William James - The PhD Octopus.html

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  18     <h1>William James - The PhD Octopus</h1>
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  29 <p>Thanks to the public domain I have republished the full text of
  30 William James's article <em><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/20768">The Ph.D Octopus</a></em>. It is a rather nice essay on
  31 the over-reliance on academic accredation as a measure of intellectual
  32 worth which I find is a particularly relevant issue today.</p>
  33
  34 <p>What makes this most interesting is that it was published in 1903 by a
  35 man who was seeing our present-day culture form before his eyes. Ah!
  36 What an exciting&mdash;or perhaps, terrifying&mdash;time the beginning of the
  37 20th century must have been! All of the technological <em>progress</em> in our
  38 time has been meaningless in contrast to our utter cultural
  39 stagnation. Perhaps exciting times are here for us now; perhaps the
  40 time has come to reverse&mdash;or transcend&mdash;the cultural <em>progress</em> of the
  41 early 20th century.</p>
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  43 <h2><a name="sec1" id="sec1"></a>
  44 Full Text</h2>
  45
  46 <blockquote>
  47 <p class="quoted">
  48 Some years ago we had at our Harvard Graduate School a very brilliant
  49 student of Philosophy, who, after leaving us and supporting himself by
  50 literary labor for three years, received an appointment to teach
  51 English Literature at a sister-institution of learning.  The governors
  52 of this institution, however, had no sooner communicated the
  53 appointment than they made the awful discovery that they had enrolled
  54 upon their staff a person who was unprovided with the Ph.D. degree.
  55 The man in question had been satisfied to work at Philosophy for her
  56 own sweet (or bitter) sake, and had disdained to consider that an
  57 academic bauble should be his reward.</p>
  58 <p class="quoted">His appointment had thus been made under a misunderstanding.  He was
  59 not the proper man; and there was nothing to do but to inform him of
  60 the fact.  It was notified to him by his new President that his
  61 appointment must be revoked, or that a Harvard doctor's degree must
  62 forthwith be procured.</p>
  63 <p class="quoted">Although it was already the spring of the year, our Subject, being a
  64 man of spirit, took up the challenge, turned his back upon literature
  65 (which in view of his approaching duties might have seemed his more
  66 urgent concern) and spent the weeks that were left him, in writing a
  67 metaphysical thesis and grinding his psychology, logic and history of
  68 philosophy up again, so as to pass our formidable ordeals.</p>
  69 <p class="quoted">When the thesis came to be read by our committee, we could not pass it.
  70 Brilliancy and originality by themselves won't save a thesis for the
  71 doctorate; it must also exhibit a heavy technical apparatus of
  72 learning; and this our candidate had neglected to bring to bear.  So,
  73 telling him that he was temporarily rejected, we advised him to pad out
  74 the thesis properly, and return with it next year, at the same time
  75 informing his new President that this signified nothing as to his
  76 merits, that he was of ultra Ph.D. quality, and one of the strongest
  77 men with whom we had ever had to deal.</p>
  78 <p class="quoted">To our surprise we were given to understand in reply that the quality
  79 <em>per se</em> of the man signified nothing in this connection, and that
  80 three magical letters were the thing seriously required.  The College
  81 had always gloried in a list of faculty members who bore the doctor's
  82 title, and to make a gap in the galaxy, and admit a common fox without
  83 a tail, would be a degradation impossible to be thought of.  We wrote
  84 again, pointing out that a Ph.D. in philosophy would prove little
  85 anyhow as to one's ability to teach literature; we sent separate
  86 letters in which we outdid each other in eulogy of our candidate's
  87 powers, for indeed they were great; and at last, <em>mirabile dictu</em>, our
  88 eloquence prevailed.  He was allowed to retain his appointment
  89 provisionally, on condition that one year later at the farthest his
  90 miserably naked name should be prolonged by the sacred appendage the
  91 lack of which had given so much trouble to all concerned.</p>
  92 <p class="quoted">Accordingly he came up here the following spring with an adequate
  93 thesis (known since in print as a most brilliant contribution to
  94 metaphysics), passed a first-rate examination, wiped out the stain, and
  95 brought his college into proper relations with the world again.
  96 Whether his teaching, during that first year, of English Literature was
  97 made any the better by the impending examination in a different
  98 subject, is a question which I will not try to solve.</p>
  99 <p class="quoted">I have related this incident at such length because it is so
 100 characteristic of American academic conditions at the present day.
