Elder's Proposals Fail In Faculty Voice Vote

Dean Elder's plan to restrict Ph.D. candidates to four years at the Graduate School failed to pass the Faculty yesterday afternoon. The plan, which had been in the making for over a year, lost by a decisive vote.

The proposal would require candidates for the Ph.D. to "complete all their requirements and take that degree within no more than four years of residence.'" Teaching fellows would be allowed five years. Work for the Masters degree at another university was to "count among 'years of residence.'"

In further efforts to speed up graduate study, Elder recommended that students who had not passed their qualifying examinations by the end of their third year be made ineligible for a Harvard scholarship in their last year.

In presenting the plan, the Administrative Board of the School asserted that its purpose was "not to change the nature of study for this degree but to minimize abuses which are inherent in the present procedures."

Especially, the Board wished to "discourage the more or less perpetual student--the man who stays in residence for an extended period of time without completing requirements and the student who leaves Cambridge without finishing his thesis, and then postpones doing so for several years, or forever."

Faculty Differs

The majority of the Faculty, it appeared, felt differently. It was the opinion of the majority that "graduate study is a matter between the individual graduate student and his advisers," and that Elder's proposals, which would "introduce a sense of pressure," were "out of time with Harvard's attitude of looking at the individual."

Although the matter was debated "amiably," and professors emerged from the meeting discussing the proposals in a friendly tone, the Dean's motion was soundly defeated. It was reported that "the nays were so loud that they didn't need to be counted," and that the plans met with but "a peeping chorus of ayes."

Ph.D. Program "Nebulous"

The proposals were first outlined at meetings of the GSAS Administrative Board last spring, after Elder had co-authored a report for the Association of Graduate Schools in the Fall. He then called the present Ph.D. program "nebulous" and "myth-enveloped," compared with graduate degrees in law, medicine, or business, in which the student "knows beforehand how long a time such training will take."

Even now, the GSAS catalog recommends that the qualifying examinations be completed after three years, and the Faculty in the spring of 1957 defined the Ph.D. "less in terms of formal courses" than it had previously done. Anticipating the CEP plan of last spring, the Faculty voted an increase in independent work: only eight half courses in the first two years were required rather than sixteen.

Although this reduction in courses was planned by Elder as an aid in speeding up work for the degree, the Faculty yesterday balked at going further in this regard. It was predicted yesterday that the proposal will not again be raised unless "someone has new material."