Study Edition · Essay 66
The Ph.D. Octopus
Source: Harvard Monthly, March 1903; collected in Memories and Studies (1911). Text from Project Gutenberg #20768. ABRIDGED: James's discussion of the purpose of graduate schools and of the “natural Ph.D.'s” is shortened, as marked. Archaic verb forms modernized; vocabulary kept and glossed.
William James, the Harvard philosopher and founder of American psychology (and brother of the novelist Henry James), saw the research doctorate spread through American universities in his lifetime. In this essay he warns that the Ph.D. is turning into a mere badge: colleges hire for the letters after a name rather than for real ability, and the system crushes hard-working but ordinary students. He opens with a true story, then argues his case with humour and moral passion. The essay is more than a century old, yet it reads like a comment on today's “credentialism.” Notice his images: the octopus, the pepper caster, moths to a light.
69 sentences: 10 simple, 32 moderate, 27 complex. Hover a number for its paraphrase; click it for the full note.
Key Vocabulary
- disdainto consider something beneath oneself
- baublea showy trinket of little value
- revoketo cancel officially
- forthwithimmediately
- ordeala painful or difficult test
- eulogyhigh praise
- provisionallyfor the time being, on condition
- appendagesomething attached to a larger thing
- firmamentthe sky
- shamsomething fake; a pretence
- maxima short rule or saying
- antagonisticopposed; working against each other
- grotesqueabsurd and distorted
- laudabledeserving praise
- adventitiousadded from outside; not essential
- stultifyto make something look foolish or useless
- virulentextremely harmful; poisonous
- capricea sudden, unreasonable change of mind
- custodiana guardian or keeper
- requiteto repay or reward
The Essay
Some years ago we had at our Harvard Graduate School a very brilliant student of Philosophy, who, after leaving us and supporting himself by literary labor for three years, received an appointment to teach English Literature at a sister-institution of learning.1 The governors of this institution, however, had no sooner communicated the appointment than they made the awful discovery that they had enrolled upon their staff a person who was unprovided with the Ph.D. degree.2 The man in question had been satisfied to work at Philosophy for her own sweet (or bitter) sake, and had disdained to consider that an academic bauble should be his reward.3
His appointment had thus been made under a misunderstanding.4 He was not the proper man; and there was nothing to do but to inform him of the fact.5 It was notified to him by his new President that his appointment must be revoked, or that a Harvard doctor's degree must forthwith be procured.6
Although it was already the spring of the year, our Subject, being a man of spirit, took up the challenge, turned his back upon literature (which in view of his approaching duties might have seemed his more urgent concern) and spent the weeks that were left him, in writing a metaphysical thesis and grinding his psychology, logic and history of philosophy up again, so as to pass our formidable ordeals.7
When the thesis came to be read by our committee, we could not pass it.8 Brilliancy and originality by themselves won't save a thesis for the doctorate; it must also exhibit a heavy technical apparatus of learning; and this our candidate had neglected to bring to bear.9 So, telling him that he was temporarily rejected, we advised him to pad out the thesis properly, and return with it next year, at the same time informing his new President that this signified nothing as to his merits, that he was of ultra Ph.D. quality, and one of the strongest men with whom we had ever had to deal.10
To our surprise we were given to understand in reply that the quality per se of the man signified nothing in this connection, and that three magical letters were the thing seriously required.11 The College had always gloried in a list of faculty members who bore the doctor's title, and to make a gap in the galaxy, and admit a common fox without a tail, would be a degradation impossible to be thought of.12 We wrote again, pointing out that a Ph.D. in philosophy would prove little anyhow as to one's ability to teach literature; we sent separate letters in which we outdid each other in eulogy of our candidate's powers, for indeed they were great; and at last, mirabile dictu, our eloquence prevailed.13 He was allowed to retain his appointment provisionally, on condition that one year later at the farthest his miserably naked name should be prolonged by the sacred appendage the lack of which had given so much trouble to all concerned.14