 101 Graduate schools still are something of a novelty, and higher diplomas
 102 something of a rarity.  The latter, therefore, carry a vague sense of
 103 preciousness and honor, and have a particularly &quot;up-to-date&quot;
 104 appearance, and it is no wonder if smaller institutions, unable to
 105 attract professors already eminent, and forced usually to recruit their
 106 faculties from the relatively young, should hope to compensate for the
 107 obscurity of the names of their officers of instruction by the
 108 abundance of decorative titles by which those names are followed on the
 109 pages of the catalogues where they appear.  The dazzled reader of the
 110 list, the parent or student, says to himself, &quot;This must be a terribly
 111 distinguished crowd,&mdash;their titles shine like the stars in the
 112 firmament; Ph.D.'s, S.D.'s, and Litt.D.'s, bespangle the page as if
 113 they were sprinkled over it from a pepper caster.&quot;</p>
 114 <p class="quoted">Human nature is once for all so childish that every reality becomes a
 115 sham somewhere, and in the minds of Presidents and Trustees the Ph.D.
 116 degree is in point of fact already looked upon as a mere advertising
 117 resource, a manner of throwing dust in the Public's eyes.  &quot;No
 118 instructor who is not a Doctor&quot; has become a maxim in the smaller
 119 institutions which represent demand; and in each of the larger ones
 120 which represent supply, the same belief in decorated scholarship
 121 expresses itself in two antagonistic passions, one for multiplying as
 122 much as possible the annual output of doctors, the other for raising
 123 the standard of difficulty in passing, so that the Ph.D. of the special
 124 institution shall carry a higher blaze of distinction than it does
 125 elsewhere.  Thus we at Harvard are proud of the number of candidates
 126 whom we reject, and of the inability of men who are not <em>distingues</em> in
 127 intellect to pass our tests.</p>
 128 <p class="quoted">America is thus as a nation rapidly drifting towards a state of things
 129 in which no man of science or letters will be accounted respectable
 130 unless some kind of badge or diploma is stamped upon him, and in which
 131 bare personality will be a mark of outcast estate.  It seems to me high
 132 time to rouse ourselves to consciousness, and to cast a critical eye
 133 upon this decidedly grotesque tendency.  Other nations suffer terribly
 134 from the Mandarin disease.  Are we doomed to suffer like the rest?</p>
 135 <p class="quoted">Our higher degrees were instituted for the laudable purpose of
 136 stimulating scholarship, especially in the form of &quot;original research.&quot;
 137 Experience has proved that great as the love of truth may be among men,
 138 it can be made still greater by adventitious rewards.  The winning of a
 139 diploma certifying mastery and marking a barrier successfully passed,
 140 acts as a challenge to the ambitious; and if the diploma will help to
 141 gain bread-winning positions also, its power as a stimulus to work is
 142 tremendously increased.  So far, we are on innocent ground; it is well
 143 for a country to have research in abundance, and our graduate schools
 144 do but apply a normal psychological spur.  But the institutionizing on
 145 a large scale of any natural combination of need and motive always
 146 tends to run into technicality and to develop a tyrannical Machine with
 147 unforeseen powers of exclusion and corruption.  Observation of the
 148 workings of our Harvard system for twenty years past has brought some
 149 of these drawbacks home to my consciousness, and I should like to call
 150 the attention of my readers to this disadvantageous aspect of the
 151 picture, and to make a couple of remedial suggestions, if I may.</p>
 152 <p class="quoted">In the first place, it would seem that to stimulate study, and to
 153 increase the <em>gelehrtes Publikum</em>, the class of highly educated men in
 154 our country, is the only positive good, and consequently the sole
 155 direct end at which our graduate schools, with their diploma-giving
 156 powers, should aim.  If other results have developed they should be
 157 deemed secondary incidents, and if not desirable in themselves, they
 158 should be carefully guarded against.</p>
 159 <p class="quoted">To interfere with the free development of talent, to obstruct the
 160 natural play of supply and demand in the teaching profession, to foster
 161 academic snobbery by the prestige of certain privileged institutions,
 162 to transfer accredited value from essential manhood to an outward
 163 badge, to blight hopes and promote invidious sentiments, to divert the
 164 attention of aspiring youth from direct dealings with truth to the
 165 passing of examinations,&mdash;such consequences, if they exist, ought
 166 surely to be regarded as drawbacks to the system, and an enlightened
 167 public consciousness ought to be keenly alive to the importance of
 168 reducing their amount.  Candidates themselves do seem to be keenly
 169 conscious of some of these evils, but outside of their ranks or in the
 170 general public no such consciousness, so far as I can see, exists; or
 171 if it does exist, it fails to express itself aloud.  Schools, Colleges,
 172 and Universities, appear enthusiastic over the entire system, just as
 173 it stands, and unanimously applaud all its developments.</p>
 174 <p class="quoted">I beg the reader to consider some of the secondary evils which I have
 175 enumerated.  First of all, is not our growing tendency to appoint no
 176 instructors who are not also doctors an instance of pure sham?  Will
 177 any one pretend for a moment that the doctor's degree is a guarantee
 178 that its possessor will be successful as a teacher?  Notoriously his
 179 moral, social and personal characteristics may utterly disqualify him
 180 for success in the class-room; and of these characteristics his
 181 doctor's examination is unable to take any account whatever.  Certain
 182 bare human beings will always be better candidates for a given place
 183 than all the doctor-applicants on hand; and to exclude the former by a
 184 rigid rule, and in the end to have to sift the latter by private
 185 inquiry into their personal peculiarities among those who know them,
 186 just as if they were not doctors at all, is to stultify one's own
 187 procedure.  You may say that at least you guard against ignorance of
 188 the subject by considering only the candidates who are doctors; but how
 189 then about making doctors in one subject teach a different subject?
