| 1 | Thanks to the public domain I have republished the full text of |
| 2 | William James's article *[[http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/20768][The Ph.D Octopus]]*. It is a rather nice essay on |
| 3 | the over-reliance on academic accredation as a measure of intellectual |
| 4 | worth which I find is a particularly relevant issue today. |
| 5 | |
| 6 | What makes this most interesting is that it was published in 1903 by a |
| 7 | man who was seeing our present-day culture form before his eyes. Ah! |
| 8 | What an exciting--or perhaps, terrifying--time the beginning of the |
| 9 | 20th century must have been! All of the technological *progress* in our |
| 10 | time has been meaningless in contrast to our utter cultural |
| 11 | stagnation. Perhaps exciting times are here for us now; perhaps the |
| 12 | time has come to reverse--or transcend--the cultural *progress* of the |
| 13 | early 20th century. |
| 14 | |
| 15 | * Full Text |
| 16 | |
| 17 | <quote> |
| 18 | Some years ago we had at our Harvard Graduate School a very brilliant |
| 19 | student of Philosophy, who, after leaving us and supporting himself by |
| 20 | literary labor for three years, received an appointment to teach |
| 21 | English Literature at a sister-institution of learning. The governors |
| 22 | of this institution, however, had no sooner communicated the |
| 23 | appointment than they made the awful discovery that they had enrolled |
| 24 | upon their staff a person who was unprovided with the Ph.D. degree. |
| 25 | The man in question had been satisfied to work at Philosophy for her |
| 26 | own sweet (or bitter) sake, and had disdained to consider that an |
| 27 | academic bauble should be his reward. |
| 28 | |
| 29 | His appointment had thus been made under a misunderstanding. He was |
| 30 | not the proper man; and there was nothing to do but to inform him of |
| 31 | the fact. It was notified to him by his new President that his |
| 32 | appointment must be revoked, or that a Harvard doctor's degree must |
| 33 | forthwith be procured. |
| 34 | |
| 35 | Although it was already the spring of the year, our Subject, being a |
| 36 | man of spirit, took up the challenge, turned his back upon literature |
| 37 | (which in view of his approaching duties might have seemed his more |
| 38 | urgent concern) and spent the weeks that were left him, in writing a |
| 39 | metaphysical thesis and grinding his psychology, logic and history of |
| 40 | philosophy up again, so as to pass our formidable ordeals. |
| 41 | |
| 42 | When the thesis came to be read by our committee, we could not pass it. |
| 43 | Brilliancy and originality by themselves won't save a thesis for the |
| 44 | doctorate; it must also exhibit a heavy technical apparatus of |
| 45 | learning; and this our candidate had neglected to bring to bear. So, |
| 46 | telling him that he was temporarily rejected, we advised him to pad out |
| 47 | the thesis properly, and return with it next year, at the same time |
| 48 | informing his new President that this signified nothing as to his |
| 49 | merits, that he was of ultra Ph.D. quality, and one of the strongest |
| 50 | men with whom we had ever had to deal. |
| 51 | |
| 52 | To our surprise we were given to understand in reply that the quality |
| 53 | *per se* of the man signified nothing in this connection, and that |
| 54 | three magical letters were the thing seriously required. The College |
| 55 | had always gloried in a list of faculty members who bore the doctor's |
| 56 | title, and to make a gap in the galaxy, and admit a common fox without |
| 57 | a tail, would be a degradation impossible to be thought of. We wrote |
| 58 | again, pointing out that a Ph.D. in philosophy would prove little |
| 59 | anyhow as to one's ability to teach literature; we sent separate |
| 60 | letters in which we outdid each other in eulogy of our candidate's |
| 61 | powers, for indeed they were great; and at last, *mirabile dictu*, our |
| 62 | eloquence prevailed. He was allowed to retain his appointment |
| 63 | provisionally, on condition that one year later at the farthest his |
| 64 | miserably naked name should be prolonged by the sacred appendage the |
| 65 | lack of which had given so much trouble to all concerned. |
| 66 | |
| 67 | Accordingly he came up here the following spring with an adequate |
| 68 | thesis (known since in print as a most brilliant contribution to |
