On a week-day night in the stepdown lounge of the Graduate Center, only a few students can be found in the overstuffed couches, thumbing through magazines, listening to music. Upstairs in the grill, a few more drop in for a quiet mid-evening beer. Outside, the winding ramps between dormitories are quiet, and inside the dorms, little can be heard above the occasional clacking of a typewriter. The graduate students--almost to the man--are studying. Not studying for hour exams, or cramming for a day's memory, but studying with a broad view to the doctoral examinations: a complete review of eight to ten years training.

It is this intensity of study which is in many ways the predominant characteristic of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, GSAS, still resisting John Dewey, offers one of the most rigorous American educational experiences; absorbing it is a full-time, often an overtime task. But it is this intensity which has also earned GSAS its reputation as probably the finest school of its kind in the country.

Like Winesburg, Ohio

In Cambridge, the GSAS represents the intellectual core of the University in its dual function of training the professional intellectual and furthering knowledge in all areas of liberal arts and sciences. In both these endeavors, the success of the Graduate School has paralleled the fame of the University. The high numbers of Harvard Ph.D's who staff the faculties of the more highly-rated American colleges; the recurring number of Nobel and other prizes awarded the faculty; the consistently high number of GSAS doctoral theses published--all vouchsafe the depth of learned research at the GSAS.

Its influence on American education through its graduates and its influence on College education at Harvard, through courses open to undergraduates as well as graduates, is inestimably pronounced.

This reputation and this influence are a summation of individual achievements, but the attainment of even individual goals involves tremendous effort and sometimes strain. To anyone familiar with the four-to-seven years required for the doctorate, it is obvious that there is little time left for financially-remunerative employment. Even Cambridge and Boston can seem like Winesburg, Ohio after years of sustained study and mounting financial restriction.

Influence From Europe

Nevertheless, most graduate students feel that these difficulties, though real, are largely specious. Between seminar reports, they may disparage their fate as that of the rejected, overworked, intellectual, but they will at the same time admit that there is no other undertaking they would even faintly prefer.

Until the time of President Eliot, however, the graduate student led an easy existence. It was a common complaint among the townspeople of Cambridge, that "all a Harvard man had to do for his Master's degree was to pay five dollars and to stay out of jail." This was essentially true--the principal requirements for the degree were merely the maintenance of good character for three years after receiving the A.B., a nominal fee, and participation at the degree-awarding ceremony. The degree, needless to say, carried little academic prestige.

In 1872, however, under President Eliot, the Corporation and Overseers were influenced by the growing attention paid to graduate training in European universities, and created a "Graduate Department." From successive administrative changes in 1905 and 1912 evolved the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences with essentially the same curriculum as it has today.

In recent years, the school has generally admitted only students planning to continue their studies through to the doctoral level; it has declined to accept students studying for the M.A. alone, largely because of size limitations.

The intensity of the present GSAS curriculum is expressed in studies as well as in studying. Most of the larger undergraduate departments are broken up into smaller areas for concentrated graduate study. With a predominance of A's required for the Ph.D., the GSAS dean's office recognizes a B as the rough equivalent of an "undergraduate C--."

Graduate A's cannot be achieved by osmosis, and studying becomes an all-pervasive part of the graduate's existence. The average graduate student often puts considerably more time into his study than the average working man puts into his job. Seminar reports rival theses in difficulty and many students are further burdened by the families and teaching fellowships they have acquired.

GSAS, then, is to a great extent personified by is scholarly curriculum. Nevertheless there are marked lines of cleavage among faculty and students on the purpose of graduate education. There is, however, an official orthodox view of the function as they see it applicable in their fields.

This function, as defined by Francis M. Rogers, Dean of the USAS, is "to train students for the Ph.D., the professional degree of the academic profession." GSAS, to Dean Rogers and to many other faculty members, is as truly professional as any other graduate school in the University. But the Dean points out, his concept of the "academic profession"--"the preservation, dissemination, and advancement of knowledge"--is far broader than hat of many others.