The Professional Schools

2001 ◽  
Author(s):  
Morton Keller ◽  
Phyllis Keller
Keyword(s):  
Graduate Education ◽  
Graduate School ◽  
Professional Training ◽  
Professional Schools ◽  
American University ◽  
Arts And Sciences ◽  
Administrative Costs ◽  
Shared Goal ◽  
Education Design ◽  
Professional Faculties

Harvard’s nine professional schools were on the cutting edge of its evolution from a Brahmin to a meritocratic university. Custom, tradition, and the evergreen memory of the alumni weighed less heavily on them than on the College. And the professions they served were more interested in their current quality than their past glory. True, major differences of size, standing, wealth, and academic clout separated Harvard’s Brobdingnagian professional faculties—the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the Schools of Medicine, Law, and Business— from the smaller, weaker Lilliputs—Public Health and Dentistry, Divinity, Education, Design, Public Administration. But these schools had a shared goal of professional training that ultimately gave them more in common with one another than with the College and made them the closest approximation of Conant’s meritocratic ideal. Harvard’s doctoral programs in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) were a major source of its claim to academic preeminence. As the Faculty of Arts and Sciences became more research and discipline minded, so grew the importance of graduate education. A 1937 ranking of graduate programs in twenty-eight fields—the lower the total score, the higher the overall standing—provided a satisfying measure of Harvard’s place in the American university pecking order: But there were problems. Money was short, and while graduate student enrollment held up during the Depression years of the early 1930s (what else was there for a young college graduate to do?), academic jobs became rare indeed. Between 1926–27 and 1935–36, Yale appointed no Harvard Ph.D. to a junior position. The Graduate School itself was little more than a degree-granting instrument, with no power to appoint faculty, no building, no endowment, and no budget beyond one for its modest administrative costs. Graduate students identified with their departments, not the Graduate School. Needless to say, the GSAS deanship did not attract the University’s ablest men. Conant in 1941 appointed a committee to look into graduate education, and historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr., “called for a thoroughgoing study without blinders.

The Professional Schools

2001 ◽  
Author(s):  
Morton Keller ◽  
Phyllis Keller
Keyword(s):  
Graduate School ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Academic Culture ◽  
Student Attrition ◽  
Drop Out ◽  
Basic Knowledge ◽  
Professional Schools ◽  
Arts And Sciences ◽  
Set Up

Harvard’s graduate and professional schools were where the tension between social responsibility and teaching the technical skills demanded by a complex society most fully emerged. The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the traditional Big Three of Law, Business, and Medicine continued to dominate the Harvard professional school scene (though the Kennedy School of Government was coming up fast). From 1940 to 1970, they and the smaller schools took on their modern configuration: meritocratic, intensely professional, intellectually ambitious. From 1970 to 2000 they faced a variety of internal challenges to that academic culture, as well as constant competition from their counterparts in other universities. After he became president in 1971, Derek Bok devoted his first annual report to Harvard College, his second to the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. This was not surprising: the closely linked College and Graduate School were Harvard’s traditional academic core. What, he asked, was GSAS’s essential mission? Now as before, it was to train scholars and add to basic knowledge. But the Graduate School was in trouble. One problem was student attrition. Up to half of those who entered failed to get their Ph.D.s, compared to a drop-out rate of less than 5 percent in Law and Medicine. The fault, Bok thought, lay in the lack of structure in many doctoral programs, and he prodded the faculty to do something about that. Another concern was the Ph.D. job shortage. Nonscientists had to be ready to have careers in colleges, not just in research universities. That meant that the Graduate School would have to teach its students how to teach. At his urging in 1976 the Danforth Center for Teaching and Learning (renamed the Bok Center in 1991) was set up to tend to the pedagogical instruction of graduate students.1 Declining academic job prospects cast the longest shadow over GSAS in the 1970s. More than 1,000 students entered in the peak year of 1966–67; by 1971–72 the number was down to 560. The humanities were particularly hard hit: the 1975–76 entering class in English Literature was 16, compared to 70 a decade before.