 190 This happened in the instance by which I introduced this article, and
 191 it happens daily and hourly in all our colleges?  The truth is that the
 192 Doctor-Monopoly in teaching, which is becoming so rooted an American
 193 custom, can show no serious grounds whatsoever for itself in reason.
 194 As it actually prevails and grows in vogue among us, it is due to
 195 childish motives exclusively.  In reality it is but a sham, a bauble, a
 196 dodge, whereby to decorate the catalogues of schools and colleges.</p>
 197 <p class="quoted">Next, let us turn from the general promotion of a spirit of academic
 198 snobbery to the particular damage done to individuals by the system.</p>
 199 <p class="quoted">There are plenty of individuals so well endowed by nature that they
 200 pass with ease all the ordeals with which life confronts them.  Such
 201 persons are born for professional success.  Examinations have no
 202 terrors for them, and interfere in no way with their spiritual or
 203 worldly interests.  There are others, not so gifted who nevertheless
 204 rise to the challenge, get a stimulus from the difficulty, and become
 205 doctors, not without some baleful nervous wear and tear and retardation
 206 of their purely inner life, but on the whole successfully, and with
 207 advantage.  These two classes form the natural Ph.D.'s for whom the
 208 degree is legitimately instituted.  To be sure, the degree is of no
 209 consequence one way or the other for the first sort of man, for in him
 210 the personal worth obviously outshines the title.  To the second set of
 211 persons, however, the doctor ordeal may contribute a touch of energy
 212 and solidity of scholarship which otherwise they might have lacked, and
 213 were our candidates all drawn from these classes, no oppression would
 214 result from the institution.</p>
 215 <p class="quoted">But there is a third class of persons who are genuinely, and in the
 216 most pathetic sense, the institution's victims.  For this type of
 217 character the academic life may become, after a certain point, a
 218 virulent poison.  Men without marked originality or native force, but
 219 fond of truth and especially of books and study, ambitious of reward
 220 and recognition, poor often, and needing a degree to get a teaching
 221 position, weak in the eyes of their examiners,&mdash;among these we find the
 222 veritable <em>chair a canon</em> of the wars of learning, the unfit in the
 223 academic struggle for existence.  There are individuals of this sort
 224 for whom to pass one degree after another seems the limit of earthly
 225 aspiration.  Your private advice does not discourage them.  They will
 226 fail, and go away to recuperate, and then present themselves for
 227 another ordeal, and sometimes prolong the process into middle life.  Or
 228 else, if they are less heroic morally they will accept the failure as a
 229 sentence of doom that they are not fit, and are broken-spirited men
 230 thereafter.</p>
 231 <p class="quoted">We of the university faculties are responsible for deliberately
 232 creating this new class of American social failures, and heavy is the
 233 responsibility.  We advertise our &quot;schools&quot; and send out our
 234 degree-requirements, knowing well that aspirants of all sorts will be
 235 attracted, and at the same time we set a standard which intends to pass
 236 no man who has not native intellectual distinction.  We know that there
 237 is no test, however absurd, by which, if a title or decoration, a
 238 public badge or mark, were to be won by it, some weakly suggestible or
 239 hauntable persons would not feel challenged, and remain unhappy if they
 240 went without it.  We dangle our three magic letters before the eyes of
 241 these predestined victims, and they swarm to us like moths to an
 242 electric light.  They come at a time when failure can no longer be
 243 repaired easily and when the wounds it leaves are permanent; and we say
 244 deliberately that mere work faithfully performed, as they perform it,
 245 will not by itself save them, they must in addition put in evidence the
 246 one thing they have not got, namely this quality of intellectual
 247 distinction.  Occasionally, out of sheer human pity, we ignore our high
 248 and mighty standard and pass them.  Usually, however, the standard, and
 249 not the candidate, commands our fidelity.  The result is caprice,
 250 majorities of one on the jury, and on the whole a confession that our
 251 pretensions about the degree cannot be lived up to consistently.  Thus,
 252 partiality in the favored cases; in the unfavored, blood on our hands;
 253 and in both a bad conscience,&mdash;are the results of our administration.</p>
 254 <p class="quoted">The more widespread becomes the popular belief that our diplomas are
 255 indispensable hall-marks to show the sterling metal of their holders,
 256 the more widespread these corruptions will become.  We ought to look to
 257 the future carefully, for it takes generations for a national custom,
 258 once rooted, to be grown away from.  All the European countries are
 259 seeking to diminish the check upon individual spontaneity which state
 260 examinations with their tyrannous growth have brought in their train.
