Committee Suggests Revisions of Ph.D.

We face a starkly pressing demand for Ph.D.'s on all sorts of fronts--for college teachers, scientists, government experts, business consultants, and for no end of other purposes. What are we in the graduate schools going to do about tightening up our programs and requirements for this critical degree, which now seems to offer nearly as many services as the A.B. itself? Current pressure forces us to examine our myth-enveloped Ph.D. with candor. What we see makes us look away with shock: for compare our Ph.D. programs with the professional programs in law, medicine, or business. We must ruefully conclude that the Ph.D. is tortuously slow and riddled with needless uncertainties; that it is frequently inefficient and traumatically disagreeable to the bewildered and frustrated candidate. The basic flaw is: we have never cleanly defined this protean degree.

The Uncertainties

When a college graduate considers going to law school or business school, or even to medical school, he at least knows beforehand how long a time such training will take if he does decent work. Not so at all for a Ph.D. One may say, in reply, that law and business and medicine are professional programs and thus can be easily defined, but that the Ph.D. is essentially an individual matter between student and master; that it is therefore filled with unpredictable elements, and that, in short, it is non-professional and therefore cannot be laid out so neatly in terms of years.

We agree. The Ph.D. is not a professional degree.No degree could be called professional which sets out to nurture individual discovery and which exalts newness in knowledge. Nor would we know at all clearly for what profession we were training our candidates for the Ph.D. For teaching? Or business? Or the Foreign Service? Or a consultant for Life Magazine?

The Ph.D. is bound to defy exact definition in terms of time. But yet need the time-factor be so very imprecise? Generally the Ph.D. takes at least four years to get; more often it takes six or seven, and not infrequently ten to fifteen.

Financial need, to be sure, often comes into the picture. But all the same we know that too many programs have taken too many years simply because faculty members and the graduate office have failed to give hard-headed 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. If we put our heads to the matter, certainly we ought to be able to say to a good student: "With a leeway of not more than one year, it will take you so and so long to take the Ph.D."

Uncertainly about the time required leads in turn to another kind of uncertainty--financial uncertainty. Doubt and confusion on this score have a host of disastrous effects. Many superior men, facing unknowns here, abandon thoughts about working for a Ph.D. and realistically go off to law or the like. In the light of our pressing need for college teachers, nothing could be more underisable.

Other men, bolder or more sanguine, enter a graduate school of arts and sciences but are finally compelled for financial reasons to leave before taking their degree. Now that something like forty per cent of our men are married, this is becoming increasingly more common. They leave with good and serious intentions of returning when they have the money. One good reason gives way to another to prevent the man's ever finishing his work, and all too often the files of the dean's office become a last repository for uncompleted thesis projects.

The End-Product

Then consider the uncertainties about what might be called the enduse of the product. In the world of the Ph.D. there is no licensing, no state examinations, and often no fairly sure concept of what a man is to do with the degree or any fairly precise expectation of this or that salary. This, of course, is a realm in which the universities can do little directly. Yet it involves important matters--fundamentally related to the application of the training--about which we should be militantly aware.

Suppose that a superior man is sufficiently fired and sufficiently determined to try for a Ph.D. despite his uncertainty about time and money and final outcome. What surety does he have about the kind of training he will meet? What kind of program is usually mapped out for him, and how wisely and thoughtfully has this been designed to suit his individual needs, talents and aspirations?

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 repetitions 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 selfpoised, and less confident after two years in a graduate school than he was as an inspirited college senior!

Our achievement far too frequently turns out to be the very reverse of what we wanted: the second-year man under our system of traditional courses, examinations and grades emerges a puzzled fellow indeed, rapidly losing any feeling of his own progress or coming to mistrust the yardstick by which progress is measured.