Accordingly he came up here the following spring with an adequate thesis (known since in print as a most brilliant contribution to metaphysics), passed a first-rate examination, wiped out the stain, and brought his college into proper relations with the world again.15 Whether his teaching, during that first year, of English Literature was made any the better by the impending examination in a different subject, is a question which I will not try to solve.16
I have related this incident at such length because it is so characteristic of American academic conditions at the present day.17 Graduate schools still are something of a novelty, and higher diplomas something of a rarity.18 The latter, therefore, carry a vague sense of preciousness and honor, and have a particularly “up-to-date” appearance, and it is no wonder if smaller institutions, unable to attract professors already eminent, and forced usually to recruit their faculties from the relatively young, should hope to compensate for the obscurity of the names of their officers of instruction by the abundance of decorative titles by which those names are followed on the pages of the catalogues where they appear.19 The dazzled reader of the list, the parent or student, says to himself, “This must be a terribly distinguished crowd, their titles shine like the stars in the firmament; Ph.D.'s, S.D.'s, and Litt.D.'s, bespangle the page as if they were sprinkled over it from a pepper caster.”20
Human nature is once for all so childish that every reality becomes a sham somewhere, and in the minds of Presidents and Trustees the Ph.D. degree is in point of fact already looked upon as a mere advertising resource, a manner of throwing dust in the Public's eyes.21 “No instructor who is not a Doctor” has become a maxim in the smaller institutions which represent demand; and in each of the larger ones which represent supply, the same belief in decorated scholarship expresses itself in two antagonistic passions, one for multiplying as much as possible the annual output of doctors, the other for raising the standard of difficulty in passing, so that the Ph.D. of the special institution shall carry a higher blaze of distinction than it does elsewhere.22 Thus we at Harvard are proud of the number of candidates whom we reject, and of the inability of men who are not distingués in intellect to pass our tests.23
America is thus as a nation rapidly drifting towards a state of things in which no man of science or letters will be accounted respectable unless some kind of badge or diploma is stamped upon him, and in which bare personality will be a mark of outcast estate.24 It seems to me high time to rouse ourselves to consciousness, and to cast a critical eye upon this decidedly grotesque tendency.25 Other nations suffer terribly from the Mandarin disease.26 Are we doomed to suffer like the rest?27
Our higher degrees were instituted for the laudable purpose of stimulating scholarship, especially in the form of “original research.”28 Experience has proved that great as the love of truth may be among men, it can be made still greater by adventitious rewards.29 … But the institutionizing on a large scale of any natural combination of need and motive always tends to run into technicality and to develop a tyrannical Machine with unforeseen powers of exclusion and corruption.30
… First of all, is not our growing tendency to appoint no instructors who are not also doctors an instance of pure sham?31 Will any one pretend for a moment that the doctor's degree is a guarantee that its possessor will be successful as a teacher?32 Notoriously his moral, social and personal characteristics may utterly disqualify him for success in the class-room; and of these characteristics his doctor's examination is unable to take any account whatever.33 … The truth is that the Doctor-Monopoly in teaching, which is becoming so rooted an American custom, can show no serious grounds whatsoever for itself in reason.34 As it actually prevails and grows in vogue among us, it is due to childish motives exclusively.35 In reality it is but a sham, a bauble, a dodge, whereby to decorate the catalogues of schools and colleges.36
… But there is a third class of persons who are genuinely, and in the most pathetic sense, the institution's victims.37 For this type of character the academic life may become, after a certain point, a virulent poison.38 Men without marked originality or native force, but fond of truth and especially of books and study, ambitious of reward and recognition, poor often, and needing a degree to get a teaching position, weak in the eyes of their examiners, among these we find the veritable chair à canon of the wars of learning, the unfit in the academic struggle for existence.39 There are individuals of this sort for whom to pass one degree after another seems the limit of earthly aspiration.40 Your private advice does not discourage them.41 They will fail, and go away to recuperate, and then present themselves for another ordeal, and sometimes prolong the process into middle life.42 Or else, if they are less heroic morally they will accept the failure as a sentence of doom that they are not fit, and are broken-spirited men thereafter.43
