, but I also think I might want to work in government. Or maybe the student is saying, I'm not that interested in academia. I've been here a couple of years and I know that I want to get a PhD, but the professor's life is not as interesting to me as it seemed when I first got here.

(23:43):
And remember how taboo it is to say this in graduate school, but in student-centered graduate school, it's less taboo because we're conducting a thought experiment. So in this thought experiment, the student is saying, well, I think I might like a job in government better. So in a student-centered graduate program, the student's committee sits down with her and says, okay, what kind of dissertation can we design for you that's going to maximize your chances of reaching the outcome or outcomes or competing for those outcomes that you want? How can we make this project into a culmination of your education instead of simply trying to ram you into a procurian mold of what that's based on what has been happening all along. The similarly, you asked about courses and comprehensives. Well, in a student-centered graduate program, the comprehensives are an organic outgrowth, both of the coursework that came before and of the dissertation that's going to come after.

(24:54):
So perhaps the comprehensive examination, maybe it's not gasp an oral because oh my goodness, we've been doing oral. Well, we have to do an oral. Why do we have to do an oral? Well, because we've always done one. Well, there was a time when there were no comprehensive exams, and if you're a historian of institutional structures like I've become, I will tell you that before about the thirties, there were no comprehensive exams because there were so few graduate students, you didn't need them. Comprehensive exams were invented as a way of bureaucratizing a system that was becoming too large to run on a purely retail personal level. So it was a rational response, but it was a response to a felt need. Once graduate school institutionalizes a practice though, it stays there and people stop asking why it is that we're doing this? And when practices get enshrined in this way, as they so often are in academia and we stop asking why, then we deprive ourselves of the chance to surface and examine our assumptions. We don't have to change them, but we need to examine them regularly to make sure that they still reflect the realities of the world that they were designed to address. And student-centered graduate school does that. It can do it in lots of different ways, but predominantly it does that it's reality centered. And right now too much of graduate education in the United States is fantasy centered.

Derek Bruff (26:39):
Well, if I'm a research faculty member and I have come up through this system which is finely tuned to produce people like me, how do I go about preparing graduate students for careers that are not like mine? I feel like am I even the right person to do that? It's asking me to prepare students for careers that I've never experienced myself

Leonard Cassuto (27:08):
A fine FAQ that No, the only time I ever spent not pursuing a career in scholarship was the summer I spent flipping burgers when I was 17. So how the hell do I know how to do it? Well, there are two possible answers to this, and one of them is snarky. The snarky one is you sit in the place you're sitting in because you're a professional learner, because you're really good at learning. In fact, that is what academics have in common across fields, and you're telling me you can't learn how to do this. So that's the snarky answer, but a more practical answer acknowledges the fact that the time that the professor has to spend learning this more expansive version of graduate teaching or helping students seek diverse outcomes is, as I said, it's not part of our value system to reward this. And until we start, until we change our value system, we need to acknowledge the fact that you're asking somebody to act that in a way that's not in his own specific interest.

(28:22):
So fortunately, we have offices of career services who have graduate career specialists in them. And so the answer is that if you're running a graduate program, you bring those career service specialists, those graduate career service specialists into the culture of your graduate program earlier rather than later, and you honor the work that they do, and you encourage your students to consult them because you tell your students, we recognize that you'll have a diversity of outcomes. We recognize that pursuing that diversity of outcomes requires more expertise than just the advisor can provide, which is again, a heresy because this idea that, oh, the advisor is sharing the student. Well, historically, students become the private property of advisors, and I'm using the language of chattel advisedly because this idea that you become the student of a particular advisor, you're out of circulation, you're now learning in this dyad. It's not practical. A university is a city of knowledge. When we're teaching graduate students, any advisor worthy of the name should understand that advice is going to come from places other than his own mouth, and that then this kind of attentiveness spreads. It doesn't just spread the responsibility, it serves the needs of the audience of the student.

Emily Donahoe (30:05):
So I'm really glad to hear you talking about resources and opportunities that graduate students can take advantage of and tap into outside of their programs. Because the most valuable and interesting things that I did in my own graduate program were being offered outside of the program requirements. So I did an optional public writing practicum. I did a program on socially engaged research. I had a position at the teaching center as a graduate student, and I'm happy to hear that all of these things are increasingly being offered to graduate students, but I'm wondering how we can convince academic departments to build this kind of preparation or these kinds of experiences into their programs and their curriculum, and what might they need to cut or devote less attention to in order to make room for that?

Leonard Cassuto (30:57):
Well, the rubber meets the road here because you're asking what do we have to give up in order to devote resources to this very important matter of actually meeting our students where they are, and this phrase meeting students where they are, we commonly hear it in K 12 or sometimes when we're talking about college. It's true about graduate students too. And so you described a richly varied graduate experience you had with a lot of co-curricular experiences. You are adding those on. Well, I think one question we can ask here is what if they were curricular? What if they were curricular options?

Emily Donahoe (31:44):
Imagine that.

Leonard Cassuto (31:46):
Yeah. What if a student could get credit for teaching, get payment for teaching while taking an internship because the student's interests are leading them to need the kind of instruction that they can get from an internship? Well, that's the sort of commitment that programs have to make if they're going to serve their audiences. Now, here I want to reference again the idea that academia is a culture that is not attuned enough to serving its audience. That's why I wrote this new book and why the new book is of a piece with the two recent books, because when we're talking about writing, which is a fundamental in academic culture, writing something that we're taught to do without regard for the audience and designing graduate programs, if you talk to professors about how to design their graduate programs, they might describe a process in which talking to students never enters into it.

