GSAS: Professional Method For Professional Scholars

On a week-day night in the stepdown lounge of the Graduate Center, only a few students can be found in the overstuffed couches, thumbing through magazines, listening to music. Upstairs in the grill, a few more drop in for a quiet mid-evening beer. Outside, the winding ramps between dormitories are quiet, and inside the dorms, little can be heard above the occasional clacking of a typewriter. The graduate students--almost to the man--are studying. Not studying for hour exams, or cramming for a day's memory, but studying with a broad view to the doctoral examinations: a complete review of eight to ten years training.

It is this intensity of study which is in many ways the predominant characteristic of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, GSAS, still resisting John Dewey, offers one of the most rigorous American educational experiences; absorbing it is a full-time, often an overtime task. But it is this intensity which has also earned GSAS its reputation as probably the finest school of its kind in the country.

Like Winesburg, Ohio

In Cambridge, the GSAS represents the intellectual core of the University in its dual function of training the professional intellectual and furthering knowledge in all areas of liberal arts and sciences. In both these endeavors, the success of the Graduate School has paralleled the fame of the University. The high numbers of Harvard Ph.D's who staff the faculties of the more highly-rated American colleges; the recurring number of Nobel and other prizes awarded the faculty; the consistently high number of GSAS doctoral theses published--all vouchsafe the depth of learned research at the GSAS.

Its influence on American education through its graduates and its influence on College education at Harvard, through courses open to undergraduates as well as graduates, is inestimably pronounced.

This reputation and this influence are a summation of individual achievements, but the attainment of even individual goals involves tremendous effort and sometimes strain. To anyone familiar with the four-to-seven years required for the doctorate, it is obvious that there is little time left for financially-remunerative employment. Even Cambridge and Boston can seem like Winesburg, Ohio after years of sustained study and mounting financial restriction.

Influence From Europe

Nevertheless, most graduate students feel that these difficulties, though real, are largely specious. Between seminar reports, they may disparage their fate as that of the rejected, overworked, intellectual, but they will at the same time admit that there is no other undertaking they would even faintly prefer.

Until the time of President Eliot, however, the graduate student led an easy existence. It was a common complaint among the townspeople of Cambridge, that "all a Harvard man had to do for his Master's degree was to pay five dollars and to stay out of jail." This was essentially true--the principal requirements for the degree were merely the maintenance of good character for three years after receiving the A.B., a nominal fee, and participation at the degree-awarding ceremony. The degree, needless to say, carried little academic prestige.

In 1872, however, under President Eliot, the Corporation and Overseers were influenced by the growing attention paid to graduate training in European universities, and created a "Graduate Department." From successive administrative changes in 1905 and 1912 evolved the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences with essentially the same curriculum as it has today.

In recent years, the school has generally admitted only students planning to continue their studies through to the doctoral level; it has declined to accept students studying for the M.A. alone, largely because of size limitations.

The intensity of the present GSAS curriculum is expressed in studies as well as in studying. Most of the larger undergraduate departments are broken up into smaller areas for concentrated graduate study. With a predominance of A's required for the Ph.D., the GSAS dean's office recognizes a B as the rough equivalent of an "undergraduate C--."

Graduate A's cannot be achieved by osmosis, and studying becomes an all-pervasive part of the graduate's existence. The average graduate student often puts considerably more time into his study than the average working man puts into his job. Seminar reports rival theses in difficulty and many students are further burdened by the families and teaching fellowships they have acquired.

GSAS, then, is to a great extent personified by is scholarly curriculum. Nevertheless there are marked lines of cleavage among faculty and students on the purpose of graduate education. There is, however, an official orthodox view of the function as they see it applicable in their fields.

This function, as defined by Francis M. Rogers, Dean of the USAS, is "to train students for the Ph.D., the professional degree of the academic profession." GSAS, to Dean Rogers and to many other faculty members, is as truly professional as any other graduate school in the University. But the Dean points out, his concept of the "academic profession"--"the preservation, dissemination, and advancement of knowledge"--is far broader than hat of many others.

In his own department, Romance Languages and Literatures, the disciplines are designed primarily for training future college teachers. "But the Graduate School is very large in scope, its body is very heterogeneous, and there is no one standard student goal," Rogers adds.

Most of the other departments within the division of the Humanities likewise consider the Graduate School as specific preparation for college teaching. As one graduate student in English puts it, "what practical value has an English Ph.D. besides that of a teaching pre-requisite?"

Unfortunately, some students have entered graduate study with no decisive vocational plans, and have complicated both their own careers and the troubled of GSAS. "The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences is not a fifth year of college. The young man who has not yet found himself does not belong here," Dean Rogers believes.

On the brighter side, students in almost all fields who get their Ph.D.'s can very frequently secure placement in top rank schools usually through the GSAS appointment office. Initial salaries are likely to be disappointing to those unfamiliar with incomes in the field of education. Many men, after as many as six or seven years of graduate work, receive first-year incomes of well under $4,000.

