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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 |
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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> |