We of the university faculties are responsible for deliberately creating this new class of American social failures, and heavy is the responsibility.44 … We dangle our three magic letters before the eyes of these predestined victims, and they swarm to us like moths to an electric light.45 They come at a time when failure can no longer be repaired easily and when the wounds it leaves are permanent; and we say deliberately that mere work faithfully performed, as they perform it, will not by itself save them, they must in addition put in evidence the one thing they have not got, namely this quality of intellectual distinction.46 Occasionally, out of sheer human pity, we ignore our high and mighty standard and pass them.47 Usually, however, the standard, and not the candidate, commands our fidelity.48 The result is caprice, majorities of one on the jury, and on the whole a confession that our pretensions about the degree cannot be lived up to consistently.49 Thus, partiality in the favored cases; in the unfavored, blood on our hands; and in both a bad conscience, are the results of our administration.50
… Our universities at least should never cease to regard themselves as the jealous custodians of personal and spiritual spontaneity.51 They are indeed its only organized and recognized custodians in America to-day.52 They ought to guard against contributing to the increase of officialism and snobbery and insincerity as against a pestilence; they ought to keep truth and disinterested labor always in the foreground, treat degrees as secondary incidents, and in season and out of season make it plain that what they live for is to help men's souls, and not to decorate their persons with diplomas.53
There seem to be three obvious ways in which the increasing hold of the Ph.D. Octopus upon American life can be kept in check.54
The first way lies with the universities.55 They can lower their fantastic standards (which here at Harvard we are so proud of) and give the doctorate as a matter of course, just as they give the bachelor's degree, for a due amount of time spent in patient labor in a special department of learning, whether the man be a brilliantly gifted individual or not.56 Surely native distinction needs no official stamp, and should disdain to ask for one.57 On the other hand, faithful labor, however commonplace, and years devoted to a subject, always deserve to be acknowledged and requited.58
The second way lies with both the universities and colleges.59 Let them give up their unspeakably silly ambition to bespangle their lists of officers with these doctorial titles.60 Let them look more to substance and less to vanity and sham.61
The third way lies with the individual student, and with his personal advisers in the faculties.62 Every man of native power, who might take a higher degree, and refuses to do so, because examinations interfere with the free following out of his more immediate intellectual aims, deserves well of his country, and in a rightly organized community, would not be made to suffer for his independence.63 … Private letters of recommendation from their instructors, which in any event are ultimately needful, ought, in these cases, completely to offset the lack of the breadwinning degree.64
It is indeed odd to see this love of titles, and such titles, growing up in a country of which the recognition of individuality and bare manhood have so long been supposed to be the very soul.65 … The spectacle of the “Rath” distinction in its innumerable spheres and grades, with which all Germany is crawling to-day, is displeasing to American eyes; and displeasing also in some respects is the institution of knighthood in England, which, aping as it does an aristocratic title, enables one's wife as well as one's self so easily to dazzle the servants at the house of one's friends.66 But are we Americans ourselves destined after all to hunger after similar vanities on an infinitely more contemptible scale?67 And is individuality with us also going to count for nothing unless stamped and licensed and authenticated by some title-giving machine?68 Let us pray that our ancient national genius may long preserve vitality enough to guard us from a future so unmanly and so unbeautiful!69
Sentence Notes
In plain English: Some years ago our Harvard Graduate School had a very brilliant philosophy student. After leaving us and earning his living by writing for three years, he was offered a job teaching English literature at another college.
Reference & context: James does not name the student. Harvard was then the leading American graduate school in philosophy, where James taught alongside Josiah Royce and George Santayana.
