Most of the uncertainties just adumbrated can be removed. Reluctance to give up the status quo or the desire, having been hazed yourself, to go and do likewise, have permitted these uncertainties to be kept alive. Still, we might tolerate them if we could proudly point to the results of the system--or lack of system. Far too often we cannot.

First of all, too many men emerge from the ordeal spiritually dried up. A queer kind of virtue indeed is under test here. The desire for finding out what had not been known, the imaginative urge to reinterpret--these the tired and weary student has gradually lost. He has been wrung dry, and, knowingly or not, he often finishes his thesis with the firm resolve to have no more to do with "scholarship." The drive--almost the poetic drive--which first excited him and sent him on from college to graduate school is now run out.

So much for his feelings, but what of his abilities? What has the traditional training done for him as a potential investigator? The emerging Ph.D. is not what we mean by an educated man, a man who combines wide-ranging learning with an attitude of simplicity and vividness, and who commingles good taste with an excited curiosity.

Rather, he likely has become a sort of expert plumber in the card cata- logues or other areas and neither as teacher nor scholar will he throw off this inhibiting heritage. As a teacher, he may well lack that vivid excitement before fact or expression which is the basis of real communication. As a scholar, he may lack the means which a rigorous training in disciplines and techniques ought to have given him. If he knows that he does not possess the necessary tools with which a piece of work ought to be tackled, and that his training in form was so deficient that he cannot effectively put forward a valuable contribution, he will invent one or another reason for avoiding further efforts in scholarship. Or worse, if he does not recognize his own deficiencies, students and libraries hereafter pay the price.

A Definition

We reaffirm what we take to have been the original idea and intent of the Ph.D.; namely, to train men to do advanced work of an original nature, without either maiming them spiritually or assuming that they are Methuselahs. Such training should obviously include a wide grasp of what is already known--we ought not, however, to require all knowledge--and it should equally include strict introduction to methods and tools.

The degree is not, we said, a professional degree. Rather, it implies a high technical ability--and, we hope, taste and skill in the art of written and oral communication. The result should be original work, especially in the sense of having the work reported with individuality. We cannot require a man to be creative. To avoid further generalities an outline of a specific plan is presented.

Specific Plan

Time. Except in most unusual cases (e.g.in the middle-Eastern studies, where new languages must be gotten up before one may go very far), the whole program should take no more than three years of residence. In the first two years a man should take what courses he needs, and should have all the freedom from prescribed courses for his own individual work that his previous training will allow. At the end of his second year he should take his general examinations. At the end of his third year, he should have completed his thesis.

Admission. More precise recommendations for work in the three years will follow, but first it is obvious from the brief outline just presented that admission policies must be tightened up if a three-year plan is to be workable. Beyond tightening up the standards in the field in which the man proposes to work, we would especially ask that the language requirements now on our books be fully implemented and that a candidate be required to show that he can write respectable English.

As for the first, we all know how much time in graduate work is given over to preparing for the foreign language examinations--time that should have been spent in high school or in college--and we know, too, how handicapped a student is who cannot read German. He should know German while taking seminars, and not just before he takes the degree. As for ability to write good English, we need no demonstration of the frequent lapses here. And yet no one would question the paramount importance of a man's ability effectively to put forth his findings.

Language Plan

Accordingly, we propose that before registration in the first year a man should take an examination in one foreign language and in the writing of connected English prose. If he fails in either or both, he must make up this deficiency by the beginning of the second term of the first year. The examination in the second foreign language may be taken at the start of either the first or second term of the first year or of the first term of the second year.

In any case, if a man has not passed both foreign language examinations by the end of the second years residence he should be put on probation or dropped. This whole matter does not so much call for deadlines and a calendar during the first two years as for increased emphasis on ability in the native and foreign languages as an admission requirement.

Advising and the first year. The best interest of both the student and the school demand that a member of the faculty deal fully and thoughtfully with the individual student. We need not stress the heterogeneous backgrounds of our graduate students. The adviser, meeting with the first-year man before registration and after the results of the foreign lan-