BY DEGREES

A campaign launched today in London is the result of the exposure of what is fast becoming a widespread abuse in England,--the selling of American college degrees. Advertisements, carefully worded, have been appearing in London papers of the best type; and agents of so-called American universities,--the most notorious centering about Washington and Chicago,--have been hawking degrees under various ingenious pretenses.

This abuse, bad enough in itself, points to an allied evil which is one of the most serious defects in modern education, what William James in characteristic fashion variously termed the "Doctor Monopoly" and the "Ph.D. Octopus". It is the growing tendency, especially in the newer colleges, to appoint no instructors who are not also doctors of some sort or other. The college catalogue looks far more impressive when every member of the faculty has two or three magic letters after his name. The result is that a tradition is established, and any man who would obtain a desirable teaching berth must first obtain by hook or crook some sort of fancy degree. This would not be serious if such degrees were always sure hall-marks of a man's scholastic training and ability; but the more wide-spread the idea becomes that no man of science or letters is intellectually respectable unless stamped with some kind of badge or diploma, the more widespread will be the attendant corruption.

The obvious result is that the value of all degrees is cheapened and that all personal spontaneity will tend to be knocked out of university intellectual life, as long as degrees are the paramount object in view.

Equally obvious are ways in which the "Ph.D. Octopus" may be kept in check, if applied before it is too late. If the standards were lowered, and the doctorate degree given for so much training, with the nightmare of Examination removed, a good deal of the present possibility of corruption could be eliminated. If private letters of introduction from instructors were to be substituted for the wage-earning qualities of a Ph.D., the inordinate desire for extra letters of the alphabet to place after one's name would largely disappear. Finally, if degrees were treated as secondary in importance, if colleges gave up the ambition to spatter their catalogues of faculties with doctor's titles, the present commercializing of the degree would stop. Unless some method of prevention is adopted, and adopted soon, by the American universities of high standing, the abuse will prove hydra-headed with the founding of each new institution, and like the hydra will be almost impossible to kill.