Close the Barn Door

To get a doctor's degree in most branches of the University, students must run a formidable gauntlet of language tests, theses, and cold-blooded oral examiners. The University has purposely constructed these barriers on the admirable assumption that a doctor's degree from Harvard will only carry distinction if it is hard to obtain. But compared with these rigid standards, the men in the Littauer School's agricultural extension program receive their doctor's degrees almost as a gift.

The agricultural extension program itself is an excellent idea. By training state government employees for top-ranking jobs in farm modernization, it brings some advantages of Harvard to America's rural population. But it is too vocational a program to rate the degree of Doctor of Public Administration from a nonvocational school. The only hurdles it presents are a rudimentary knowledge of accounting, a practical thesis project, and a taste of some of Littauer's regular seminar courses.

Even in the non-agricultural seminars, the extension students often get a bargain. Because they have been away from academic life for an average of almost ten years, they are expected to flounder for a while in reading, reports, and exams. And so Littauer's professors often swallow hard and give the extensioneers a higher grade than they really deserve.

Many Littauer students who must crawl all over each other for good grades view this procedure with some distress. With some justification, they complain that the extension students are corrupting the academic standards for Littauer's highest degree.

Littauer should not junk the extension program, for it is most valuable in its field. Nor can it stiffen its admissions requirements, for the extensioneers should be chosen primarily for their agricultural, not their scholarly ability. What Littauer can tamper with, however, is the doctor's degree itself. If the degree clearly indicated that the extension doctorate was in agricultural studies alone, there could be no complaints that standards were being diluted. For the farm educators' purposes, this qualification would rub no shine off their sheepskins. And it would close a loophole through which many academically average students have been slipping into a supposed doctorate.