The Degree of a Teacher

The depressing thing about Dean Elder's disapproval of Earl McGrath's proposal to shorten the Ph.D. is that both Elder and McGrath are right. The growing shortage of college and high school teachers is neither imagined nor the result of foolish rules, but the inevitable result of an apparently irresolvable confusion of roles between College and University.

The decline of the M.A., which is the remnant of a teaching degree, into a device for sloughing out the mistakes of the admissions offices, has made the Ph.D. into the only valid post-graduate degree. But McGrath's proposal that study for the degree should be shortened to two years compromises the research value of the degree. An entirely new degree, or a resurrection of the M.A., is the only solution to the Ph.D. bottleneck.

Neither a new degree nor a changed M.A. will carry much weight unless introduced by influential universities like Harvard, Yale, and California, and these are already overburdened by candidates for a straight research degree who are dear to the hearts of research-oriented university faculties. By the same token, there will be little hope until small colleges, and perhaps university colleges, recognize that research and teaching are not only different, but often independent, and in a manpower shortage, antithetical. If liberal education is to survive at all, colleges must also learn that the aim of education is to produce not scholars but men.

Elder's own proposal to accelerate study for the Ph.D. without shortening it is only a step to increase production, not to solve the confusion between research and teaching. Worthwhile in itself, it is not directed toward the central issue, and will do little to preserve teaching as an art. Only awareness of the difference between research and education, between the university and the college, will ever bring the needed change in direction.

But a solution must be found, even though McGrath achieves nothing by proposing to cheapen the research degree. The college will not survive unless it can find a separate purpose in society. Even if it devotes itself to the education of citizens, rather than the employment and production of scholars, it will only succeed if the universities also recognize that teaching of teachers is as important an aim as the increase of knowledge.