EDITORIALLY SPEAKING
First come the janitors; then the professors; then the freshmen; then the graduate students." Thus starts the manuscript of a paper which recently crossed our desk. We are stealing the idea for discussion on this page with the excuse that the author's anonymity will avoid all adverse implications that his institution would he the last place a student would want to go for graduate work. The author is quoting a chemistry graduate student. He may or may not be expressing the majority opinion of his compatriots a t X University. No doubt he is speaking for many a t X .. . (n 1) Universities. His view deserves some thought. The author's contention is that the present curriculum for graduate education so fragments a student's time that he feels:
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caught up between his own research and exam, correcting homework, teaching lab, and keeping himself available for mswering confused freshmen as well a s making sure that he will attend alldepartment seminm on a few minutes' notice when visiting dignitaries drop in. . .Is it a. true maxim in higher education that "when the going gets rough, the rough get going?"
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We do not believe that planners of graduate curricula hold to established patterns on the criterion that a plan is satisfactory only because it works. There is tremendous variety in existing curricula across the country. Several years ago the ACS Committee on Professional Training found it impossible to formulate any guidelines analogous to those it has established for the evaluation of undergraduate chemistry curricula. The personality of institutions, and even of prominent professors, is notably apparent from any survey of practices in graduate education. There is constant change. An overall evolution is quite apparent. The goal of a few decades ago was for much more encyclopedic knowledge to he demonstrated by numerous day-long examinations. Now it is almost universally an emphasis on developing the ability to investigate (or even hopefully to become creative) in a particular field of interest. Cumulative examinations and required "propositions" are used to encourage-few claim that they really teststudents. Administration of these examinations varies c
greatly, sometimes even by divisions within a department. Our correspondent makes a positive suggestion which we know is not new, hut is worthy of consideration: During the years that the graduate student is also a teaching assistant, he would concentrate one term on his own coursework, the other on his teaching duties. If such a division of a student's time could be accomplished in a practical, functionally administrative way by the department, it could offer real advantages for the student. If he is properly encouraged and is sufficiently imaginative and adaptable, his teaching semester could be an effective device for making him both the recipient and a protagonist of an "academic atmosphere." This concentration, in contrast to the presently common fragmentation, would
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.almost. certainly allow his preparation and devotion to teaching duties to be better.. . A second important benefit would be his having an opportunity to sit in on classes, become acquainted with the departments1 research activities by visiting around. . . and have time to attend and properly digest seminars and colloquia. Whereas the "study semester" would undoubtedly require more arduous work, it would thus be followed by months of less tension and pressure. The necessity of a relaxation period is well known in sports; a shortcoming of current educational theory is the little attention given to a similar need in the world of mental activity.
The aims of this plan are sound, though the specific proposal may not he the only device for attaining them. Graduate students, like horses, cannot always be made to drink, and some simply are not thirsty. Of one thing we are sure: never in his later professional life will the pressures and tensions be planned out of his life by any one but an individual himself. Piet Hein1has a "Grook" to remember: Because of lines we neatly drew And later neatly stumbled over.
' PIETHEIN,"GroobS."
MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1966.
Circle No. ln on Readars' Senice C a d
Volume 44, Number 2, February 1967
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