| 69 | metaphysics), passed a first-rate examination, wiped out the stain, and |
| 70 | brought his college into proper relations with the world again. |
| 71 | Whether his teaching, during that first year, of English Literature was |
| 72 | made any the better by the impending examination in a different |
| 73 | subject, is a question which I will not try to solve. |
| 74 | |
| 75 | I have related this incident at such length because it is so |
| 76 | characteristic of American academic conditions at the present day. |
| 77 | Graduate schools still are something of a novelty, and higher diplomas |
| 78 | something of a rarity. The latter, therefore, carry a vague sense of |
| 79 | preciousness and honor, and have a particularly "up-to-date" |
| 80 | appearance, and it is no wonder if smaller institutions, unable to |
| 81 | attract professors already eminent, and forced usually to recruit their |
| 82 | faculties from the relatively young, should hope to compensate for the |
| 83 | obscurity of the names of their officers of instruction by the |
| 84 | abundance of decorative titles by which those names are followed on the |
| 85 | pages of the catalogues where they appear. The dazzled reader of the |
| 86 | list, the parent or student, says to himself, "This must be a terribly |
| 87 | distinguished crowd,--their titles shine like the stars in the |
| 88 | firmament; Ph.D.'s, S.D.'s, and Litt.D.'s, bespangle the page as if |
| 89 | they were sprinkled over it from a pepper caster." |
| 90 | |
| 91 | Human nature is once for all so childish that every reality becomes a |
| 92 | sham somewhere, and in the minds of Presidents and Trustees the Ph.D. |
| 93 | degree is in point of fact already looked upon as a mere advertising |
| 94 | resource, a manner of throwing dust in the Public's eyes. "No |
| 95 | instructor who is not a Doctor" has become a maxim in the smaller |
| 96 | institutions which represent demand; and in each of the larger ones |
| 97 | which represent supply, the same belief in decorated scholarship |
| 98 | expresses itself in two antagonistic passions, one for multiplying as |
| 99 | much as possible the annual output of doctors, the other for raising |
| 100 | the standard of difficulty in passing, so that the Ph.D. of the special |
| 101 | institution shall carry a higher blaze of distinction than it does |
| 102 | elsewhere. Thus we at Harvard are proud of the number of candidates |
| 103 | whom we reject, and of the inability of men who are not *distingues* in |
| 104 | intellect to pass our tests. |
| 105 | |
| 106 | America is thus as a nation rapidly drifting towards a state of things |
| 107 | in which no man of science or letters will be accounted respectable |
| 108 | unless some kind of badge or diploma is stamped upon him, and in which |
| 109 | bare personality will be a mark of outcast estate. It seems to me high |
| 110 | time to rouse ourselves to consciousness, and to cast a critical eye |
| 111 | upon this decidedly grotesque tendency. Other nations suffer terribly |
| 112 | from the Mandarin disease. Are we doomed to suffer like the rest? |
| 113 | |
| 114 | Our higher degrees were instituted for the laudable purpose of |
| 115 | stimulating scholarship, especially in the form of "original research." |
| 116 | Experience has proved that great as the love of truth may be among men, |
| 117 | it can be made still greater by adventitious rewards. The winning of a |
| 118 | diploma certifying mastery and marking a barrier successfully passed, |
| 119 | acts as a challenge to the ambitious; and if the diploma will help to |
| 120 | gain bread-winning positions also, its power as a stimulus to work is |
| 121 | tremendously increased. So far, we are on innocent ground; it is well |
| 122 | for a country to have research in abundance, and our graduate schools |
| 123 | do but apply a normal psychological spur. But the institutionizing on |
| 124 | a large scale of any natural combination of need and motive always |
| 125 | tends to run into technicality and to develop a tyrannical Machine with |
| 126 | unforeseen powers of exclusion and corruption. Observation of the |
| 127 | workings of our Harvard system for twenty years past has brought some |
| 128 | of these drawbacks home to my consciousness, and I should like to call |
| 129 | the attention of my readers to this disadvantageous aspect of the |
| 130 | picture, and to make a couple of remedial suggestions, if I may. |
