Four-Year Plan

The thunder of nays that resounded from the faculty meeting last week over Dean Elder's plan to limit Ph.D. study to four years must have come either from aroused protective instincts or from simple misunderstanding. Possibly the various departments suspect in the Dean's proposals a plot to catalyze his present comfortable hold into an iron grip. Or they may think the proposals would really alter the structure of graduate study. Both of these fears should cease to be.

Certainly a department should defend its autonomy when endangered by administrative officiousness, and it should protect both its teachers and students from abusive restrictions from the outside. But in this case the abuses of graduate study come from within the departments themselves. It is the men who drag on as long as fifteen years in vague pursuit of a Ph.D., stalling, cluttering the files with never-consummated thesis topics, who abuse the admirable leniency of the present system. Yet not everyone can or should manage a thesis in three years and a degree in four. Factors such as the depth of the research required or the unusual nature of the study topic make a strictly unexceptionable time limit undesirable.

But who says different? Elder's proposals prominently feature a clause for lengthier plans of study. They recommend only that such special cases be reported to the Dean's office and be reviewed by the Administrative Board.

As for basic alterations in the graduate study curricula, the Dean has repeatedly asserted his conviction that the Ph.D. is a non-professional degree, and therefore "is bound to deny exact definition in terms of time," or courses of study. All his tendered changes are qualitative.

Very likely, some faculty disapproval proceeded not from either of these suspicions, but from other, quite plainly reprehensible, states of mind. One such state of mind belongs to men grown hidebound with inertia, teachers whose youth and fresh ideas lie behind them. These men often will oppose a change just because it is change. Another state of mind considers, as Dean Elder has put it, "a well-bred air of amateurishness more gentlemanly and becoming than down-to-earth efficiency."

The Dean's proposals do not have in them the seeds of Administrative tyranny, nor do they intend any fundamental changes in GSAS studies. Their purpose is to discourage the European type of perpetual student, the professional grad student who cannot foresake Cambridge for the real world. Elder's plan would clear the lines for active, purposeful graduate work. It would make the Ph.D. a "more residential degree to be won by workmanlike methods within a reasonably definite time." Graduate study should be preparation, not vocation. Hopefully there will be another vote, and another verdict.