Economists For Business

Teaching is also a popular graduate career in the Social Sciences, but some departments train students for quite different positions. Both the government and private business concerns consistently demand students in Economics, annually attracting as many Ph.D.'s as does education. Graduate work in Economics, hence, is more widely separated from undergraduate work than are most other departments, and, in its use of economic analysis, graduate study in Economics in some ways approaches the work in the Graduate School of Business Administration.

The department of History, on the other hand, is concerned with developing scholars. It aims at training professional historians, whether they will also be teachers, researchers, or even lawyers or businessmen. Indeed, nearly all the graduate students in History want to teach. But History, like other major fields, is overcrowded. There simply is not enough demand for teachers, and as a result, about a third of all Ph.D.'s in History enter careers as archivists, government workers, or sometimes, as businessmen.

Teaching Fellows

In the pure sciences, doctoral candidates rarely spend more than a year in actual courses. The remaining time is devoted to research, under close supervision by the student's faculty advisor, since the science departments feel their purpose is to train students to be competent researchers.

In view of the significance of teaching as a goal of graduate students, many members of the faculty of Arts and Sciences feel that the school should more thoroughly stress the development of future teachers.

Although a number of the graduates at some time hold fellowships that include teaching responsibilities, many more eventually enter teaching careers. In some departments, moreover, teaching fellowships were until recently considered a sort of dishonor bestowed upon students in need of financial aid, but lacking the intellectual qualities for a full scholarship.

Some significant developments have come about in the past few years to help develop future teachers. Seminar courses now stress more heavily the delivery and defense of research reports. Teaching fellows are carefully selected for their abilities as potential teachers, rather because of financial exigencies alone.

Teacher Training

As an adjunct to the teaching fellow program, some departments offer prizes for the best teaching fellows in various courses. Much as the faculty dislikes the phrase "teacher-training," a series of lectures is being given this semester, after a lapse of several years, precisely on this topic.

Another basis for controversy in the Graduate School is the University's basic philosophy of inter-grading undergraduate and graduate disciplines throughout the 100 and 200 series of courses.

In most fields, the 100 courses are theoretically used to complete the training of students from small colleges with inadequate undergraduate preparation, the courses themselves are considered more for undergraduates than for graduates. In the 200 series of courses, the practice of encouraging undergraduate honors concentrators to register in courses which are not actually seminars has become common. Thus, in larger departments the undergraduate enrollment in 200 courses has often exceeded graduate enrollment, and the combined enrollment is so large that the "conference" course is reduced to the routine lecture course.

The seminar, then, remains as the basic unit of graduate instruction. Since the average seminar requires three times as much preparation as the average lecture course, few students enroll in more than one per semester. Because most of the incoming students have studied at large institutions, however, and are quite well-prepared in their fields, they may actually be wasting their first two years in lecture conference courses. Faculty members are currently debating this question; students are often too busy using what time they have to consider whether or not they are wasting it.

Perhaps the biggest students problem in the Graduate School is the high rate of withdrawals. Only half of those who receive the M.A. degree eventually receive their doctorate. Scholastic account for comparatively few losses; rather, the problem rests with the individual student's purpose and his financial foresight.

The administration can aid students much as is feasible with scholarships, fellowships, and research assistantships. It now grants awards to more than half the men in the Graduate School, though it obviously cannot fill all requests. Purposefulness, however, cannot be bolstered by the University. Here, the department of concentration tries to evaluate a student's persistence and sincerity in judging him for admission.

Well-Versed in Mediocrity

Many faculty members personally prefer the all-around man with the well-developed personality, but there is a strong minority which echoes the judgment of George B. Kistiakowsky, Abbot and James Lawrence Professor of Chemistry: "the well-rounded personality is usually versed only in mediocrity."

Once the student comes to GSAS, he discovers that while life is rigorous it is not so as he might expect. The Graduate Center and adjoining dormitories provide a free community which has been compared to an intellectual apartment development quite unlike anything on the undergraduate level. Aesthetic conviviality prevails, and there are even occasional expeditions to Cronin's. A Graduate Student Council coordinates government and student affairs, and a graduate body stages an informal dance every weekend.

Although many students live outside the University area, and few graduates are familiar with the work that occupies the vast bulk of their colleagues' time, there is an unusual spirit of warmth and unity among the graduates eating in the Harkness Commons or relaxing in the Graduate lounges. It is not the warmth of the House dinning hall or the undergraduate student activity, but the warmth of men and their neighbors.

The Graduate School, with its wholly adult, business-like approach to living might conceivably be located in any city in the United States. It is this social background, coupled with the internal Cambridge intellectual background, that characterizes GSAS, both in the University community and in the field of American education.DEAN FRANCIS M. ROGERS