William James - The PhD Octopus.html

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  16     <h1>William James - The PhD Octopus</h1>
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  25
  26 <!-- Page published by Emacs Muse begins here --><p>Thanks to the public domain I have republished the full text of
  27 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
  28 the over-reliance on academic accredation as a measure of intellectual
  29 worth which I find is a particularly relevant issue today.</p>
  30
  31 <p>What makes this most interesting is that it was published in 1903 by a
  32 man who was seeing our present-day culture form before his eyes. Ah!
  33 What an exciting&mdash;or perhaps, terrifying&mdash;time the beginning of the
  34 20th century must have been! All of the technological <em>progress</em> in our
  35 time has been meaningless in contrast to our utter cultural
  36 stagnation. Perhaps exciting times are here for us now; perhaps the
  37 time has come to reverse&mdash;or transcend&mdash;the cultural <em>progress</em> of the
  38 early 20th century.</p>
  39
  40 <h2><a name="sec1" id="sec1"></a>
  41 Full Text</h2>
  42
  43 <blockquote>
  44 <p class="quoted">
  45 Some years ago we had at our Harvard Graduate School a very brilliant
  46 student of Philosophy, who, after leaving us and supporting himself by
  47 literary labor for three years, received an appointment to teach
  48 English Literature at a sister-institution of learning.  The governors
  49 of this institution, however, had no sooner communicated the
  50 appointment than they made the awful discovery that they had enrolled
  51 upon their staff a person who was unprovided with the Ph.D. degree.
  52 The man in question had been satisfied to work at Philosophy for her
  53 own sweet (or bitter) sake, and had disdained to consider that an
  54 academic bauble should be his reward.</p>
  55 <p class="quoted">His appointment had thus been made under a misunderstanding.  He was
  56 not the proper man; and there was nothing to do but to inform him of
  57 the fact.  It was notified to him by his new President that his
  58 appointment must be revoked, or that a Harvard doctor's degree must
  59 forthwith be procured.</p>
  60 <p class="quoted">Although it was already the spring of the year, our Subject, being a
  61 man of spirit, took up the challenge, turned his back upon literature
  62 (which in view of his approaching duties might have seemed his more
  63 urgent concern) and spent the weeks that were left him, in writing a
  64 metaphysical thesis and grinding his psychology, logic and history of
  65 philosophy up again, so as to pass our formidable ordeals.</p>
  66 <p class="quoted">When the thesis came to be read by our committee, we could not pass it.
  67 Brilliancy and originality by themselves won't save a thesis for the
  68 doctorate; it must also exhibit a heavy technical apparatus of
  69 learning; and this our candidate had neglected to bring to bear.  So,
  70 telling him that he was temporarily rejected, we advised him to pad out
  71 the thesis properly, and return with it next year, at the same time
  72 informing his new President that this signified nothing as to his
  73 merits, that he was of ultra Ph.D. quality, and one of the strongest
  74 men with whom we had ever had to deal.</p>
  75 <p class="quoted">To our surprise we were given to understand in reply that the quality
  76 <em>per se</em> of the man signified nothing in this connection, and that
  77 three magical letters were the thing seriously required.  The College
  78 had always gloried in a list of faculty members who bore the doctor's
  79 title, and to make a gap in the galaxy, and admit a common fox without
  80 a tail, would be a degradation impossible to be thought of.  We wrote
  81 again, pointing out that a Ph.D. in philosophy would prove little
  82 anyhow as to one's ability to teach literature; we sent separate
  83 letters in which we outdid each other in eulogy of our candidate's
  84 powers, for indeed they were great; and at last, <em>mirabile dictu</em>, our
  85 eloquence prevailed.  He was allowed to retain his appointment
  86 provisionally, on condition that one year later at the farthest his
  87 miserably naked name should be prolonged by the sacred appendage the
  88 lack of which had given so much trouble to all concerned.</p>
  89 <p class="quoted">Accordingly he came up here the following spring with an adequate
  90 thesis (known since in print as a most brilliant contribution to
  91 metaphysics), passed a first-rate examination, wiped out the stain, and
  92 brought his college into proper relations with the world again.
  93 Whether his teaching, during that first year, of English Literature was
  94 made any the better by the impending examination in a different
  95 subject, is a question which I will not try to solve.</p>
  96 <p class="quoted">I have related this incident at such length because it is so
  97 characteristic of American academic conditions at the present day.
