Ph.D.

It is said that when President-emeritus Lowell surveyed his academic demesne at the last, having filled in the bigger ditches and rounded the boundaries, he was least satisfied with the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. But so entrenched were the traditions and methods of gaining this degree at Harvard, and so long and forbidding the task of changing them, that he preferred to leave it to a younger man who should succeed him. This archaic and cumbersome bequest, the Graduate School, may be regarded as the greatest problem of the new presidency.

The special iniquity of the School is that it takes a large body of men of the most diverse capacities and intentions and submits them all to the same regimen, to a regimen that is cramping, often pedantic, and usually unadjusted to the demands of the modern world. Its state is especially grave because the degree it gives has become a touchstone for academic advancement, an economic necessity for anyone who wishes to teach. Hence the minds of students all over the country are entrusted to men who, if not actually given false standards by the Ph.D. training, have at least gotten nothing from it but a mass of unleavened erudition. It is not only an unreasonable and exacting anachronism in itself, but a drag on all American education. And Harvard's School is a model for the whole system.

The first desideratum is to examine more closely the records and capabilities of applicants for admission, to reject those who are unprepared or unfit for advanced work of any sort. The Graduate School today is clogged up with men who have chosen scholarship as an easy way to support themselves, who have no impetus to their work except a professional and economic one, who will reach their intellectual peak when they are given their degree. Naturally, graduate study is professional, but in the arts and sciences, it ought to spring from a full-blooded and passionate interest in one or more fields, and a desire to further present accomplishments in them. Anyone who lacks these qualities should be scrupulously debarred. To this end, a more flexible method of admissions will have to be devised, requiring possibly a cogent statement by the candidate of his purpose in coming to the School, and an oral examination to decide his acceptability in the light of this statement.

It might be possible in this way to keep out all but the first of the classes which the president-emeritus posited in his Report for 1930-31, reprinted else-where in this issue, and make of the Graduate School a large-sized Society of Fellows. Perhaps this is the ideal which the School should approach as a limit, but it is hardly a workable solution today. For lack of a complete endowment, the maintenance of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences requires that the enrollment be kept substantially at its present numbers. Exclusiveness on a grand scale is thus out of the question; instead it becomes imperative to decide with the closest possible attention to individuals the kind and extent of work to be exacted. For members of the second and third groups "those better at absorbing than producing ideas, . . . and those seeking only the master's degree now generally required for teaching" great freedom obviously will not do; they must be brigaded in some degree, and put through the routine of classes. Particularly is this true of candidates for the M.A. degree, an archaic shibboleth which is kept mainly because of the requirements of state secondary school boards. The shibboleth may be continued for those who are able to study for only a year, or as a preliminary for those who wish to take the doctorate and lack the proper college background. It would be less of a joker if Harvard were to require a thesis as most other Institutions do.

No degree of care in admissions or in classification of the students can be useful, however, without cleansing the School of its intellectual dryrot. "Towards this end, the course system ought to be wholly abolished for the first group of students and modified for the others, letting the vanity of some of the professors go untickled, but doing the students a great service. For a rigid insistence on a program of courses merely bogs down the man of talent and stays him from vital accomplishment. Certain topics can best be treated in large lectures; attendance at those should be no more compulsory than graduate attendance at classes in Oxford or Cambridge, and there need not be nearly so many of them as at present. Most material now conveyed from the rostrum would be better obtained from books or discussed in seminars. For the advanced student, the seminar is decidedly the most stimulating method of study and discussion, and Harvard should use it far more. The choice of a field, both for general study and thesis work, needs to be greatly widened. More emphasis is needed, as the late Professor Babbitt was fond of saying, on the relation of one study to another, of history and economics to literature, of philosophy and psychology to each other, of sociology to any of these. Let those who wish to explore the small obscurities of the past do so, but do not discourage a man from taking a large field and discovering now interpretations of it, or from striking out on some entirely original path of his own choosing. For whatever work he chooses to embark on, the student would be assigned perhaps two advisers or tutors, from one or more fields. The board of doctoral examiners would be composed differently for each candidate, with representatives from various departments, so that the whole range of his study might be covered and no part of it overtaxed. Though always testing his factual knowledge, it ought also to call for a showing of developed standards, and for some ability to relate the pale facts of study to the realities of life. In short, the ideal Graduate School would merely provide a fertile ground for the development of a man's work, and would not box it or trim it, or force it into any prearranged pattern.

In the humanities the present spectacle is most painful. Scientific study is in a different class and much of this comment is not applicable to it. Rather, the penetration of science into humanistic studies is the danger. Whatever organization these departments may develop, they must forget their exclusive allegiance to accomplished facts, and to the field within the field within the field. It has been supposed that, but the very nature of the men teaching graduate subjects, these reforms cannot be possible, but it is not so much in persons that the academic anemia has its source, as in a system which has dug itself down, a system that none but the small group of aged obstructionists would defend, but that most accept through more inertia.