 261 We have had to institute state examinations too; and it will perhaps be
 262 fortunate if some day hereafter our descendants, comparing machine with
 263 machine, do not sigh with regret for old times and American freedom,
 264 and wish that the <em>regime</em> of the dear old bosses might be reinstalled,
 265 with plain human nature, the glad hand and the marble heart, liking and
 266 disliking, and man-to-man relations grown possible again.  Meanwhile,
 267 whatever evolution our state-examinations are destined to undergo, our
 268 universities at least should never cease to regard themselves as the
 269 jealous custodians of personal and spiritual spontaneity.  They are
 270 indeed its only organized and recognized custodians in America to-day.
 271 They ought to guard against contributing to the increase of officialism
 272 and snobbery and insincerity as against a pestilence; they ought to
 273 keep truth and disinterested labor always in the foreground, treat
 274 degrees as secondary incidents, and in season and out of season make it
 275 plain that what they live for is to help men's souls, and not to
 276 decorate their persons with diplomas.</p>
 277 <p class="quoted">There seem to be three obvious ways in which the increasing hold of the
 278 Ph.D. Octopus upon American life can be kept in check.</p>
 279 <p class="quoted">The first way lies with the universities.  They can lower their
 280 fantastic standards (which here at Harvard we are so proud of) and give
 281 the doctorate as a matter of course, just as they give the bachelor's
 282 degree, for a due amount of time spent in patient labor in a special
 283 department of learning, whether the man be a brilliantly gifted
 284 individual or not.  Surely native distinction needs no official stamp,
 285 and should disdain to ask for one.  On the other hand, faithful labor,
 286 however commonplace, and years devoted to a subject, always deserve to
 287 be acknowledged and requited.</p>
 288 <p class="quoted">The second way lies with both the universities and colleges.  Let them
 289 give up their unspeakably silly ambition to bespangle their lists of
 290 officers with these doctorial titles.  Let them look more to substance
 291 and less to vanity and sham.</p>
 292 <p class="quoted">The third way lies with the individual student, and with his personal
 293 advisers in the faculties.  Every man of native power, who might take a
 294 higher degree, and refuses to do so, because examinations interfere
 295 with the free following out of his more immediate intellectual aims,
 296 deserves well of his country, and in a rightly organized community,
 297 would not be made to suffer for his independence.  With many men the
 298 passing of these extraneous tests is a very grievous interference
 299 indeed.  Private letters of recommendation from their instructors,
 300 which in any event are ultimately needful, ought, in these cases,
 301 completely to offset the lack of the breadwinning degree; and
 302 instructors ought to be ready to advise students against it upon
 303 occasion, and to pledge themselves to back them later personally, in
 304 the market-struggle which they have to face.</p>
 305 <p class="quoted">It is indeed odd to see this love of titles&mdash;and such titles&mdash;growing
 306 up in a country or which the recognition of individuality and bare
 307 manhood have so long been supposed to be the very soul.  The
 308 independence of the State, in which most of our colleges stand,
 309 relieves us of those more odious forms of academic politics which
 310 continental European countries present.  Anything like the elaborate
 311 university machine of France, with its throttling influences upon
 312 individuals is unknown here.  The spectacle of the &quot;Rath&quot; distinction
 313 in its innumerable spheres and grades, with which all Germany is
 314 crawling to-day, is displeasing to American eyes; and displeasing also
 315 in some respects is the institution of knighthood in England, which,
 316 aping as it does an aristocratic title, enables one's wife as well as
 317 one's self so easily to dazzle the servants at the house of one's
 318 friends.  But are we Americans ourselves destined after all to hunger
 319 after similar vanities on an infinitely more contemptible scale?  And
 320 is individuality with us also going to count for nothing unless stamped
 321 and licensed and authenticated by some title-giving machine?  Let us
 322 pray that our ancient national genius may long preserve vitality enough
 323 to guard us from a future so unmanly and so unbeautiful!</p>
 324
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 354 <p class="cke-footer">Lindsay (Carlton): should i eat more post its
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