| 131 | |
| 132 | In the first place, it would seem that to stimulate study, and to |
| 133 | increase the *gelehrtes Publikum*, the class of highly educated men in |
| 134 | our country, is the only positive good, and consequently the sole |
| 135 | direct end at which our graduate schools, with their diploma-giving |
| 136 | powers, should aim. If other results have developed they should be |
| 137 | deemed secondary incidents, and if not desirable in themselves, they |
| 138 | should be carefully guarded against. |
| 139 | |
| 140 | To interfere with the free development of talent, to obstruct the |
| 141 | natural play of supply and demand in the teaching profession, to foster |
| 142 | academic snobbery by the prestige of certain privileged institutions, |
| 143 | to transfer accredited value from essential manhood to an outward |
| 144 | badge, to blight hopes and promote invidious sentiments, to divert the |
| 145 | attention of aspiring youth from direct dealings with truth to the |
| 146 | passing of examinations,--such consequences, if they exist, ought |
| 147 | surely to be regarded as drawbacks to the system, and an enlightened |
| 148 | public consciousness ought to be keenly alive to the importance of |
| 149 | reducing their amount. Candidates themselves do seem to be keenly |
| 150 | conscious of some of these evils, but outside of their ranks or in the |
| 151 | general public no such consciousness, so far as I can see, exists; or |
| 152 | if it does exist, it fails to express itself aloud. Schools, Colleges, |
| 153 | and Universities, appear enthusiastic over the entire system, just as |
| 154 | it stands, and unanimously applaud all its developments. |
| 155 | |
| 156 | I beg the reader to consider some of the secondary evils which I have |
| 157 | enumerated. First of all, is not our growing tendency to appoint no |
| 158 | instructors who are not also doctors an instance of pure sham? Will |
| 159 | any one pretend for a moment that the doctor's degree is a guarantee |
| 160 | that its possessor will be successful as a teacher? Notoriously his |
| 161 | moral, social and personal characteristics may utterly disqualify him |
| 162 | for success in the class-room; and of these characteristics his |
| 163 | doctor's examination is unable to take any account whatever. Certain |
| 164 | bare human beings will always be better candidates for a given place |
| 165 | than all the doctor-applicants on hand; and to exclude the former by a |
| 166 | rigid rule, and in the end to have to sift the latter by private |
| 167 | inquiry into their personal peculiarities among those who know them, |
| 168 | just as if they were not doctors at all, is to stultify one's own |
| 169 | procedure. You may say that at least you guard against ignorance of |
| 170 | the subject by considering only the candidates who are doctors; but how |
| 171 | then about making doctors in one subject teach a different subject? |
| 172 | This happened in the instance by which I introduced this article, and |
| 173 | it happens daily and hourly in all our colleges? The truth is that the |
| 174 | Doctor-Monopoly in teaching, which is becoming so rooted an American |
| 175 | custom, can show no serious grounds whatsoever for itself in reason. |
| 176 | As it actually prevails and grows in vogue among us, it is due to |
| 177 | childish motives exclusively. In reality it is but a sham, a bauble, a |
| 178 | dodge, whereby to decorate the catalogues of schools and colleges. |
| 179 | |
| 180 | Next, let us turn from the general promotion of a spirit of academic |
| 181 | snobbery to the particular damage done to individuals by the system. |
| 182 | |
| 183 | There are plenty of individuals so well endowed by nature that they |
| 184 | pass with ease all the ordeals with which life confronts them. Such |
| 185 | persons are born for professional success. Examinations have no |
| 186 | terrors for them, and interfere in no way with their spiritual or |
| 187 | worldly interests. There are others, not so gifted who nevertheless |
| 188 | rise to the challenge, get a stimulus from the difficulty, and become |
| 189 | doctors, not without some baleful nervous wear and tear and retardation |
| 190 | of their purely inner life, but on the whole successfully, and with |
| 191 | advantage. These two classes form the natural Ph.D.'s for whom the |
| 192 | degree is legitimately instituted. To be sure, the degree is of no |
