College and Research Libraries T h e Ph.D. Degree and Research Toward Improving Ph.D. Programs. E r n e s t V. Hollis. Washington, D.C., American Council on Education, 1945. Is the function of doctoral study in univer- sities to advance the frontiers of knowledge or to provide students with the intellectual attainments which they will need in their vocational lives? The author of this volume inclines toward the latter view of social usefulness in determining the content of graduate study and offers history, opinion, fact, and logic in support of his position. His argument may be put bluntly. The American graduate school is in reality an ad- vanced professional school. Sixty-five per cent of the recipients of Ph.D. degrees become college professors and 20 per cent industrial research workers. Productive research is more and more being conducted at the post- graduate level, in industrial laboratories, and by endowed research organizations. Why not face this reality and devise a program of graduate study which serves the vocational need of students? One need have only limited contact with academic traditions to recognize this as an unorthodox viewpoint. And one need have only slight acquaintance with the degree structure of American higher education to recognize this as an attack upon a sacred anachronism of the academic world. M r . Hollis supports his contention that the vocational use of the Ph.D. degree is primarily professional by tabulating statistics of the present employment of 22,000 persons who re- ceived the Ph.D. degree in the decade 1930-40. He further offers as evidence the opinions of employers of Ph.D. recipients and of the re- cipients themselves, both of which groups dis- play a confusion and inconsistency that can be pulled together only after considerable inter- pretation. M r . Hollis does not support his contention concerning the relative unimpor- tance of academic research by either fact or group opinions but rather by his own con- victions, exemplified for example in the fol- lowing quotation: "Life in government and industry has become too complex and too de- pendent on research to leave so vital a func- tion to the off-hours of university professors and the amateur work of their advanced stu- dents." The position of this volume is entirely mis- understood if M r . Hollis' emphasis upon a vocational foundation for graduate study is interpreted to mean that he wants more nar- rowly professional courses in the graduate curriculum—more accountancy in the business school, more quantitative analysis in the chem- istry department, and more cataloging in the library school. On the contrary, he abhors the very technical emphasis that often ac- companies research specialization. In its place, he advocates a single integrated gradu- ate school in universities which would aim at a broad scholarly product prepared to meet not only the technical but also the philosophi- cal and social demands of professional life. Specialization would not be entirely aban- doned. The dissertation would be retained but it would not be designed as an original contribution to knowledge but as a ". . . proj- ect that focuses attention on securing com- mand of a variety of research methods and skills in critical appraisal of the work of oth- ers." Aptly he quotes Nicholas Murray Butler's aphorism, "a broad man sharpened to a point." Librarians will raise two questions about the position taken in the book. Would the adoption of improvements in Ph.D. programs here suggested make any difference in aca- demic library use and status? What sig- nificance has this viewpoint for graduate education for librarianship? A broader program of graduate study would increase the use of library resources. This conclusion is not a pious hope but a logical consequence. It is inherent in the wider range of content to be dealt with. It is inherent in decreased dependence upon the speciaf tech- nical apparatus of subject areas. It is in- herent in the orderly study of other scholarly works in the dissertation. M r . Hollis recog- nizes this consequence when he contrasts the irrelevance of tests in foreign language ability for most graduate students with the impor- tance of demonstrated ability to use library resources. However, lest librarians derive undue com- fort from this observation, a danger in the trend toward broader graduate study must be pointed out. Library organization displays the same weakness which M r . Hollis criticizes 188 COLLEGE AND RESEARCH LIBRARIES in the graduate curriculum. Materials are related to each other in terms of narrow spe- cialization. T o what extent does the or- ganization of materials in libraries facilitate an understanding of the social results of technological process on the part of the gradu- ate science student? T o what extent does the organization promote the formulation of a philosophy of purpose on the part of the graduate social science student? T o what extent does it aid the graduate library student in integrating subject content with the tech- niques of his profession? The shortcomings of library organization are apparent enough under the present system. They may reach the breaking point if additional educational demands are made upon the library. There is also a connection between M r . Hollis' thesis and graduate education for li- brarianship. In the past all professional fields have come in for a full measure of censure as legitimate areas for graduate academic study from such critics as Abraham Flexner and Norman Foerster. Here is an educator who not only maintains that professional fields are legitimate candidates for graduate status (if they can define a scholarly as distinct from technical content) but goes further and sug- gests that pure subject areas give greater attention to professional needs in their gradu- ate programs. This involves the radical as- sertion that professional fields, no less than subject fields, present problems in research and practice which require high scholarly at- tainment for solution. The academic world is organized into a hierarchy in terms of specialization. Status of an individual or a discipline is measured by degree of specialization. In the sense of the material dealt with, librarianship is not a specialization but a generalization. This has been the source of its difficulty in becoming established among academic disciplines. Ac- tually, the most crying need of the academic world, and of the larger world of knowledge, may be synthesis which cuts across specializa- tion—and the librarian may be one of the few agents of synthesis in the realm of schol- arship. Librarianship, then, is not ostracized from the circle of graduate discipline in the view of this book. But neither is it automatically a member of the circle. Like any field, it must present an intellectual content requiring broad scholarly preparation. This view, by clarify- ing the issue, hastens the day when that in- tellectual content must be defined. And by its emphasis upon a comprehensive program of graduate study, this view points librarian- ship toward an orientation for its content that may be summarily suggested in the phrase "the organization of recorded knowledge for use." One cannot help but play with the idea of graduate study in librarianship which would be directed by a university interdepartmental committee having such a title. M r . Hollis' call to new roads in graduate education lacks the force and originality to be found in recent calls in undergraduate edu- cation by Hutchins, Maritain, Wriston, and others. It does not even present a belated codification of a long-existing trend, as does the Harvard report. But it is what has been notably lacking in the literature of graduate education, an honest and reflective statement of purpose and method.—Lowell Martin. T h e State University and the Humanities A State University Surveys the Humanities. Edited with a Foreword by Loren C. Mac- Kinney, Nicholson B. Adams, and Harry K. Russell. (University of North Carolina Sesquicentennial Publications, Louis R. Wilson, director.) Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1945. xi, 262P. Reading A State University Surveys the Humanities is like strolling down the inviting avenue of an old city, say Boston or Charles- ton or Williamsburg. Here is an ancient residence, recently renovated; there, one, time- worn and respectably weary but still tenanted; and yonder, across the street, a self-conscious new one, lately erected and bearing, we some- how feel, a shy embarrassment at having been placed in such a sedate and austerely genteel neighborhood. Our first reaction to this motley is to blame the city fathers for their failure to plan ahead. Are there no zoning regulations here? Un- satisfied, we criticize especially the mayor and his council. Failing there, we naturally find fault with the architects. Then, suddenly, we APRIL, 1946 189