Any fundamental reform in scholarly work must be built around substantial changes in graduate education. It is the several years of graduate school that most decisively shape the developing intellectual personality of new scholars as they move from the more general education of college into full professional activity. It is then that habits of mind are learned and reinforced, then that the choices made by the profession begin to seem natural. Yet the structure of graduate education has remained stable since the triumph of the Ph. D. at the turn of the century. What would it take to achieve a meaningful and lasting series of reforms? The history of the modern university repeatedly shows that changes can occur when faculties perceive them as in their interest, while conversely any reform that is not in the interest of the faculty will wither on the vine. Nowhere is this more true than of graduate education, which has come to be guided almost entirely by individual departments, and largely by individual faculty members in the case of advanced students, often with only minimal oversight even from the department. No exhortations to change will have any effect on graduate education if the faculty do not wish to make the change.

To take one example, the Ph. D. dissertation has been lambasted repeatedly ever since William James satirized" The Ph. D. Octopus" in 1903, when the degree was only just beginning to flex its tentacles in this country. Yet recurrent attacks on the irrelevance of narrowly specialized and turgidly written theses have in no way affected the degree, whose requirements have persisted throughout the century,