  98 Graduate schools still are something of a novelty, and higher diplomas
  99 something of a rarity.  The latter, therefore, carry a vague sense of
 100 preciousness and honor, and have a particularly &quot;up-to-date&quot;
 101 appearance, and it is no wonder if smaller institutions, unable to
 102 attract professors already eminent, and forced usually to recruit their
 103 faculties from the relatively young, should hope to compensate for the
 104 obscurity of the names of their officers of instruction by the
 105 abundance of decorative titles by which those names are followed on the
 106 pages of the catalogues where they appear.  The dazzled reader of the
 107 list, the parent or student, says to himself, &quot;This must be a terribly
 108 distinguished crowd,&mdash;their titles shine like the stars in the
 109 firmament; Ph.D.'s, S.D.'s, and Litt.D.'s, bespangle the page as if
 110 they were sprinkled over it from a pepper caster.&quot;</p>
 111 <p class="quoted">Human nature is once for all so childish that every reality becomes a
 112 sham somewhere, and in the minds of Presidents and Trustees the Ph.D.
 113 degree is in point of fact already looked upon as a mere advertising
 114 resource, a manner of throwing dust in the Public's eyes.  &quot;No
 115 instructor who is not a Doctor&quot; has become a maxim in the smaller
 116 institutions which represent demand; and in each of the larger ones
 117 which represent supply, the same belief in decorated scholarship
 118 expresses itself in two antagonistic passions, one for multiplying as
 119 much as possible the annual output of doctors, the other for raising
 120 the standard of difficulty in passing, so that the Ph.D. of the special
 121 institution shall carry a higher blaze of distinction than it does
 122 elsewhere.  Thus we at Harvard are proud of the number of candidates
 123 whom we reject, and of the inability of men who are not <em>distingues</em> in
 124 intellect to pass our tests.</p>
 125 <p class="quoted">America is thus as a nation rapidly drifting towards a state of things
 126 in which no man of science or letters will be accounted respectable
 127 unless some kind of badge or diploma is stamped upon him, and in which
 128 bare personality will be a mark of outcast estate.  It seems to me high
 129 time to rouse ourselves to consciousness, and to cast a critical eye
 130 upon this decidedly grotesque tendency.  Other nations suffer terribly
 131 from the Mandarin disease.  Are we doomed to suffer like the rest?</p>
 132 <p class="quoted">Our higher degrees were instituted for the laudable purpose of
 133 stimulating scholarship, especially in the form of &quot;original research.&quot;
 134 Experience has proved that great as the love of truth may be among men,
 135 it can be made still greater by adventitious rewards.  The winning of a
 136 diploma certifying mastery and marking a barrier successfully passed,
 137 acts as a challenge to the ambitious; and if the diploma will help to
 138 gain bread-winning positions also, its power as a stimulus to work is
 139 tremendously increased.  So far, we are on innocent ground; it is well
 140 for a country to have research in abundance, and our graduate schools
 141 do but apply a normal psychological spur.  But the institutionizing on
 142 a large scale of any natural combination of need and motive always
 143 tends to run into technicality and to develop a tyrannical Machine with
 144 unforeseen powers of exclusion and corruption.  Observation of the
 145 workings of our Harvard system for twenty years past has brought some
 146 of these drawbacks home to my consciousness, and I should like to call
 147 the attention of my readers to this disadvantageous aspect of the
 148 picture, and to make a couple of remedial suggestions, if I may.</p>
 149 <p class="quoted">In the first place, it would seem that to stimulate study, and to
 150 increase the <em>gelehrtes Publikum</em>, the class of highly educated men in
 151 our country, is the only positive good, and consequently the sole
 152 direct end at which our graduate schools, with their diploma-giving
 153 powers, should aim.  If other results have developed they should be
 154 deemed secondary incidents, and if not desirable in themselves, they
 155 should be carefully guarded against.</p>
 156 <p class="quoted">To interfere with the free development of talent, to obstruct the
 157 natural play of supply and demand in the teaching profession, to foster
 158 academic snobbery by the prestige of certain privileged institutions,
 159 to transfer accredited value from essential manhood to an outward
 160 badge, to blight hopes and promote invidious sentiments, to divert the
 161 attention of aspiring youth from direct dealings with truth to the
 162 passing of examinations,&mdash;such consequences, if they exist, ought
 163 surely to be regarded as drawbacks to the system, and an enlightened
 164 public consciousness ought to be keenly alive to the importance of
 165 reducing their amount.  Candidates themselves do seem to be keenly
 166 conscious of some of these evils, but outside of their ranks or in the
 167 general public no such consciousness, so far as I can see, exists; or
 168 if it does exist, it fails to express itself aloud.  Schools, Colleges,
 169 and Universities, appear enthusiastic over the entire system, just as
 170 it stands, and unanimously applaud all its developments.</p>
 171 <p class="quoted">I beg the reader to consider some of the secondary evils which I have
 172 enumerated.  First of all, is not our growing tendency to appoint no
 173 instructors who are not also doctors an instance of pure sham?  Will
 174 any one pretend for a moment that the doctor's degree is a guarantee
 175 that its possessor will be successful as a teacher?  Notoriously his
 176 moral, social and personal characteristics may utterly disqualify him
 177 for success in the class-room; and of these characteristics his
 178 doctor's examination is unable to take any account whatever.  Certain
 179 bare human beings will always be better candidates for a given place
 180 than all the doctor-applicants on hand; and to exclude the former by a
 181 rigid rule, and in the end to have to sift the latter by private
 182 inquiry into their personal peculiarities among those who know them,
 183 just as if they were not doctors at all, is to stultify one's own
 184 procedure.  You may say that at least you guard against ignorance of
 185 the subject by considering only the candidates who are doctors; but how
 186 then about making doctors in one subject teach a different subject?
