Ph.D. Under Attack

For his own doctoral dissertation in education, John Schrodt Jr., editor of the Indiana University Alumni Magazine, surveyed other Ph.D. holders on college faculties in Indiana and discovered that it had taken them an average of nearly eleven years of graduate study to get their degrees. It also cost them about $34,000 each, counting lost income while studying, and 20% developed ulcers or nervous disorders. The study worsened Schrodt's own nervous stomach and fed the growing feeling among many educators that the Ph.D., at least for teachers, may not be worth all that time, pain and expense.

The Ph.D. has been under attack before, but the soaring demand for broadly trained teachers is now forcing real reform, particularly in the humanities and liberal arts. Yale University recently announced that it will give a Master of Philosophy degree to graduate students who complete all of their doctoral work except the long research dissertation. The M.Phil, will be adequate for "many teaching positions, especially those concerned with general education in the first two years of college," explains Yale Graduate Dean John Perry Miller.

Horrifying Ph.D.s. More significantly, the graduate deans of the Big Ten universities and the University of Chicago, schools that produce one-third of the nation's Ph.D.s, recently agreed in principle on the awarding of a similar "all-but-dissertation" degree, jokingly called the A.B.D. and more formally termed the Certificate of Candidacy, pending agreement on a more apt name. The aim, says Northwestern Graduate Dean Robert Baker, is to "impress the educational world with the validity of this stage of training." The Graduate Council at the University of California's Berkeley campus is studying a faculty recommendation to offer a similar degree to be called a Doctor of Arts.

Only concerted action by such major universities is likely to break the Ph.D. fixation of most colleges, which constantly compare the percentage of Ph.D.s on their faculties. Donald E. Queller, associate dean of the University of Southern California Graduate School, contends that many colleges hire Ph.D.s but "just want the letters. If they get a fellow who is as interested in scholarship and research as Ph.D.s are supposed to be, they are horrified. They don't know what to do with him." Promotions and higher pay seldom go to the teacher without a Ph.D., and since more than half of all Ph.D. candidates never complete the doctorate, many good teachers are handicapped throughout their careers.

Defter Dissertations. A different attack on the problem is to reform the dissertation. Berkeley English Professor Charles Muscatine calls the present Ph.D. "narrow, specialized and constipated. What is needed is a more human and intelligent relationship between the student's training and his thesis." Many dissertations are tedious tomes, running up to a thousand pages and taking two or more years to write--and seemingly almost as long for an outsider to read.

By contrast, Brown University urges its liberal arts candidates to submit what Graduate Dean R. Bruce Lindsay calls "a shorter paper--a glorified essay," and also requires proficiency in only one foreign language instead of the customary two. Rutgers is piloting a program in which candidates for Ph.D.s in English write one critical 50-page essay, another historical or biographical essay, and deliver one public lecture, all within one year. A student can thus hedge his bets. Too often, says Rutgers Assistant Graduate Dean Paul Bertram, a thesis adviser "is stuck with passing the candidate's paper or chopping off his head."

Many schools are also trying to speed up the Ph.D. process. Cornell University last week announced the names of 48 high school graduates (their median College Board score is a bright 750) admitted to a new program in which they can earn a Ph.D. in just six years, mainly by taking advanced courses earlier. They will get their B.A. in three years and for the last three years will enjoy $3,000 grants plus free tuition.

The Johns Hopkins English department next fall will offer $2,500 and free tuition to graduate students who devote full time to getting their master's in two years, their Ph.D. in the next year.

A Ford Foundation-sponsored innovation at 41 colleges is to require more advanced work in the last two under graduate years so that an upgraded teaching-aimed M.A. can be completed in one more year. It all seems to spell the end of the pleasantly leisurely Ph.D., such as the one that Columbia is granting to Paul Cousins, 76, who has been polishing his dissertation on Joel Chandler Harris since 1927.

The new turmoil, in sum, asks whether the A.B.D. should be called an M.Phil., thus elevating the M.A., or be called a D.A., thus diluting the Ph.D., or whether the stress should simply be on streamlining the present Ph.D.

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