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.