The Professional Schools

2001 ◽  
Author(s):  
Morton Keller ◽  
Phyllis Keller
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Graduate School ◽  
Korean War ◽  
Fund Raising ◽  
Professional School ◽  
Student Body ◽  
Professional Schools ◽  
Woodrow Wilson ◽  
Arts And Sciences ◽  
Major Alteration

Meritocracy flourished most luxuriantly in Harvard’s professional schools. The Big Four—the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the Schools of Law, Medicine, and Business—threw off the constraints of lack of money and student cutbacks imposed by World War II. The smaller professional schools—Public Health and Dentistry, Education, Divinity, Design—shared in the good times, though their old problems of scarce resources and conflicted missions continued to bedevil them. The major alteration in the Harvard postgraduate scene was the establishment of the Kennedy School of Government. By the time Derek Bok—as well disposed to the Kennedy School as Conant was to Education and Pusey to Divinity—became president in 1971, this new boy on the Harvard professional school block was well situated to capitalize on his good favor. The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences remained, as in the past, rich in renown, poor in fund-raising and administrative autonomy. Between 1952 and 1962, fewer than 5 percent of GSAS alumni donated a total of about $60,000; during the early sixties giving went down to $3,000 a year. Its dean had little or no budgetary or curricular control; its faculty, curriculum, and student admissions were in the hands of the departments. In 1954 Overseer/Judge Charles Wyzanski grandly proposed that admissions to the Graduate School be sharply cut back. The reduction, he thought, would free up the faculty for more creative thought, improve undergraduate education, and upgrade the level of the graduate student body. But the post–Korean War expansion of American higher education led to boom years for the Graduate School. In 1961, 190 male and 60 female Woodrow Wilson Foundation Fellows, more than a quarter of the national total, chose to go to Harvard or Radcliffe; 80 of 172 National Science Foundation grantees wanted to go to Harvard. A 1969 rating of the nation’s graduate programs gave Harvard Chemistry a perfect 5, Mathematics 4.9, Physics, Biochemistry, Molecular Biology, History, and Classics 4.8, Art History and Sociology 4.7, English and Spanish 4.6, Philosophy and Government 4.5. Impressive enough, all in all, to sustain the faculty’s elevated impression of itself. But in the late sixties the Graduate School bubble deflated. Government aid, foundation fellowships, and college jobs declined; student disaffection grew.

Présentation

1988 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-4
Author(s):  
Roland Simon
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Graduate School ◽  
Foreign Relations ◽  
The United States ◽  
University Of Virginia ◽  
Arts And Sciences ◽  
United States Information Agency ◽  
Generous Support ◽  
The University ◽  
Selection Of

On 29-31 May 1988 a French-American Bicentennial Conference was held at the University of Virginia to share in the spirit of commemoration of the Revolution on both sides of the Atlantic. The Tocqueville Review is pleased to publish here a selection of the papers that were presented and discussed among a group of about forty specialists in political science, history, sociology, civilization and literature from France and the United States. The conference and the publication of its proceedings would not have been possible without the generous support of the French Ministry of Foreign Relations and the Cultural Services of the French Chancelry in Washington, D.C., the United States Information Agency, and the Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of the University of Virginia to all of whom we express our gratitude.

Affiliates of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

2019 ◽  
pp. 47-55
Author(s):  
David Riesman ◽  
Katharine E. Mcbride ◽  
Josephine E. Case ◽  
Marcella H. Congdon ◽  
Hannah K. Moses ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Graduate School ◽  
Arts And Sciences

Fundamental legal institutions

Legal Studies ◽  
1982 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-13 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. G. Stein
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Professional Training ◽  
Legal Education ◽  
Legal Institutions ◽  
House Of Commons ◽  
Professional Schools ◽  
England And Wales ◽  
Public Nature ◽  
Set Up

As law teachers, we are more reticent about our aims than our colleagues in other countries. It does no harm, therefore, to remind ourselves of what we are expected to do. We must start from the peculiar structure of legal education in England and Wales. The sharp division between the academic stage and the professional stage, each in the hands of institutions totally independent of each other, is almost unique to England and Wales. It does not exist in Scotland or in Northern Ireland, where there are no professional schools, and where the Universities share responsibility with the professions for most of the professional training. And it does not exist with such sharpness on the continent of Europe, or in North America. This distinction is the product of the Report of the House of Commons Committee of Legal Education in 1846. That Committee was set up when it was discovered that there was ‘no Legal Education, worthy of the name, of a public nature, in England or Ireland.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document