When at the middle or end of his second year the student looks ahead, all is equally dark. What are the general examinations like, what are they meant to cover, and what do they aim at? How long should he try to prepare for these ill-defined and sprawling areas? And once that Scylla is somehow desperately skirted, what of the Charybdis of the thesis? So many questions arise here that it is no wonder that only one solution seems at all sure; make the thesis a long one, cram it with learned footnotes and keep your own feelings and taste out of it.

Poor Results

Most of the uncertainties just adumbrated can be removed. Reluctance to give up the status quo or the desire, having been hazed yourself, to go and do likewise, have permitted these uncertainties to be kept alive. Still, we might tolerate them if we could proudly point to the results of the system--or lack of system. Far too often we cannot.

First of all, too many men emerge from the ordeal spiritually dried up. A queer kind of virtue indeed is under test here. The desire for finding out what had not 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." The drive--almost the poetic drive--which first excited him and sent him on from college to graduate school is now run out.

So much for his feelings, but what of his abilities? What has the traditional training done for him as a potential investigator? The emerging Ph.D. is not 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 cata- logues or other areas and neither as teacher nor scholar will he throw off this inhibiting heritage. As a teacher, he may well lack that vivid excitement before fact or expression which is the basis of real communication. As a scholar, he may lack the means which a rigorous training in disciplines and techniques ought to have given him. If he knows that he does not possess the necessary tools with which a piece of work ought to be tackled, and that his training in form was so deficient that he cannot effectively put forward a valuable contribution, he will invent one or another reason for avoiding further efforts in scholarship. Or worse, if he does not recognize his own deficiencies, students and libraries hereafter pay the price.

A Definition

We reaffirm what we take to have been the original idea and intent of the Ph.D.; namely, to train men to do advanced work of an original nature, without either maiming them spiritually or assuming that they are Methuselahs. Such training should obviously include a wide grasp of what is already known--we ought not, however, to require all knowledge--and it should equally include strict introduction to methods and tools.

The degree is not, we said, a professional degree. Rather, it implies a high technical ability--and, we hope, taste and skill in the art of written and oral communication. The result should be original work, especially in the sense of having the work reported with individuality. We cannot require a man to be creative. To avoid further generalities an outline of a specific plan is presented.

Specific Plan

Time. Except in most unusual cases (e.g.in the middle-Eastern studies, where new languages must be gotten up before one may go very far), the whole program should take no more than three years of residence. In the first two years a man should take what courses he needs, and should have all the freedom from prescribed courses for his own individual work that his previous training will allow. At the end of his second year he should take his general examinations. At the end of his third year, he should have completed his thesis.

Admission. More precise recommendations for work in the three years will follow, but first it is obvious from the brief outline just presented that admission policies must be tightened up if a three-year plan is to be workable. Beyond tightening up the standards in the field in which the man proposes to work, we would especially ask that the language requirements now on our books be fully implemented and that a candidate be required to show that he can write respectable English.

As for the first, we all know how much time in graduate work is given over to preparing for the foreign language examinations--time that should have been spent in high school or in college--and we know, too, how handicapped a student is who cannot read German. He should know German while taking seminars, and not just before he takes the degree. As for ability to write good English, we need no demonstration of the frequent lapses here. And yet no one would question the paramount importance of a man's ability effectively to put forth his findings.

Language Plan

Accordingly, we propose that before registration in the first year a man should take an examination in one foreign language and in the writing of connected English prose. If he fails in either or both, he must make up this deficiency by the beginning of the second term of the first year. The examination in the second foreign language may be taken at the start of either the first or second term of the first year or of the first term of the second year.

In any case, if a man has not passed both foreign language examinations by the end of the second years residence he should be put on probation or dropped. This whole matter does not so much call for deadlines and a calendar during the first two years as for increased emphasis on ability in the native and foreign languages as an admission requirement.

Advising and the first year. The best interest of both the student and the school demand that a member of the faculty deal fully and thoughtfully with the individual student. We need not stress the heterogeneous backgrounds of our graduate students. The adviser, meeting with the first-year man before registration and after the results of the foreign lan-