College and Research Libraries


T h e Ph.D. Degree and Research 

Toward Improving Ph.D. Programs. E r n e s t 
V. Hollis. Washington, D.C., American 
Council on Education, 1945. 
Is the function of doctoral study in univer-

sities to advance the frontiers of knowledge 
or to provide students with the intellectual 
attainments which they will need in their 
vocational lives? The author of this volume 
inclines toward the latter view of social 
usefulness in determining the content of 
graduate study and offers history, opinion, fact, 
and logic in support of his position. 

His argument may be put bluntly. The 
American graduate school is in reality an ad-
vanced professional school. Sixty-five per cent 
of the recipients of Ph.D. degrees become 
college professors and 20 per cent industrial 
research workers. Productive research is 
more and more being conducted at the post-
graduate level, in industrial laboratories, and 
by endowed research organizations. Why not 
face this reality and devise a program of 
graduate study which serves the vocational 
need of students? 

One need have only limited contact with 
academic traditions to recognize this as an 
unorthodox viewpoint. And one need have 
only slight acquaintance with the degree 
structure of American higher education to 
recognize this as an attack upon a sacred 
anachronism of the academic world. 

M r . Hollis supports his contention that the 
vocational use of the Ph.D. degree is primarily 
professional by tabulating statistics of the 
present employment of 22,000 persons who re-
ceived the Ph.D. degree in the decade 1930-40. 
He further offers as evidence the opinions of 
employers of Ph.D. recipients and of the re-
cipients themselves, both of which groups dis-
play a confusion and inconsistency that can be 
pulled together only after considerable inter-
pretation. M r . Hollis does not support his 
contention concerning the relative unimpor-
tance of academic research by either fact or 
group opinions but rather by his own con-
victions, exemplified for example in the fol-
lowing quotation: "Life in government and 
industry has become too complex and too de-
pendent on research to leave so vital a func-
tion to the off-hours of university professors 
and the amateur work of their advanced stu-
dents." 

The position of this volume is entirely mis-
understood if M r . Hollis' emphasis upon a 
vocational foundation for graduate study is 
interpreted to mean that he wants more nar-
rowly professional courses in the graduate 
curriculum—more accountancy in the business 
school, more quantitative analysis in the chem-
istry department, and more cataloging in the 
library school. On the contrary, he abhors 
the very technical emphasis that often ac-
companies research specialization. In its 
place, he advocates a single integrated gradu-
ate school in universities which would aim at 
a broad scholarly product prepared to meet 
not only the technical but also the philosophi-
cal and social demands of professional life. 
Specialization would not be entirely aban-
doned. The dissertation would be retained 
but it would not be designed as an original 
contribution to knowledge but as a ". . . proj-
ect that focuses attention on securing com-
mand of a variety of research methods and 
skills in critical appraisal of the work of oth-
ers." Aptly he quotes Nicholas Murray 
Butler's aphorism, "a broad man sharpened 
to a point." 

Librarians will raise two questions about 
the position taken in the book. Would the 
adoption of improvements in Ph.D. programs 
here suggested make any difference in aca-
demic library use and status? What sig-
nificance has this viewpoint for graduate 
education for librarianship? 

A broader program of graduate study would 
increase the use of library resources. This 
conclusion is not a pious hope but a logical 
consequence. It is inherent in the wider range 
of content to be dealt with. It is inherent in 
decreased dependence upon the speciaf tech-
nical apparatus of subject areas. It is in-
herent in the orderly study of other scholarly 
works in the dissertation. M r . Hollis recog-
nizes this consequence when he contrasts the 
irrelevance of tests in foreign language ability 
for most graduate students with the impor-
tance of demonstrated ability to use library 
resources. 