 187 This happened in the instance by which I introduced this article, and
 188 it happens daily and hourly in all our colleges?  The truth is that the
 189 Doctor-Monopoly in teaching, which is becoming so rooted an American
 190 custom, can show no serious grounds whatsoever for itself in reason.
 191 As it actually prevails and grows in vogue among us, it is due to
 192 childish motives exclusively.  In reality it is but a sham, a bauble, a
 193 dodge, whereby to decorate the catalogues of schools and colleges.</p>
 194 <p class="quoted">Next, let us turn from the general promotion of a spirit of academic
 195 snobbery to the particular damage done to individuals by the system.</p>
 196 <p class="quoted">There are plenty of individuals so well endowed by nature that they
 197 pass with ease all the ordeals with which life confronts them.  Such
 198 persons are born for professional success.  Examinations have no
 199 terrors for them, and interfere in no way with their spiritual or
 200 worldly interests.  There are others, not so gifted who nevertheless
 201 rise to the challenge, get a stimulus from the difficulty, and become
 202 doctors, not without some baleful nervous wear and tear and retardation
 203 of their purely inner life, but on the whole successfully, and with
 204 advantage.  These two classes form the natural Ph.D.'s for whom the
 205 degree is legitimately instituted.  To be sure, the degree is of no
 206 consequence one way or the other for the first sort of man, for in him
 207 the personal worth obviously outshines the title.  To the second set of
 208 persons, however, the doctor ordeal may contribute a touch of energy
 209 and solidity of scholarship which otherwise they might have lacked, and
 210 were our candidates all drawn from these classes, no oppression would
 211 result from the institution.</p>
 212 <p class="quoted">But there is a third class of persons who are genuinely, and in the
 213 most pathetic sense, the institution's victims.  For this type of
 214 character the academic life may become, after a certain point, a
 215 virulent poison.  Men without marked originality or native force, but
 216 fond of truth and especially of books and study, ambitious of reward
 217 and recognition, poor often, and needing a degree to get a teaching
 218 position, weak in the eyes of their examiners,&mdash;among these we find the
 219 veritable <em>chair a canon</em> of the wars of learning, the unfit in the
 220 academic struggle for existence.  There are individuals of this sort
 221 for whom to pass one degree after another seems the limit of earthly
 222 aspiration.  Your private advice does not discourage them.  They will
 223 fail, and go away to recuperate, and then present themselves for
 224 another ordeal, and sometimes prolong the process into middle life.  Or
 225 else, if they are less heroic morally they will accept the failure as a
 226 sentence of doom that they are not fit, and are broken-spirited men
 227 thereafter.</p>
 228 <p class="quoted">We of the university faculties are responsible for deliberately
 229 creating this new class of American social failures, and heavy is the
 230 responsibility.  We advertise our &quot;schools&quot; and send out our
 231 degree-requirements, knowing well that aspirants of all sorts will be
 232 attracted, and at the same time we set a standard which intends to pass
 233 no man who has not native intellectual distinction.  We know that there
 234 is no test, however absurd, by which, if a title or decoration, a
 235 public badge or mark, were to be won by it, some weakly suggestible or
 236 hauntable persons would not feel challenged, and remain unhappy if they
 237 went without it.  We dangle our three magic letters before the eyes of
 238 these predestined victims, and they swarm to us like moths to an
 239 electric light.  They come at a time when failure can no longer be
 240 repaired easily and when the wounds it leaves are permanent; and we say
 241 deliberately that mere work faithfully performed, as they perform it,
 242 will not by itself save them, they must in addition put in evidence the
 243 one thing they have not got, namely this quality of intellectual
 244 distinction.  Occasionally, out of sheer human pity, we ignore our high
 245 and mighty standard and pass them.  Usually, however, the standard, and
 246 not the candidate, commands our fidelity.  The result is caprice,
 247 majorities of one on the jury, and on the whole a confession that our
 248 pretensions about the degree cannot be lived up to consistently.  Thus,
 249 partiality in the favored cases; in the unfavored, blood on our hands;
 250 and in both a bad conscience,&mdash;are the results of our administration.</p>
 251 <p class="quoted">The more widespread becomes the popular belief that our diplomas are
 252 indispensable hall-marks to show the sterling metal of their holders,
 253 the more widespread these corruptions will become.  We ought to look to
 254 the future carefully, for it takes generations for a national custom,
 255 once rooted, to be grown away from.  All the European countries are
 256 seeking to diminish the check upon individual spontaneity which state
 257 examinations with their tyrannous growth have brought in their train.