(32:55):
But how could you design a graduate program that's going to meet students' needs without talking to students about those needs? The answer is you can design it, it won't be as good. But that hasn't stopped a lot of people because they don't think of their students as people who are engaged in a collaboration in a circuit of communication. In my new book, I talk about how if you want to imagine what writing ought to look like, imagine one hand clasping, another, the writer reaching out to clasp, the hand of the reader, creating some kind of exchange, an act of communication. Well, too much academic writing is you have a scholar doing work and putting it into a package and thumping it on the table, and then assuming that people are going to consume it, learn from it in all of the ways that the scholar imagines. And too often that doesn't happen because the writer never took into account the reader's needs when writing the article or even the book. Well, it's the same principle. Graduate education is too often designed by faculty who think they know what students need and who in practice know something about what students need, but not everything and not enough.

Emily Donahoe (34:32):
What you're describing sounds really similar to a lot of students as partners programs that are popping up at teaching centers across the country and the world. Those are mostly for undergraduate students. And so

Leonard Cassuto (34:45):
That's right. They're That's certainly true. And they're popping up in teaching centers, not in departments.

Emily Donahoe (34:53):
Yes. So what I'm hearing is we need to start thinking about graduate students as partners as well, and faculty can do that work within their home spaces rather than relying on other people to do that work. I guess.

Derek Bruff (35:09):
So I want to put a footnote on something you just said about the students as partners programs because in a previous episode I talked with Katie Johnson and Katarya Johnson Williams, who are respectively a math faculty member, and now a bachelor's graduate of Florida Gulf Coast University, and their Students as Partners program did happen in the math department. That's where it started, and it spread to other departments.

(35:36):
Hey, this is future Derek with a quick correction. The Florida Gulf Coast University program I just referred to is a learning assistants program, not a Students as Partners program, although the two program types do share some similarities.

(35:50):
But I would argue that an institution like Florida, Gulf Coast University, which is a kind of regional comprehensive university, they are clear that their number one job is undergraduate education. And so to get to your point about values, the values at play, the ways that those faculty are evaluated in those departments are going to put undergraduate education at the top. And so you get to see things that are much more student centered at an institution like that because it is valued.

Leonard Cassuto (36:18):
That's true if there is an equilibrium there. But it's all too often you may have an undergraduate centered institution that is working in the way that you describe, and if you look at what's being hatched at the top, it's like, how can we become more prestigious? How can we add some graduate programs? Because alone among professional cultures, academia measures success in only one way. That there are lots of different ways to be successful. Let's say if you are a manufacturer, if you've got a factory by the edge of the ocean, farm shrimp don't make pencils. If you've got a factory that is at the edge of a forest, make pencils, don't farm shrimp. But in academia, the only way that you can move up the ladder is by becoming more research intensive. And the history of higher education in this country is for better and worse, a history of institutions trying to become more and more research intensive. Instead of trying to become better and better at serving the population that they already serve so well, they decide that they want to be something that is more like Harvard,

Derek Bruff (37:49):
Right? We need more ladders, different ladders,

Leonard Cassuto (37:54):
And some of them need to go horizontally, get wider. You don't always have to get higher. You can also get wider,

(38:03):
But not in academia. In academia, it only goes one direction. I just asked an audience at a conference that I was at last week, how would you teach the Odyssey to a group of first year students, including perhaps some developmental readers and writers, compared to how would you teach the Odyssey to a class of advanced undergraduates or even graduate students? And some of the questions that you're asking are going to be the same. Some of them are going to be different. Some of them are going to be the same questions phrased differently. So there will be similarities and differences, but you're thinking about audience

(38:44):
And that kind of thinking about audience can never be bad if we're talking about how to generate our best practice and understand, yes, what you're describing, how there are many different publics in the world. They're not all enormous, but if we understand when we write and teach that we are trying to envision a public and meet its needs, then our work will be better for it for the time that we've spent thinking about what does that student or that reader want or need from me and how can I best meet that need? That's an ethic of care and service, and that ethic of care and service lies at the center of academic practice. The problem is that not enough academics are consciously aware of it.

Derek Bruff (39:47):
Well, Len, that's a bit of a cliffhanger, but it's also a good place to end it, right? This is the ongoing work to figure out how to renew our interest in those goals and to do it in a practical way that works in our systems. So thank you so much for coming on the podcast today and sharing, sharing about your work. And remind us again, what's the name of your newest book?

Leonard Cassuto (40:12):
It's Academic Writing as if Readers Matter, and it was just published by Princeton University Press.

Derek Bruff (40:20):
That's great. And I really loved how you connected that to the notions of teaching and graduate education, so thanks so much for being here today.

Leonard Cassuto (40:28):
It was great being here. It's been fun having this conversation.

Derek Bruff (40:35):
That was Leonard Cassuto, professor of English at Fordham University, and author of the books, The New PhD: How to Build a Better Graduate Education and Academic Writing as If Readers Matter among other books, and much other writing. Thanks to Len for taking the time to come on the podcast. And special thanks to Emily Donahoe for joining me for this interview. See the show notes for links to more information about Len and Emily and their work and head over to the Intentional Teaching Patreon to hear a few bonus clips from the conversation, including Emily and Len comparing notes on public facing scholarship. It's the start of a new year, so what better time to become an intentional teaching Patreon supporter to access these and other bonus clips from the podcast?

(41:18):
Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the Online and Professional Education Association. In the show notes, you'll find a link to the UPCEA website where you can find out about their research, networking opportunities and professional development offerings. This episode, intentional Teaching was produced and edited by me, Derek Bruff. See the show notes for links to my website, the Intentional Teaching Newsletter, and my Patreon, where you can help support the show for just a few bucks a month. If you found this or any episode of Intentional Teaching useful, would you consider sharing it with a colleague? That would mean a lot. As always, thanks for listening.