The Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate: The Case of Mathematics

Mathematics is a discipline—a domain of knowledge, an intellectual heritage with ancient roots, with language and methods for analysis and understanding of aspects of the worlds that we inhabit and experience. And mathematics is now as well a profession—an intellectual community dedicated to knowledge generation, application, conservation, and transmission, interacting with other domains and institutions of learning and with the larger society. My thesis here is that, historically, the disciplinary perspective of mathematics has dominated and largely shaped the design of doctoral programs. The professional aspects of mathematics have gradually come into prominence over the past half-century, sometimes haltingly, and with mostly ad hoc adjustments in education and practice. Mathematics departments have mainly responded to immediate environmental pressures—of resource availability and the professional marketplace—without much broad reflection on the proper meaning and purpose of the mathematics doctorate in today’s world. I argue here that we should build on the proven strength of the discipline-focused doctoral training and develop scholars who are also professionals with a sense of calling that I shall begin to elaborate below. It is this view rather than transient market and resource pressures that can best guide our rethinking of the doctorate in mathematics.2 The ideas advanced here are less conclusions than