| 193 | consequence one way or the other for the first sort of man, for in him |
| 194 | the personal worth obviously outshines the title. To the second set of |
| 195 | persons, however, the doctor ordeal may contribute a touch of energy |
| 196 | and solidity of scholarship which otherwise they might have lacked, and |
| 197 | were our candidates all drawn from these classes, no oppression would |
| 198 | result from the institution. |
| 199 | |
| 200 | But there is a third class of persons who are genuinely, and in the |
| 201 | most pathetic sense, the institution's victims. For this type of |
| 202 | character the academic life may become, after a certain point, a |
| 203 | virulent poison. Men without marked originality or native force, but |
| 204 | fond of truth and especially of books and study, ambitious of reward |
| 205 | and recognition, poor often, and needing a degree to get a teaching |
| 206 | position, weak in the eyes of their examiners,--among these we find the |
| 207 | veritable *chair a canon* of the wars of learning, the unfit in the |
| 208 | academic struggle for existence. There are individuals of this sort |
| 209 | for whom to pass one degree after another seems the limit of earthly |
| 210 | aspiration. Your private advice does not discourage them. They will |
| 211 | fail, and go away to recuperate, and then present themselves for |
| 212 | another ordeal, and sometimes prolong the process into middle life. Or |
| 213 | else, if they are less heroic morally they will accept the failure as a |
| 214 | sentence of doom that they are not fit, and are broken-spirited men |
| 215 | thereafter. |
| 216 | |
| 217 | We of the university faculties are responsible for deliberately |
| 218 | creating this new class of American social failures, and heavy is the |
| 219 | responsibility. We advertise our "schools" and send out our |
| 220 | degree-requirements, knowing well that aspirants of all sorts will be |
| 221 | attracted, and at the same time we set a standard which intends to pass |
| 222 | no man who has not native intellectual distinction. We know that there |
| 223 | is no test, however absurd, by which, if a title or decoration, a |
| 224 | public badge or mark, were to be won by it, some weakly suggestible or |
| 225 | hauntable persons would not feel challenged, and remain unhappy if they |
| 226 | went without it. We dangle our three magic letters before the eyes of |
| 227 | these predestined victims, and they swarm to us like moths to an |
| 228 | electric light. They come at a time when failure can no longer be |
| 229 | repaired easily and when the wounds it leaves are permanent; and we say |
| 230 | deliberately that mere work faithfully performed, as they perform it, |
| 231 | will not by itself save them, they must in addition put in evidence the |
| 232 | one thing they have not got, namely this quality of intellectual |
| 233 | distinction. Occasionally, out of sheer human pity, we ignore our high |
| 234 | and mighty standard and pass them. Usually, however, the standard, and |
| 235 | not the candidate, commands our fidelity. The result is caprice, |
| 236 | majorities of one on the jury, and on the whole a confession that our |
| 237 | pretensions about the degree cannot be lived up to consistently. Thus, |
| 238 | partiality in the favored cases; in the unfavored, blood on our hands; |
| 239 | and in both a bad conscience,--are the results of our administration. |
| 240 | |
| 241 | The more widespread becomes the popular belief that our diplomas are |
| 242 | indispensable hall-marks to show the sterling metal of their holders, |
| 243 | the more widespread these corruptions will become. We ought to look to |
| 244 | the future carefully, for it takes generations for a national custom, |
| 245 | once rooted, to be grown away from. All the European countries are |
| 246 | seeking to diminish the check upon individual spontaneity which state |
| 247 | examinations with their tyrannous growth have brought in their train. |
| 248 | We have had to institute state examinations too; and it will perhaps be |
| 249 | fortunate if some day hereafter our descendants, comparing machine with |
| 250 | machine, do not sigh with regret for old times and American freedom, |
| 251 | and wish that the *regime* of the dear old bosses might be reinstalled, |
| 252 | with plain human nature, the glad hand and the marble heart, liking and |
