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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 November 2014
Canadian universities have not been as enterprising as their American neighbours in seeking out new ways of serving the community; but they have deviated far enough from the straight and narrow path of academic scholarship to develop a sense of guilt for which atonement may be offered by devoting a part of their resources to the promotion of graduate studies.
In the United States we find a desperate effort being made to save the M.A. degree from the fate which has befallen the B.A. degree, by applying truly heroic remedies, such as insistence on serious qualifications for admission to candidacy, on “graduate standards of attainment,” on “proper use of spoken and written English,” on “a reading knowledge of at least one foreign language … as indispensable background and not merely as a tool for research.” A candidate should have obtained “an average grade which places him in at least the first third of his class” and “due attention should be paid to those qualities known as personality and, in particular, to moral character.”
A sense of guilt may be a very potent force, but it requires rationalization. Various reasons have been assigned for promoting graduate studies in Canada. Professor Brebner contends that an increased output of scholars, retained in Canada, could be employed in “the creation of Canadian culture.” In so doing they would solve what Professor Brebner considers ought to be “the most urgent problem for Canadian post-war planners,” namely “how to make Canada so cordial and attractive a place” that Canadians “who excel in any field” will be content to live and work there. It is nearly fifty years since American universities set about the task of meeting “needs for the satisfaction of which approximately 300 out of a total of some 500 advanced students at the time considered it necessary to go abroad.” Canadians have continued to pursue graduate studies in other countries, but it is possible to argue that young Canadians cannot rely as much as in the past on the opportunities offered for advanced work at British and American universities.
1 Note the title of ProfessorBrebner's, J. B. survey: Scholarship for Canada: The Function of Graduate Studies (Ottawa, 1945).Google Scholar
2 The Master's Degrees,” Report of the Committee on Graduate Work of the Association of American Universities, Journal of Proceedings and Addresses of the Forty-sixth Annual Conference, 1945.
3 Ibid., p. 88.
4 Ibid., p. 5.
5 Hollis, Ernest V., Toward Improving Ph.D. Programs (Washington, 1945).Google Scholar
6 Cf. “The Master's Degrees,” p. 122, “A Bachelor undertaking a second curriculum which is largely of undergraduate character should not be permitted to register for a Master's degree. … He should be awarded a second baccalaureate degree.”
7 For instance, at the University of British Columbia, Physics and the life sciences (Biology, Botany, Zoology, and Forestry).
8 “Even if [a graduate student] proposed to continue in his original field he might reasonably be held subject to … special requirements if his earlier programs had been planned as terminal courses rather than on a broad basis as the foundation for later specialization.”— Hollis, , Toward Improving Ph.D. Programs, p. 176.Google Scholar Opinions differ widely as to what bases deserve to be called broad.
9 Ibid., p. 124.
10 Ibid., p. 123.
11 Ibid., p. 124.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid., p. 170. I am not clear what other experiences determine the “average.”
14 Ibid., p. 190.
15 See The Humanities in Canada, by Kirkconnell, Watson and Woodhouse, A. S. P. (Ottawa, 1947), chaps. VI and VII for a full discussion of the problems.Google Scholar
16 Hollis, , Toward Improving Ph.D. Programs, p. 193.Google Scholar
17 Brebner, , Scholarship for Canada, p. 89.Google Scholar Two examples concern the natural sciences. The others are: the most efficient national structure for Canadian industry and finance; how effective Dominion-provincial relations might be achieved; what political parties in Canada represent; what has happened to the churches and religion, literature and the arts; whether or not a Canadian province could make a quasi-treaty with an American state.
18 Hollis, Toward Improving Ph.D. Programs.
19 Ibid., p. 172.
20 Ibid., p. 173.
21 Ibid., p. 176.
22 Ibid., p. 184.
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid., pp. 187-8.
25 Ibid., p. 189.
26 See ante note 21.
27 Hollis, , Toward Improving Ph.D. Programs, p. 193.Google Scholar
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid., p. 105 et passim.
30 Ibid, p. 95. The best example is the Ph.D. in English, 97 per cent of the recipients of which teach.