Occasional Papers on Higher Education, Volume: XXI

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J O H N W. B O Y E R

certainly is useful for a college teacher to know how to do research and to do some if he can find the time. No candidate for the Ph.D. should be allowed to graduate without some training in research. It does not follow, however, that his whole course of study should be based on the idea that he is going to be a scholar. It might be much better for him to do more and broader work in the subject matter of his field or to study under the Committee on the Preparation of Teachers or both.” Hutchins then repeated his proposal that the University should use the Ph.D. primarily for teachers and create a different degree for scholars. He added laconically, “So far, I have yet to find a member of the faculty who agrees with me.”213 Nonetheless, Hutchins had pulled in his horns over this issue, and in the late 1930s and early 1940s he was preoccupied with engineering a radical reinvention of the baccalaureate degree, based solely on non-departmental general education, and the creation of a large and autonomous faculty in the College to teach it. In early 1944, however, Hutchins decided to return to the problem of the (in his mind) relative indifference of the departments toward training their graduate students to become college teachers. The final denouement involving Hutchins and graduate education came in January 1944 in a famous speech that he gave to the trustees and faculty at the South Shore Country Club. This speech was a political disaster for Hutchins. Posing broad claims about the dire state of higher education in America and set in a highly moralistic framework, Hutchins proposed that the University create a new institute of liberal studies that would be licensed to give Ph.D. degrees to graduate students interested primarily in teaching careers and 213. Report of the President, 1930–1934, February 1, 1935, p. 24, Hutchins Administration, Box 52, folder 3.


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