The Academic Roots of Forestry Programs: A Case Study from Virginia Tech

Abstract

Constructing academic genealogies involves the practice of creating family trees based on doctoral advisors, that is, the advisor–graduate student relationship replaces the father–son relationship. Forestry academic genealogies document the historical development of forestry and quantify the contributions of other disciplines. In this study, the authors researched the academic genealogies of all the tenured faculty members in the Forestry Department at Virginia Tech. The resulting academic genealogies included 122 individuals and individual family trees varied in length from 19 generations spanning 360 years to two generations spanning 8 years. The interdisciplinary history of forestry was demonstrated by the high number of non‐forestry doctorates earned and the genealogies included individuals trained in agricultural economics, agronomy, botany, civil engineering, ecology, environmental engineering, environmental science, chemistry, economics, horticulture, medicine, plant physiology, political science, recreation, and soils. In contrast to academic genealogies from other disciplines, most early American forestry programs hired faculty members who lacked doctorates, instead of hiring European‐trained foresters, and these gentlemen went on to train doctoral students and develop forestry research programs, even though they lacked doctorates themselves.

Interdisciplinary doctoral research supervision: A scoping review

“…There is a significant amount of literature describing particular interdisciplinary doctoral programs (Copenheaver, Nelson, & Goldbeck, 2009;Coryn, Stufflebeam, Davidson, & Scriven, 2010;da Sousa Correa, Chornik, & Samuels, 2009;McGee & DeLong, 2007;Mcvicar et al, 2006;Rhoten, 2003;Rhoten & Parker, 2004;Skarakis-Doyle & Doyle, 2008;Stufflebeam, 2001;Sugimoto, 2010). This literature is focused on articulating current practices with varying degrees of description, reflection, and use of empirical data.…”

“…With the exception of Rhoten and colleagues' study of five interdisciplinary research programs (Rhoten, 2003;Rhoten & Parker, 2004;Rhoten, 2004) and Enders' (2005) examination of different modes of doctoral research training (Enders, 2005), this literature concerns single-site studies with various levels of empirical data. Empirical research in this area includes formative evaluation (McGee & DeLong, 2007) surveys, interviews (Sugimoto, 2010), bibliometric approaches (Sugimoto, 2010), and academic genealogical analysis (Copenheaver et al, 2009). Generally the literature in this area is descriptive, offering a historical account of how the program came to be, the disciplines involved, a characterization of the areas of expertise of the faculty members and students, and a justification for why interdisciplinary work is necessary in this topic area.…”

Discipline Continuity across Undergraduate and Graduate Degrees

“…When forestry developed in the early 1900s, all faculty members came from other disciplines. The first forestry departments hired faculty members educated in agronomy, botany, chemistry, economics, and horticulture because there were no forestry graduate programs from which to hire new faculty (Copenheaver et al, 2009). Given that faculty tend to hire individuals who share educational pathways similar to their own (Lohmann, 2004), these initial forestry faculty hired faculty who also had been trained in other disciplines.…”