| 253 | disliking, and man-to-man relations grown possible again. Meanwhile, |
| 254 | whatever evolution our state-examinations are destined to undergo, our |
| 255 | universities at least should never cease to regard themselves as the |
| 256 | jealous custodians of personal and spiritual spontaneity. They are |
| 257 | indeed its only organized and recognized custodians in America to-day. |
| 258 | They ought to guard against contributing to the increase of officialism |
| 259 | and snobbery and insincerity as against a pestilence; they ought to |
| 260 | keep truth and disinterested labor always in the foreground, treat |
| 261 | degrees as secondary incidents, and in season and out of season make it |
| 262 | plain that what they live for is to help men's souls, and not to |
| 263 | decorate their persons with diplomas. |
| 264 | |
| 265 | There seem to be three obvious ways in which the increasing hold of the |
| 266 | Ph.D. Octopus upon American life can be kept in check. |
| 267 | |
| 268 | The first way lies with the universities. They can lower their |
| 269 | fantastic standards (which here at Harvard we are so proud of) and give |
| 270 | the doctorate as a matter of course, just as they give the bachelor's |
| 271 | degree, for a due amount of time spent in patient labor in a special |
| 272 | department of learning, whether the man be a brilliantly gifted |
| 273 | individual or not. Surely native distinction needs no official stamp, |
| 274 | and should disdain to ask for one. On the other hand, faithful labor, |
| 275 | however commonplace, and years devoted to a subject, always deserve to |
| 276 | be acknowledged and requited. |
| 277 | |
| 278 | The second way lies with both the universities and colleges. Let them |
| 279 | give up their unspeakably silly ambition to bespangle their lists of |
| 280 | officers with these doctorial titles. Let them look more to substance |
| 281 | and less to vanity and sham. |
| 282 | |
| 283 | The third way lies with the individual student, and with his personal |
| 284 | advisers in the faculties. Every man of native power, who might take a |
| 285 | higher degree, and refuses to do so, because examinations interfere |
| 286 | with the free following out of his more immediate intellectual aims, |
| 287 | deserves well of his country, and in a rightly organized community, |
| 288 | would not be made to suffer for his independence. With many men the |
| 289 | passing of these extraneous tests is a very grievous interference |
| 290 | indeed. Private letters of recommendation from their instructors, |
| 291 | which in any event are ultimately needful, ought, in these cases, |
| 292 | completely to offset the lack of the breadwinning degree; and |
| 293 | instructors ought to be ready to advise students against it upon |
| 294 | occasion, and to pledge themselves to back them later personally, in |
| 295 | the market-struggle which they have to face. |
| 296 | |
| 297 | It is indeed odd to see this love of titles--and such titles--growing |
| 298 | up in a country or which the recognition of individuality and bare |
| 299 | manhood have so long been supposed to be the very soul. The |
| 300 | independence of the State, in which most of our colleges stand, |
| 301 | relieves us of those more odious forms of academic politics which |
| 302 | continental European countries present. Anything like the elaborate |
| 303 | university machine of France, with its throttling influences upon |
| 304 | individuals is unknown here. The spectacle of the "Rath" distinction |
| 305 | in its innumerable spheres and grades, with which all Germany is |
| 306 | crawling to-day, is displeasing to American eyes; and displeasing also |
| 307 | in some respects is the institution of knighthood in England, which, |
| 308 | aping as it does an aristocratic title, enables one's wife as well as |
| 309 | one's self so easily to dazzle the servants at the house of one's |
| 310 | friends. But are we Americans ourselves destined after all to hunger |
| 311 | after similar vanities on an infinitely more contemptible scale? And |
| 312 | is individuality with us also going to count for nothing unless stamped |
| 313 | and licensed and authenticated by some title-giving machine? Let us |
| 314 | pray that our ancient national genius may long preserve vitality enough |
| 315 | to guard us from a future so unmanly and so unbeautiful! |
| 316 | </quote> |