However, lest librarians derive undue com-
fort from this observation, a danger in the 
trend toward broader graduate study must 
be pointed out. Library organization displays 
the same weakness which M r . Hollis criticizes 

188 COLLEGE AND RESEARCH LIBRARIES 



in the graduate curriculum. Materials are 
related to each other in terms of narrow spe-
cialization. T o what extent does the or-
ganization of materials in libraries facilitate 
an understanding of the social results of 
technological process on the part of the gradu-
ate science student? T o what extent does the 
organization promote the formulation of a 
philosophy of purpose on the part of the 
graduate social science student? T o what 
extent does it aid the graduate library student 
in integrating subject content with the tech-
niques of his profession? The shortcomings 
of library organization are apparent enough 
under the present system. They may reach 
the breaking point if additional educational 
demands are made upon the library. 

There is also a connection between M r . 
Hollis' thesis and graduate education for li-
brarianship. In the past all professional fields 
have come in for a full measure of censure as 
legitimate areas for graduate academic study 
from such critics as Abraham Flexner and 
Norman Foerster. Here is an educator who 
not only maintains that professional fields are 
legitimate candidates for graduate status (if 
they can define a scholarly as distinct from 
technical content) but goes further and sug-
gests that pure subject areas give greater 
attention to professional needs in their gradu-
ate programs. This involves the radical as-
sertion that professional fields, no less than 
subject fields, present problems in research 
and practice which require high scholarly at-
tainment for solution. 

The academic world is organized into a 
hierarchy in terms of specialization. Status 
of an individual or a discipline is measured 

by degree of specialization. In the sense of 
the material dealt with, librarianship is not a 
specialization but a generalization. This has 
been the source of its difficulty in becoming 
established among academic disciplines. Ac-
tually, the most crying need of the academic 
world, and of the larger world of knowledge, 
may be synthesis which cuts across specializa-
tion—and the librarian may be one of the 
few agents of synthesis in the realm of schol-
arship. 

Librarianship, then, is not ostracized from 
the circle of graduate discipline in the view 
of this book. But neither is it automatically a 
member of the circle. Like any field, it must 
present an intellectual content requiring broad 
scholarly preparation. This view, by clarify-
ing the issue, hastens the day when that in-
tellectual content must be defined. And by 
its emphasis upon a comprehensive program 
of graduate study, this view points librarian-
ship toward an orientation for its content that 
may be summarily suggested in the phrase 
"the organization of recorded knowledge for 
use." One cannot help but play with the idea 
of graduate study in librarianship which would 
be directed by a university interdepartmental 
committee having such a title. 

M r . Hollis' call to new roads in graduate 
education lacks the force and originality to 
be found in recent calls in undergraduate edu-
cation by Hutchins, Maritain, Wriston, and 
others. It does not even present a belated 
codification of a long-existing trend, as does 
the Harvard report. But it is what has been 
notably lacking in the literature of graduate 
education, an honest and reflective statement 
of purpose and method.—Lowell Martin. 

T h e State University and the Humanities 

A State University Surveys the Humanities. 
Edited with a Foreword by Loren C. Mac-
Kinney, Nicholson B. Adams, and Harry K. 
Russell. (University of North Carolina 
Sesquicentennial Publications, Louis R. 
Wilson, director.) Chapel Hill, University 
of North Carolina Press, 1945. xi, 262P. 
Reading A State University Surveys the 

Humanities is like strolling down the inviting 
avenue of an old city, say Boston or Charles-
ton or Williamsburg. Here is an ancient 
residence, recently renovated; there, one, time-

worn and respectably weary but still tenanted; 
and yonder, across the street, a self-conscious 
new one, lately erected and bearing, we some-
how feel, a shy embarrassment at having been 
placed in such a sedate and austerely genteel 
neighborhood. 

Our first reaction to this motley is to blame 
the city fathers for their failure to plan ahead. 
Are there no zoning regulations here? Un-
satisfied, we criticize especially the mayor and 
his council. Failing there, we naturally find 
fault with the architects. Then, suddenly, we 

APRIL, 1946 189