In plain English: But as soon as the college's trustees had announced the appointment, they made the dreadful discovery that they had hired someone without a Ph.D.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: Mock-horror (“the awful discovery”) sets the comic tone.
In plain English: The man had been content to study philosophy for its own sweet (or bitter) sake, and had refused to think of an academic trinket as his reward.
In plain English: So his appointment had been a mistake.
In plain English: He was not the right man, and there was nothing for it but to tell him so.
In plain English: His new college president informed him that either his appointment would be cancelled or he must get a Harvard doctorate at once.
In plain English: Although it was already spring, our hero, being a man of spirit, accepted the challenge. He turned away from literature (which, given the job he was about to start, might have seemed more urgent) and spent his remaining weeks writing a philosophy thesis and cramming psychology, logic and the history of philosophy again, so he could pass our fearsome exams.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: The parenthesis quietly points out the absurdity: he must neglect the subject he will teach in order to qualify for teaching it.
In plain English: When our committee read the thesis, we couldn't pass it.
In plain English: Brilliance and originality alone won't get a thesis through; it must also show a heavy load of scholarly footnotes and technical learning, and our candidate hadn't bothered with that.
In plain English: So we told him he was rejected for now and advised him to pad out the thesis properly and come back next year. At the same time we told his new president that this said nothing about his abilities, that he was far above Ph.D. quality, and one of the ablest men we had ever dealt with.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: The word “pad” gives the game away: the requirement is for bulk, not quality.
In plain English: To our surprise, we were told in reply that the man's actual quality meant nothing here, and that what was seriously required was three magic letters.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: The degree becomes a magic spell rather than a measure of learning.
Reference & context: Per se (Latin): “in itself.”
In plain English: The college had always been proud of a faculty list full of doctors, and to break that starry line-up by admitting an ordinary fox without a tail would be an unthinkable disgrace.
Reference & context: In Aesop's fable, a fox who loses his tail tries to persuade the other foxes to cut off theirs. Here the man without a Ph.D. is the tailless fox.
In plain English: We wrote again, pointing out that a philosophy Ph.D. would prove little about anyone's ability to teach literature anyway. We each sent letters competing to praise the candidate's abilities, which really were great; and at last, amazingly, our eloquence won.
Reference & context: Mirabile dictu (Latin): “wonderful to say.”
In plain English: He was allowed to keep his job on a trial basis, on condition that within a year at most his pitifully bare name would be lengthened by the sacred add-on whose absence had caused everyone so much trouble.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: Mock-religious language (“sacred appendage”) ridicules the worship of titles.
In plain English: So the next spring he came back with a suitable thesis (since published and recognized as a brilliant contribution to philosophy), passed an excellent exam, wiped out the shame and restored his college's good standing in the world.
In plain English: Whether his first year of teaching English literature was improved by having an exam in a completely different subject hanging over him is a question I won't try to answer.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: Polite irony: the answer is obviously no.
In plain English: I've told this story at length because it is so typical of American universities today.
In plain English: Graduate schools are still fairly new, and advanced degrees fairly rare.
Reference & context: The first American Ph.D. was awarded by Yale in 1861; Johns Hopkins, founded in 1876, made research doctorates central.
In plain English: So they have a vague air of value and honour and look very modern. No wonder smaller colleges, which can't attract famous professors and usually have to hire young ones, hope to make up for their teachers' unknown names with lots of decorative titles after those names in their catalogues.
In plain English: The dazzled reader of the list, a parent or student, thinks: “What a hugely distinguished group! Their titles shine like stars in the sky. Ph.D.s, Sc.D.s and Litt.D.s glitter all over the page as if they'd been shaken on from a pepper pot.”
Why this phrase is worth keeping: The comic drop from stars to pepper deflates the parent's awe.
Reference & context: S.D. (Doctor of Science) and Litt.D. (Doctor of Letters) are other doctorates.
