A doctor in every house? The PhD then, now and soon

Abstract

The PhD is a new degree. Those colour splashed and scarified PhD gowns on graduation days imply a direct link to a medieval past, to learned monks in dark cloisters who thought the day of the colour photograph was close. In fact the links to a distant past are tenuous. The first Australian PhDs were awarded by Melbourne University in 1948. By 1949 all six Australian universities had PhD rules. In 1950 eleven PhDs were awarded within Australia. In 1960 still only 137 PhDs were awarded. For Australia, then, the PhD is a post Second World War development, and the growth has been in the last thirty years. Those distinguished scholars who taught me or were my eminent colleagues, such as Charles Rowley, Max Crawford, Bill Scott, Jack La Nauze and Manning Clark did not have PhDs. Kathleen Fitzpatrick, who lectured me at Melbourne University, had gone from her honours degree at Melbourne to Oxford to do another undergraduate degree. That was not then unusual. It cannot be said that the Australian Universities picked up an overseas tradition which itself had a long unbroken past. In Britain the history of any higher degrees, MA or PhD, by dissertation is just over 100 years. The PhD got to England by a devious route. It went from Germany (where it increased in popularity and sharpened in definition early in the nineteenth century) to Yale which offered the PhD from the early 1860s, and it soon spread to other American colleges. American scholars wanted doctorates and those who were attracted to Germany. The intense rivalry between Germany and England immediately before and during the First World War influenced the British who did not wish to copy the German system but did not like the best and brightest of American scholars going to Germany. The British adopted the PhD from America. Oxford began its DPhil courses in 1917, but by then several British universities were on their way to introducing the PhD. Ernest Rutherford, New Zealander, physicist and Nobel Prize winner in 1908, spoke strongly in favour of the new postgraduate degree by thesis. In 1918 he said: "It should be made clear that the new degree which many universities propose is an entire innovation.... it will involve ... introducing into Britain a system practically identical with that which obtains in America, and to a large extent in Canada also.... It will be a real and very great departure in English education - the greatest revolution, in my opinion, of modern times." The PhD took over another thirty years to get to Australia. Show more