Doctoral Chemical Education: Diversify or Die
concerned over diminishing student interest in chemistry, and spurred by their most recent compilation of statistics on doctoral chemical education (page 88 of this issue) which shows a 10.8% decrease in first year graduate chemistry enrollment in the fall of 1968 compared with the previous year (this despite an increase of 9.8% in chemistry baccalaureates awarded over the same period), Drs. R. H. Linnell and D. S. Chapin suggest that, problems with the draft notwithstanding, traditional doctoral chemistry programs "are not keeping pace with the changing external world and are therefore, becoming increasingly less relevant." These authors assert that traditional chemistry doctoral education programs are oriented toward those individuals who will become university professors and who in turn will train more doctoral chemists, and they tell us that projections for the next decade indicate that the need for new graduate faculty in the nation's universities will be considerably less than the supply. Reliable assessments of the future needs for doctoral chemists are difficult to come by; however, it is estimated that not more than half the current production of PhD chemists with their "narrow research specialized training" will he needed for positions in industrial research laboratories and in universities during the next decade. By contrast, it is a certainty that during this same period somewhat more broadly trained doctoral chemists will he much in demand for undergraduate teaching positions and for what can be termed environmental problem-solving teams. The increasing demand for college teachers is made apparent in a Bureau of the Census report issued late in April, 1969 which predicts a 40% increase in the number of college teachers during the next ten years. The need for broader training of these teachers is emphasized in the recent recommendation for the estabishment of graduate programs leading to the degree, Doctor of Arts by the Committee on the Preparation of College Teachers of the Council of Graduate Schools of the United States. The committee proposes the new title "in the belief that the PhD degree has traditionally so emphasized research that it is counter-productive in that the majority of graduate students are trained almost exclusively along lines other than those which they will actually follow in their careers as college teachers."
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It asserts that, "For most doctoral students, a program emphasizing broad subject matter competence and teaching skills, and the development of synthesizing and dissemination abilities is appropriate." Like that of the PhD, the Doctor of Arts program would require at least three years of full-time study, and would include the satisfact,orycompletion of an individual study project which demonstrates an acceptable combination of scholarly, analytical, creative,' and expository skills. Needless to say, there iq much wisdom in this proposal, and much opportunity for good or evil in its implementation. It is a proposal that chemists must consider. The need for more broadly trained doctoral chemists for positions such as those envisaged with environmental problem-solving teams is not new. It has simply been ignored by the academic communitypartly, perhaps, because of tradition and recent affluence, and partly because of the great demand for the PhD product. With this demand diminishing sharply, with the graduate students about to rebel against the sterility of overspecialization, and with the air and water of the research laboratory about to be polluted with the effluent from a society bilious with the excesses of technology, the time for reconsideration of the rules by which doctoral chemists are educated would appear to be a t hand. Guidelines for this reconsideration should not be difficult to establish. At least three rather basic principles stand out. The first is the need to train chemists who will turn their intellectual energies to the urgent problems of our time. The second is recognition that despite its obvious necessity, ovenpecialization insures the inability to follow a problem through from start to finish and thereby cripples the individual. The third is the inevitability of multidisciplinary group-type prohlem solving as the principal instrument for progress in the future and the necessity to include this as a significant part of predoctoral experience. The fertile minds that have guided the destiny of chemistry and of chemistry graduate students during the exciting and productive past quarter century are certainly equal to the task of diversifying doctoral chemical education. There is a great deal to he lost if this is not done soon. WTL
Volume 47, Number 2, February 1970
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