In plain English: Human nature is so childish that every real thing turns into a fake somewhere, and college presidents and trustees already treat the Ph.D. as just an advertising tool, a way of throwing dust in the public's eyes.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: A sweeping, memorable generalization about how good institutions decay.
In plain English: “No teacher without a doctorate” has become a rule at the smaller colleges, which are the buyers. At each of the big universities, which are the suppliers, the same faith in decorated scholarship shows up as two conflicting urges: one to produce as many doctors a year as possible, the other to make passing harder, so that their own Ph.D. shines brighter than other places'.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: James uses the economics of supply and demand to expose a market in titles.
In plain English: So we at Harvard are proud of how many candidates we fail, and that men without outstanding minds can't pass our exams.
Reference & context: Distingués (French): distinguished.
In plain English: So America as a nation is quickly drifting toward a situation in which no scientist or writer will be considered respectable unless some badge or diploma is stamped on him, and in which being just a person will mark you as an outcast.
In plain English: I think it's high time we woke up and took a critical look at this frankly ridiculous trend.
In plain English: Other countries suffer terribly from the “Mandarin disease.”
Reference & context: Mandarins were officials of imperial China, chosen by elaborate exams; the word came to mean any rigid, exam-based elite.
In plain English: Are we doomed to suffer the same way?
In plain English: Our advanced degrees were created for the good purpose of encouraging scholarship, especially “original research.”
In plain English: Experience shows that however great people's love of truth may be, outside rewards can make it greater still.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: A gently ironic admission that scholars are motivated by prizes too.
In plain English: But whenever any natural mix of needs and motives is turned into a large-scale institution, it tends to get bogged down in rules and to grow into a tyrannical machine with unexpected power to shut people out and to corrupt.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: The general law behind the essay: institutions become machines.
Reference & context: Omitted: a few sentences on the degree as a spur to work and on the true aim of graduate schools.
In plain English: First of all, isn't our growing habit of hiring only teachers with doctorates pure pretence?
In plain English: Would anyone seriously claim that a doctorate guarantees its holder will be a good teacher?
In plain English: Everyone knows that his character, social skills and personality may make him completely unfit for the classroom, and the doctoral exam can't take any of these into account.
In plain English: The truth is that the doctors' monopoly on teaching, which is becoming such an established American custom, has no serious rational justification at all.
In plain English: As it actually exists and spreads among us, it comes entirely from childish motives.
In plain English: In reality it's just a fake, a trinket, a trick to decorate school and college catalogues.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: Three blunt nouns in a row: sham, bauble, dodge.
In plain English: But there is a third group of people who are truly, and in the saddest way, the victims of the system.
Reference & context: Omitted: James's first two classes, the gifted who pass easily, and those who struggle but benefit from the challenge.
In plain English: For this type of person, academic life can become, after a certain point, a deadly poison.
In plain English: These are people without striking originality or natural force, but who love truth and especially books and study, who want reward and recognition, who are often poor and need a degree to get a teaching job, and who look weak to their examiners. Among them we find the true cannon fodder of the wars of learning, the “unfit” in the academic struggle for survival.
Reference & context: Chair à canon (French): “cannon fodder.” “Struggle for existence” and “unfit” borrow Darwin's terms; compare Huxley, no. 57.
In plain English: Some people of this kind see passing one degree after another as the highest goal on earth.
In plain English: Your private advice doesn't put them off.
In plain English: They fail, go away to recover, then come back for another exam, sometimes dragging the process on into middle age.
In plain English: Or, if they're less morally tough, they take failure as a final verdict that they're not good enough, and are broken in spirit from then on.
In plain English: We university professors are responsible for deliberately creating this new kind of American failure, and it's a heavy responsibility.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: James blames his own profession, not the students.
In plain English: We dangle our three magic letters in front of these doomed victims, and they swarm to us like moths to an electric light.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: The moth image suggests both attraction and destruction.
