What's in a PhD then???

You're the Dr.

By Linton Weeks
Washington Post
March 18th, 2002



If you pontificate on the ontology of home appliances that you cannot
operate . . .

If you take your children to see "the library carrel where Mommy lived for
six years" . . . 

If you tell people you meet that you've just graduated from "the 19th
grade" . . .

You just might be a PhD.

Ahhh, PhD. Those "three magical letters," as William James once referred to
them, used to conjure up images of musty libraries, Raleigh bicycles,
sherry and tweed-hided, pipe-puffing dons chiding and guiding you through
the damned thickets and thorns of scholarship to postgraduate Paradiso and
a world witty and wise.

Not anymore.

These days, PhDs are like opinions and pie holes -- pretty much everybody's
got one.

You can earn a PhD: in human nutrition at Michigan State University; in
social work at the University of Texas; in recreational studies at the
University of Florida; in family studies at the University of New Mexico;
and in fashion merchandising at Texas Women's University.

A candidate for a PhD in creative writing at the University of Georgia can
submit poems instead of a dissertation.

At the University of Michigan you can get a PhD in literature without
reading Shakespeare.

Look around -- PhDs are everywhere. There's Dr. Laura Schlessinger. There's
Dr. Ruth Westheimer. Yoo-hoo, Dr. Henry Kissinger. And there, in the March
madness, is ESPN college basketball analyst Dr. Jack Ramsay.

Folks in the b-ball business call him "Dr. Jack." The question is: What
does a doctorate have to do with understanding zone defenses and the pick
and roll?

Answer: Back in 1963, when Ramsay got a doctorate in education from the
University of Pennsylvania -- while coaching at St. Joseph's College -- a
coach with a graduate degree was a rare bird. He was eventually inducted
into the Basketball Hall of Fame. Now there's Dr. Fitz Hill, the football
coach at San Jose State University and Dr. Kevin White, athletic director
at Notre Dame and former track coach.

But another Hall of Famer, Bobby Knight, looked at college degrees this
way: "BS is just what it stands for, an MS is More of the Same, and a PhD
is Piled Higher and Deeper."

In fact, all kinds of people are picking up PhDs. This year about 42,000
people will earn doctorates  in the United States, according to the
University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center, which conducts
research for the National Science Foundation and five other federal agencies.

Most striking is a trend toward more PhDs in the humanities -- up more than
11 percent between 1999 and 2000.

So why are there so many "doctors" of literature or history toddling around
law firms, accounting houses and newspaper offices these days?

One reason, according to Robert Weisbuch of the Woodrow Wilson National
Fellowship Foundation, is that the number of jobs for professors in the
humanities is shrinking. "It's part of an unfortunate trend that doesn't
have to be unfortunate if mentors would encourage their students to think
more creatively about career options," Weisbuch told the Chronicle of
Higher Education.

In other words, PhDs are being encouraged to avoid the groves of academe
and infiltrate other professions.

There are more reasons for the increased visibility of PhDs.

The degree that once was the domain of American men is now available to
women and international students.

"Thirty years ago, having a PhD from Princeton meant you were a made man,"
says Princeton professor and author Elaine Showalter.

The same is not true today. And was not so true then for women.

Showalter received hers in 1970 and was informed by several prestigious
universities that a woman could not be hired. 

Now 44 percent of doctorates are awarded to women, according to the
National Opinion Research Center. In many disciplines, women are in the
majority. Last year, for example, women earned more than 54 percent of
doctorates in the social sciences.

On the downside, in many ways it's easier to get a PhD today. Candidates in
the past were required to possess a breadth of knowledge bearing on a given
subject. Often they had to study additional languages. And their labor --
which usually took years of intense study in required courses -- was
subject to review by outside scholars.

In many cases, the requirements have been eased. The University of Chicago,
for instance, once expected its PhDs in the social sciences --
anthropology, economics and political science -- to read a couple of
foreign languages. The division has dropped the language requirement.

Princeton no longer requires its PhDs in many of the sciences and social
sciences to read French or German. Math is the new mother tongue.

"It's more that there's been a radical change than that the quality has
diminished," says Theodore Ziolkowski, past dean of Princeton's graduate
school. "There has been a very distinct change in the requirements, and a
person getting a PhD today could sometimes not have gotten a PhD 30 years
ago."

At the same time, Ziolkowski and others point out, the fields have changed.
He says: "Grad students are as bright as they were at any time. Humanities
and social sciences students today have expertise in fields that were
unknown 30 years ago."

But, he adds, in many departments "they are totally, utterly, absolutely
ignorant in fields that were once taken for granted."

For instance: To receive a degree in English literature at Princeton,
students not only had to know Latin, but they also had to be familiar with
the history of the language -- Old English, Middle English, et al.

At many grad schools, humanities students were once expected to know the
history of their own disciplines, to know something about the way their
fields of study developed and to possess a familiarity with pertinent work
from earlier centuries. Today "that certainly is not the case," says
Ziolkowski.

In literature departments across the country, a student who hasn't read
classics of German, English or world literature can get a PhD.

There are reasons for the changes. Interdisciplinary studies have gradually
become departments. New kinds of degrees -- such as a doctorate in film
studies -- would once have been given out under the aegis of the English
department.