 258 We have had to institute state examinations too; and it will perhaps be
 259 fortunate if some day hereafter our descendants, comparing machine with
 260 machine, do not sigh with regret for old times and American freedom,
 261 and wish that the <em>regime</em> of the dear old bosses might be reinstalled,
 262 with plain human nature, the glad hand and the marble heart, liking and
 263 disliking, and man-to-man relations grown possible again.  Meanwhile,
 264 whatever evolution our state-examinations are destined to undergo, our
 265 universities at least should never cease to regard themselves as the
 266 jealous custodians of personal and spiritual spontaneity.  They are
 267 indeed its only organized and recognized custodians in America to-day.
 268 They ought to guard against contributing to the increase of officialism
 269 and snobbery and insincerity as against a pestilence; they ought to
 270 keep truth and disinterested labor always in the foreground, treat
 271 degrees as secondary incidents, and in season and out of season make it
 272 plain that what they live for is to help men's souls, and not to
 273 decorate their persons with diplomas.</p>
 274 <p class="quoted">There seem to be three obvious ways in which the increasing hold of the
 275 Ph.D. Octopus upon American life can be kept in check.</p>
 276 <p class="quoted">The first way lies with the universities.  They can lower their
 277 fantastic standards (which here at Harvard we are so proud of) and give
 278 the doctorate as a matter of course, just as they give the bachelor's
 279 degree, for a due amount of time spent in patient labor in a special
 280 department of learning, whether the man be a brilliantly gifted
 281 individual or not.  Surely native distinction needs no official stamp,
 282 and should disdain to ask for one.  On the other hand, faithful labor,
 283 however commonplace, and years devoted to a subject, always deserve to
 284 be acknowledged and requited.</p>
 285 <p class="quoted">The second way lies with both the universities and colleges.  Let them
 286 give up their unspeakably silly ambition to bespangle their lists of
 287 officers with these doctorial titles.  Let them look more to substance
 288 and less to vanity and sham.</p>
 289 <p class="quoted">The third way lies with the individual student, and with his personal
 290 advisers in the faculties.  Every man of native power, who might take a
 291 higher degree, and refuses to do so, because examinations interfere
 292 with the free following out of his more immediate intellectual aims,
 293 deserves well of his country, and in a rightly organized community,
 294 would not be made to suffer for his independence.  With many men the
 295 passing of these extraneous tests is a very grievous interference
 296 indeed.  Private letters of recommendation from their instructors,
 297 which in any event are ultimately needful, ought, in these cases,
 298 completely to offset the lack of the breadwinning degree; and
 299 instructors ought to be ready to advise students against it upon
 300 occasion, and to pledge themselves to back them later personally, in
 301 the market-struggle which they have to face.</p>
 302 <p class="quoted">It is indeed odd to see this love of titles&mdash;and such titles&mdash;growing
 303 up in a country or which the recognition of individuality and bare
 304 manhood have so long been supposed to be the very soul.  The
 305 independence of the State, in which most of our colleges stand,
 306 relieves us of those more odious forms of academic politics which
 307 continental European countries present.  Anything like the elaborate
 308 university machine of France, with its throttling influences upon
 309 individuals is unknown here.  The spectacle of the &quot;Rath&quot; distinction
 310 in its innumerable spheres and grades, with which all Germany is
 311 crawling to-day, is displeasing to American eyes; and displeasing also
 312 in some respects is the institution of knighthood in England, which,
 313 aping as it does an aristocratic title, enables one's wife as well as
 314 one's self so easily to dazzle the servants at the house of one's
 315 friends.  But are we Americans ourselves destined after all to hunger
 316 after similar vanities on an infinitely more contemptible scale?  And
 317 is individuality with us also going to count for nothing unless stamped
 318 and licensed and authenticated by some title-giving machine?  Let us
 319 pray that our ancient national genius may long preserve vitality enough
 320 to guard us from a future so unmanly and so unbeautiful!</p>
 321
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