In plain English: They come at an age when failure can't easily be undone and leaves lasting scars, and we deliberately tell them that faithful hard work, which they do, won't save them on its own; they must also show the one thing they don't have: outstanding intellect.
In plain English: Sometimes, out of plain human pity, we ignore our lofty standard and pass them.
In plain English: Usually, though, we stay loyal to the standard rather than to the candidate.
In plain English: The result is arbitrary decisions, verdicts carried by a single vote, and overall an admission that we can't consistently live up to our claims about the degree.
In plain English: So the results of how we run things are favouritism for the lucky ones, blood on our hands for the unlucky ones, and a bad conscience either way.
In plain English: Our universities, at least, should always see themselves as the watchful guardians of individual and spiritual freedom.
Reference & context: Omitted: a passage on the spread of state examinations in Europe and America.
In plain English: In fact they are its only organized, recognized guardians in America today.
In plain English: They should guard against adding to bureaucracy, snobbery and insincerity as if against a plague. They should keep truth and unselfish work always in front, treat degrees as side issues, and at every opportunity make clear that they exist to help people's souls, not to decorate them with diplomas.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: The moral heart of the essay: education is for the soul, not for show.
Reference & context: “In season and out of season” comes from 2 Timothy 4:2: always, whether convenient or not.
In plain English: There seem to be three obvious ways to stop the Ph.D. Octopus from tightening its grip on American life.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: The octopus, with its many arms, pictures a system reaching into everything.
In plain English: The first is up to the universities.
In plain English: They can lower their absurd standards (which we at Harvard are so proud of) and give the doctorate as a matter of routine, as they give the bachelor's degree, for the right amount of time spent in patient work in a special field, whether or not the person is brilliantly gifted.
In plain English: Surely natural brilliance needs no official stamp and should be too proud to ask for one.
In plain English: On the other hand, faithful work, however ordinary, and years devoted to a subject always deserve recognition and reward.
In plain English: The second is up to both universities and colleges.
In plain English: They should give up their unbelievably silly ambition to sprinkle their staff lists with doctoral titles.
In plain English: They should care more about substance and less about vanity and pretence.
In plain English: The third is up to the individual student and the professors who advise him.
In plain English: Every naturally able person who could earn an advanced degree but refuses because exams would get in the way of pursuing his own intellectual goals deserves his country's thanks, and in a well-run society would not be punished for his independence.
In plain English: Personal letters of recommendation from their teachers, which are needed in the end anyway, should in such cases fully make up for not having the job-getting degree.
In plain English: It's really strange to see this love of titles (and such titles!) growing up in a country whose very soul was long supposed to be respect for individuality and plain human worth.
Reference & context: The e-text reads “a country or which,” a misprint for “of which,” corrected here.
In plain English: The sight of the German “Rat” titles, in countless fields and ranks, which all of Germany is crawling with today, is unpleasant to Americans; and so, in some ways, is English knighthood, which copies an aristocratic title and lets both a man and his wife so easily impress the servants when visiting friends.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: James mocks European status-hunting through a small comic detail: dazzling the servants.
Reference & context: In Germany, honorary titles such as Hofrat or Geheimrat (“court councillor,” “privy councillor”) were extremely common. A knight's wife becomes “Lady.”
In plain English: But are we Americans fated after all to crave similar vanities, on a far more pitiful scale?
In plain English: And is individuality going to count for nothing here too, unless some title-making machine has stamped, licensed and certified it?
In plain English: Let's pray that our old national spirit stays lively enough for a long time to protect us from such an unworthy and ugly future!
Why this phrase is worth keeping: The essay ends with a moral and aesthetic appeal: a credential-ruled future is not just unfair but ugly.
Fun Fact
William James never earned a Ph.D. himself. His only degree was a medical doctorate (M.D., Harvard, 1869), and he never practised medicine. He nevertheless taught at Harvard for 35 years, first anatomy and physiology, then psychology and philosophy, and his Principles of Psychology (1890) helped found psychology as a science in America.