The Rise and Fall of the Old PhD
CRATTAN, C. HARTLEY
The Rise and Fall of the Old PhD Once the summit of academic eminence here and abroad, the doctorate is now a way-station on the well-trod path to advanced study' By C. Hartley Grattan The...
...In America, the PhD fever has been rising for three-quarters of a century, since we borrowed the degree from Germany, and it long ago overtopped and obscured the MA...
...It is the decline of the individual that is deplorable, and since this academic development comes at a time when the independent individual is everywhere under strong adverse pressures, it is doubly deplorable...
...It isn't that there is any decline of ingenuity in developing research projects, but that the mechanisms of research are now so costly that single individuals can no longer hope to command them...
...Probably any sizable foundation knows most of them by virtue of applications for grants...
...Research is now a major employment resource for the otherwise redundant PhDs...
...In a way, this represents the importation of the principle of group journalism into academic goings-on, or the Time-life-Fortune influence on the academic life, and the fallacy of it appears to be the same: that a row of ciphers (or a collection of PhDs personally undistinguished) can be made to add up to an impressive total...
...Another phase of the struggle to top the PhD is the research gambit in general (as distinguished from the special research that goes on in the finishing schools for PhDs...
...and he survives only in the interstices of the academic structure, there often secreting the ideas the group researchers must have to make sense of their data...
...Theoretically, a newly fledged PhD can claim a place in an academic procession ahead of an older, infinitely more learned, academically more distinguished, and more highly placed MA educated in an earlier day...
...which comes to the same thing, for the "star acts" are all group...
...The converes of the rise of group research is the decline of the independent learned individual...
...Time was in this country when an AB degree was a badge of genuine distinction, but in late years the distinction has been eroded away, in large measure by the unrestrained multiplication of ABs (and what are euphemistically said to be equivalents) . Printing an ever-increasing number of sheepskins has had an effect similar to printing too much money: Inflation has lowered the value of the AB degree to a marked extent...
...Two others occur to me: the Ford Foundation's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Palo Alto, California, and the Hickrill Laboratory right here on my doorstep in Northern Westchester...
...It is my personal impression that a 1956 AB will have approximately the value of a high school diploma circa 1900 as a certification of learning beyond the average and as an instrument on which to parlay a career...
...The inspiration of these remarks was my remembrance of the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, read over a quarter-century earlier...
...This is definitely not nice, but the PhDs are surely going to win out all over the British world...
...To this moment, a very high percentage of the academicians in British countries are MAs and nothing more, save as they may have honorary degrees...
...Even in British countries, the MA is giving way to the PhD in academic circles and the younger aspirants to academic careers must now face the fact that a PhD is an important and increasingly demanded prerequisite...
...To quote a commencement address I once gave: "We need well-informed and wise individuals...
...Even when a first-rate mind emerges from the group-research world, he tends to trail with him the stigmata of his background...
...Yet in every sector of American life we hear an appalling amount of nonsense about "teams...
...The trend today is all against him...
...The new MIT School and the older Institute at Princeton are but conspicuous illustrations of what is happening...
...However, the PhDs have also been making themselves felt at Oxford and Cambridge for some years and creating problems of precedence in the process...
...All of them at least advertise that the PhD is no longer considered enough...
...The purpose of education is not, really, to develop "teams" but to develop individuals...
...The AB will further deteriorate over the next generation...
...A central purpose of education is to cut people out of the mass and set them up as individuals...
...Now, however, the inflation in numbers of PhDs is definitely upon us and a struggle is on to bolster up the higher learning, for which a PhD is not much more of a certification of competence than a BA was a hundred years ago, by supplying opportunities for "post-doctoral" training and research...
...Any youngster aiming today at high distinction in the higher reaches of the higher learning must look forward to spending a couple of years beyond the PhD at one or another of them, or will try to move heaven and earth to get into one for a spell before his powers flag entirely...
...A habit is a hard thing to circumvent...
...I have seen it stated that this development is to be attributed to the influence of the so-called "red brick" universities (or all universities in the United Kingdom except Oxford and Cambridge), which have tended to bolster their prestige by adorning their teaching rosters with PhDs...
...1 wish the leaders of higher learning would read Emerson, especially those now promoting post-doctoral training and research, for it should be devoted chiefly to producing scholars...
...For some obscure reason that escapes me, the MA has never commanded much prestige in America, as it does to this day in British countries...
...The Rise and Fall of the Old PhD Once the summit of academic eminence here and abroad, the doctorate is now a way-station on the well-trod path to advanced study' By C. Hartley Grattan The announcement that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is establishing a School for Advanced Study, similar in aims to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton (but closely integrated with MIT, as the Institute is not with Princeton), focuses attention on the fact that the PhD is rapidly becoming nothing more than a ticket of admission to the higher learning, not necessarily to be honored at the door...
...It is attached intellectually to Yale...
...In America the MA-in my time at least-has usually been regarded as a way-station to a PhD and as nothing in particular in itself except for high school teachers, to whom it has served as the basis of a claim for slightly higher salary...
...A characteristic quirk of the American mind gets in the way of insight: the deep-seated belief in method as something somehow independent of the individuals employing it and hence its own justification...
...But just as the free-lance journalist is at a considerable disadvantage in competition with group journalism (with its enviable research and checking facilities), so the individual scholar is at a disadvantage as against research teams, at least as far as gathering data goes...
...Masses as masses cannot be educated...
...The latter supports half-a-dozen or so "post-doctoral" workers in organic chemistry, currently including attractive young men from Australia, India and Germany...
...This just isn't so, but the revelation has not yet been so impressively made that group research is in any danger of losing its subsidies...
...If education is not calculated to multiply upstanding individuals, it ceases to he education and becomes analogous to the enterprises producing things in volume...
...This has had the curious and, in the view of many, disastrous consequence that to justify the cost of any sizable research project, the work must be done by teams...
...As Wolcott Gibbs remarked in another connection, "Where it all will end, knows God...
...If our educational institutions cease to believe in the creation of individuals they might as well shut up shop, for they will have become false to their highest purpose...
...Emerson-model, and no others, and least of all managers of teams and operators of IBM machines...
...He therefore tends to become a fringe operator, or to feel strongly that he is...
...they can only be conditioned and propagandized...
...Surely it is obvious that the welfare of the higher learning requires more and more independent, creative, thinking individuals, not more and more teams of technically competent methodologists...
...This is obvious enough in the physical sciences, where access to an expensively equipped laboratory is a sine qua non, but it is also becoming true of the social sciences, where IBM machines are the indispensable equipment...
...Where to look for a complete list of these institutions for the further development of PhDs I do not know...
...An example is David Riesman, now unquestionably an identifiable individual: but did you ever notice how many collaborators he has dragged into the limelight and keeps there with him...
...It seems to be getting out of hand...
...Education is only vouchsafed to individuals...
Vol. 39 • February 1956 • No. 6
