The Tortuous Ph.D.

Another phase of U.S. education that came under attack last week was the training program for the Ph.D. After long study, the deans of four graduate schools--Jacques Barzun of Columbia, John Petersen Elder of Harvard, Marcus Hobbs of Duke and Andrew Robertson Gordon of the University of Toronto--"ruefully" concluded that getting the

"Ph.D. is tortuously slow and riddled with needless uncertainties; that it is frequently inefficient and traumatically disagreeable to the frustrated candidate. The basic flaw is: We have never clearly defined this protean degree."

Unlike the M.D. or the LL.B., the Ph.D. does not lead to any one profession, and therefore the time needed to earn it varies from school to school and field to field. "Generally, the Ph.D. takes at least four years to get; more often it takes six or seven, and not infrequently 10 to 15. Too many programs have taken too many years simply because faculty members and the graduate office have failed to give hardheaded advice at the right time, have shied away from making their students work hard enough, and have generally thought a well-bred air of amateurishness more gentlemanly and becoming than down-to-earth efficiency."

Unexciting & Shallow. The longer the student must work, the heavier will be his financial burden, and the more apt he will be to drop out of graduate school before finishing his requirements. But even if his money holds out, say the deans, "what surety does he have about the kind of training he will meet? . . . Here too much is obscure, and too often the assignment of routine courses replaces careful faculty consideration. Too much is mechanical; too little is personal. It is easier to tell a man to take the traditional courses--unexciting, shallow, and often repetitious survey courses--than to conclude that this particular man could well be allowed to do much of this work on his own--reading and listening and talking where he can profit most. The frequent result is depressing indeed, for we see many a man less mature, less self-poised and less confident after two years in a graduate school than he was as an inspirited college senior . . .

"Too many men emerge from the ordeal spiritually dried up ... The desire for finding out what had not before been known, the imaginative urge to reinterpret--these the tired and weary student has gradually lost. He has been wrung dry, and, knowingly or not, he often finishes his thesis with the firm resolve to have no more to do with 'scholarship.' " Nor is the emerging Ph.D. "what we mean by an educated man, a man who combines wide-ranging learning with an attitude of simplicity and vividness, and who commingles good taste with an excited curiosity. Rather, he likely has become a sort of expert plumber in the card catalogues . . . and neither as teacher nor scholar will he throw off this inhibiting heritage."

Dignity & Good Standing. In training men "to do advanced work of an original nature without either maiming them spiritually or assuming that they are Methuselahs," say the deans, the graduate schools must completely overhaul their Ph.D. programs. Among other things, the schools should reduce the amount of time needed to earn a degree to about three years, should tighten admissions policies, insist that the foreign-language requirements be met within a reasonable time, and limit both the length and the scope of the thesis, whose present "fantastic bulk not only prolongs graduate years" but also produces bad habits of sloppy scholarship. The deans' final recommendation: restore the master's degree to "universal dignity and good standing."

At present, say the deans, the A.M. requirement varies so widely across the U.S. that it is often looked upon as a "quick degree" with no assured academic value. The A.M. should take 1½ years and should require the same quality of work as the Ph.D. "If the A.M. were considered as worthy in its way as the Ph.D. in its--each reflecting different amounts of the same thing and not performances different in quality--we might fill our demand for college teachers with men holding the A.M. ... If we do not take some steps toward defining and tightening the Ph.D. program, and toward rehabilitating the A.M., we shall gradually lose the power to get our own houses in order.

"For doctors and masters will be called for in the next decade with a resistless intensity. If we continue to allow--nay, encourage--men to remain in graduate schools for eight or ten years while amiably working toward the nebulous Ph.D., we shall fail to meet the demand for trained minds. If we permit a large number of A.M.s to represent nothing more than 'consolation prizes,' we shall do worse. Others will step in to supply the market, and to predict what kind of degrees will then emerge calls for no prophet."

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