And there are fresh fields, such as microbiology, ecology and the
neurosciences. "PhDs in computer sciences would have been unheard of 30
years ago," says Allen Sanderson of the National Opinion Research Center.

And new programs of studies -- Latin American, African American and women's
-- abound.

Education has exploded into shards and fragments. So has the canon of
knowledge. "There is no accepted canon," Ziolkowski says. "By arguing for a
canon, you are stating a political and social disposition."

Aspirants, Ziolkowski says, are whipped about by the shifting winds of
academia. Professors can't agree on which courses a candidate should study,
which standards should be applied or what the canon should be. "That's very
tough on students," he says.

This equivocation has led to what is perhaps the greatest change in the PhD
process, the so-called "time to degree."

For years, grad students were expected to complete their PhD in three or
four years. Today in the social sciences and humanities, the average
candidate takes 10 years to earn a PhD.

The notion of a higher, post-college degree was born in Germany. Arguably,
the first PhD was Faust, a medieval character immortalized in tales by,
among others, German playwright Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. In the stories,
Faust -- sometimes called Faustus -- sells his soul to the Devil in
exchange for knowledge and power.

In 1808, Goethe wrote of Faust, sitting at a desk "in a high-vaulted,
narrow Gothic chamber" and "restless in his chair."



"I've studied now Philosophy

And Jurisprudence, Medicine, 

And even, alas! Theology 

All through and through with ardour keen!

Here now I stand, poor fool, and see 

I'm just as wise as formerly. 

Am called a Master, even Doctor too, 

And now I've nearly ten years through 

Pulled my students by their noses to and fro 

And up and down, across, about, 

And see there's nothing we can know! 

That all but burns my heart right out."

To compete with the Europeans, America -- with nothing to fear but
inferiority itself -- imported the PhD and began awarding it with a
vengeance. Yale University bestowed its first three circa 1860 "to enable
us to retain in this country many young men, and especially students of
science, who now resort to German universities for advantages of study no
greater than we are able to afford."

James Morris Whiton, PhD (Yale, 1861), wrote a dissertation that was only
six pages long -- in Latin.

Between 1875 and 1903, about 4,500 PhDs were handed out. From the beginning
there was tension between the sciences and the humanities.

In 1903, some 337 PhDs were conferred. That year William James -- a Harvard
professor without a PhD and no admirer of German scholarship -- railed
against "the Doctor-Monopoly in teaching" in American universities.

"The titles shine like stars," he wrote of the graduate degrees listed
after the names of faculty members in school catalogues. They "bespangle
the page as if they were sprinkled over it from a pepper caster."

James wrote: "The work that leads to a doctor's degree is a constant
temptation to sacrifice one's growth as  a man to one's growth as a
specialist."

"The Ph.D. racket is a very fine racket, but I want no part of it," says
writer Charlie Citrine in the novel "Humboldt's Gift" by Saul Bellow.

Langston Hughes, Eudora Welty, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and others did quite
well without a PhD. Ernest Hemingway never even went to college.

In percentage terms, the number of doctorates in America increased
dramatically between 1900 and 1950. The GI Bill made it possible for young
men to go to college and graduate school in great numbers. "It was really
Sputnik and the space race in the 1950s that set the United States on a
course of advanced study and research that would prevail for the rest of
the 20th century," says Sanderson. The number of PhDs awarded rocketed from
8,600 in 1957 to almost 34,000 in 1973.

A century after James penned his essay, the tension still exists. Does a
PhD equal knowledge? 

Especially watered-down degrees? Learning Latin and foreign languages not
only helps you communicate with others, critics argue, it teaches you how
to think. Today's graduate schools are not shepherding scholars, they say,
they are expectorating experts.

"Today American universities, including the best ones, award the PhD to
foreign students who can barely speak English, to U.S. students who cannot
understand a foreign language, to humanists who have no grasp of
mathematical or statistical or scientific reasoning, and to scientists and
engineers who can barely construct a coherent paragraph of English prose,"
Ziolkowski wrote in "The Ph.D. Squid," which appeared in the American
Spectator in 1990.

By 1984 one survey estimated that one in every 200 adults in the country
had a PhD. This year hundreds of universities are handing out the honorifics.

You can even get one online at Rushmore University (www.rushmore.edu) or
other distance-learning institutions.

So many people have the degrees and they are offered by so many different
kinds of institutions, maybe the time has come for a new degree -- the PhD
Plus or the PhD Extreme.

The proliferation of PhDs makes life especially hard on PhDs.

"The way graduate school works contradicts the message well-meaning
scholars want to communicate to their charges: Chances for getting a
teaching job are not good," Brendan McManus, PhD, wrote on a medieval
scholar bulletin board a few years ago. He was then an adjunct professor at
the State University of New York in Oneonta. "You'll pardon an adjunct
nearing the end of his non-career for saying that, having recognized the
problem the answer seems to me rather simple -- reduce the supply at the
source. Help out the people you've already launched into the market. Just
say no: a moratorium on the production of new Ph.D.s."

Today McManus is an assistant professor of history at Bemidji State
University in Minnesota. "There are still too many PhDs being produced
generally. There are too many programs," he says. "I don't think this is
wise."
[end]