The Ph.D. was once one route among many for the life of the mind — now it is the route. A multiplicity of intellectual paths have over time flattened into one, and that path leads straight through graduate school. But the professionalized academic is not necessarily the best teacher. Here at Dartmouth, we must change our Society of Fellows to align with more diverse intellectual paths. The Society of Fellows should cease to be a postdoctoral program and instead look for a diversity of intellectual backgrounds.
Our Ph.D. infatuation is a 19th century German inheritance. American institution builders imitated the image of the German university, where scholars developed total mastery over small subjects. Especially in the discipline of history — the field I know best — Germany remained a model. Herbert Baxter Adams, who studied at the University of Heidelberg for his Ph.D., founded the first modern history department at Johns Hopkins University. Historians at Hopkins and soon many other institutions dreamed of creating a total picture of the past, where each scholar would contribute their piece. Deriving inspiration from the widely regarded German universities, the modern humanities and social sciences were cast in their mold.
The Ph.D. was the basic unit of this model. New scholars would each devote years to fabricating one solid building block — the dissertation — that, when combined with the efforts of other scholars, would culminate in an “edifice” of knowledge. Every scholar would play an incremental part in providing a total account of the past, and the Ph.D. was the method of preparation to join that process.
This dream tantalized. Many historians were reluctant to incorporate new economic and cultural sources into narratives for fear that too much data would make a consensus view of our past impossible. “That Noble Dream” by Peter Novick, a narrative of the American historical profession, shows how historians' failure to arrive at any “edifice” has eroded belief in “that noble dream” of a perfect accounting of the past.
And yet the profession has kept that organizing principle. At academic conferences, I have heard elderly scholars say “there needs to be a dissertation on this” implying a collective enterprise called “scholarship” which graduate students can quickly contribute to.
One can imagine the appeal. Novick wrote about how the American historical profession benefited from this systematization: scholars need not compete with the market to make a living. Their peers would be the test of whether their work was of value. Also, more pedestrian minds would have a clear path to jobs because they need only fulfill the agenda that the profession sets.
We must realize that the 19th century view of scholarship as a collective enterprise is overstated and wrong. Scholarship, especially in the humanities, is not solely about drawing up a list of topics that we need monographs on. Part of the role of scholarship in the humanities is to probe ourselves to think deeper and rethink our chosen subjects. Often non-Ph.D.s can do that just as well as those with Ph.D.s. Their advantage is that they have had a taste of life beyond the university. Novick’s aforementioned book is excellent not because there were no prior histories of the writing of American history, but because it changed the way we thought of the past and therefore could inspire new actions. Ph.D.s have their merits for those who think that the confines and comforts of academia will lead to useful academic work. But those without Ph.D.s often have just as much to contribute.
To worry about Ph.D.s as the only ticket into academia is not new. Over 120 years ago, well before the G.I. Bill turned universities into the behemoths they have become, renowned writer William James warned of the “Ph.D. Octopus” wrapping its tentacles around the neck of the university, and squealing. “Will anyone pretend for a moment,” he asked, “that the doctor’s degree is a guarantee that its possessor will be a successful teacher?”
In James’s time, the Ph.D. was new, and he did not have one. This did not stop him from innovating in both philosophy, psychology and religious anthropology. Indeed, it almost certainly facilitated it. The philosopher John Dewey said it protected James from “academic deadening.” But while he kept his appointment at Harvard University despite lacking the three magic letters, other young James-like geniuses were held back, and told to get a slip of paper before applying for a job. James was frustrated. “To blight hopes and promote invidious sentiments, to divert the attention of aspiring youth from direct dealings with truth to the passing of examinations” was what the Ph.D. did. It created another worry. “Men without marked originality or native force” would do Ph.D.s. Some would get jobs, some would not.
In 1925, Harvard Professors Henry Osborn Taylor, Alfred North Whitehead, and Lawrence Joseph Henderson thought of a solution — the Harvard Society of Fellows, a way for talented young academics to skip the academic mechanisms and work on what really matters. “We have developed in a mass production of mediocrity,” Abbott Lawrence Lowell, the then-Harvard President, declared, agreeing with the professors. The Society of Fellows bypassed Ph.D.s and put their junior fellows right into the academic sphere. Early successes were McGeorge Bundy, a future national security adviser and Harvard dean of faculty, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr., a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and advisor to the Kennedy family who would go on to never slow down to do a Ph.D. Brilliance, and the requisite time to demonstrate that brilliance, was a qualification of its own.
Over time, the Harvard Society of Fellows shifted its goals and administrators turned it into another postdoctoral program. The Dartmouth Society of Fellows — an imitation of other society of fellows programs which are in turn copies of Harvard —which was in turn a copy of All Souls College at Oxford — never pretended it was for unconventional minds. From the beginning, the program, created by President Hanlon in 2014, was for candidates with a Ph.D.
We already have the Montgomery Fellows program which works for bringing famous people to campus. It is wonderful. But why don’t we choose a batch of 20-30 year olds, who we can pay less than when they are titans, and bring them to campus? Better than having one more figure in that system which, since William James’s time, has metastasized from octopus to leviathan.
The Ph.D is one path among many to adding knowledge to society. Academia has become a fraternity, and without an example to follow, it will never remove the hazing ritual of the Ph.D. because each professor has already suffered through it. Change the Dartmouth Society of Fellows. Hopefully other colleges and universities will follow in turn.
Opinion articles represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
