Graduate instruction and the degree of doctor of philosophy as its
reward are not so novel and recent in America as to call for either
explanation or definition. Neither are they so old as to require a
history. Most of us can well remember when it became a common thing for
American universities to have numerous candidates for the doctorate. At
the present time there are several hundred students in our universities
who are candidates for the doctor's degree and the number is increasing
rapidly.
A degree implies a dissertation, or, as it is more commonly and less
correctly termed, a thesis. I need not here express any opinion as to
the merits or defects of these documents as a class. What I wish to
speak of is their value to university and college libraries, and the
difficulty of discovering what dissertations are produced annually, and,
for reference libraries, of procuring them when discovered. I presume
the librarian who knows the specialist's insatiate greed for
dissertations, _programmen_, and small pamphlets generally will need no
words of mine to bring home to him the need of procuring as many of
these documents as he can. Whatever we may say in derogation of doctors'
dissertations--and they have their faults--they at least represent
long-continued and careful investigation under supposedly competent
direction, and the specialist must have them.
It is a comparatively easy task to get him German and other foreign
dissertations. The new ones are listed annually and the old ones load
the shelves of the second-hand stores of Europe. But to find what is
being produced here in this country is by no means a simple undertaking.
And it behooves us, unless we tacitly admit that our American
dissertations are not worth having, to take some steps toward bettering
the present situation.
In order to ascertain the exact condition of things I have selected
fifteen representative institutions which confer the degree of Doctor of
Philosophy and have studied their requirements and conducted some
correspondence with their librarians. These institutions have been
selected purely as representing various geographical and educational
conditions, and omissions from the list are not to be taken _in malam
partem_. They are: (1) Brown, (2) Bryn Mawr, (3) California, (4)
Chicago, (5) Columbia, (6) Cornell, (7) Harvard, (8) Johns Hopkins, (9)
Michigan, (10) Nebraska, (11) Pennsylvania, (12) Princeton, (13)
Stanford, (14) Wisconsin, and (15) Yale.
The majority of these universities require that before the degree is
conferred the thesis shall be printed and a fixed number of copies,
ranging from 50 to 250, shall be deposited with some officer of the
university or in the library. The statistics are as follows:
California requires 150 copies.
Chicago requires 100 copies. "Accepted theses become the property of the
university."
Columbia requires 150 copies.
Cornell requires 50 copies.
Michigan requires 150 copies.
Nebraska requires 150 copies.
Pennsylvania requires 250 copies.
Stanford requires 100 copies.
Wisconsin requires 100 copies.
Two institutions, Bryn Mawr and Princeton, require the printing of the
thesis, but make no requirement, so far as can be ascertained from the
catalogs, that there shall be any deposit of copies.
Johns Hopkins and Pennsylvania allow the thesis to be either written or
printed; if printed, Johns Hopkins requires the deposit of 150 copies,
Pennsylvania of 250, except under certain conditions which will appear
later.
Brown makes no requirement for deposit or for printing. Harvard
provides that one copy either printed or written must be deposited in
the library. Yale requires that the "thesis must be deposited at the
library for public inspection not later than May 1st" of the year in
which the candidate expects to receive the degree.
Of these universities two only, Brown and California, print the titles
of theses in the university catalog.
The foregoing statements are taken from the annual catalogs for
1899-1900 of the universities named, except in the case of Pennsylvania,
where the statement made in the catalog is supplemented from a letter
received from the Dean.
Although I presumed that most of the copies deposited in the libraries
of the universities were used for exchange, I wrote to the librarians of
those universities which require the deposit of a number of printed
copies, making inquiry regarding their systems of exchange and
provisions for the sale of copies not exchanged. I received replies from
almost all. [These letters were read, the common condition being shown
to be that most of the copies received by the libraries were exchanged
with foreign institutions and other American universities. Varying
conditions ranging from a refusal to sell any copies to a free
distribution of copies not exchanged, was found to exist with regard to
sale of theses by the libraries.]
It will be seen from these replies that, if a library does not happen to
be on the exchange list of the university in which a thesis is written,
and if the thesis is not printed in some journal or in the proceedings
of some learned society, such a library stands very little chance either
of learning of the publication of a thesis or of procuring it from the
author or from the university. That this is not much of an affliction in
most cases I cheerfully admit. Still the small colleges which
deliberately refuse to attempt graduate work--and, be it said to their
honor, there are not a few of these--and the large reference libraries
which do not publish, have as much need of certain theses as the large
universities, and they have no means of getting them easily.
It appears to me, and I trust to you, that, if our American
dissertations are worth anything, if they are valuable enough to
preserve, if they are real contributions to knowledge--and I believe
that they are all of these--then it is worth while to secure the
publication of some list which will tell librarians and specialists
where to go to get copies, either from the author or from the
university. It should not be difficult to secure co-operation in this
matter. The number of theses printed and deposited in any one university
in any one year is not large, and it certainly would not be a burden of
alarming proportions to send titles to some central bureau. The
difficulty will be to secure an editor and the funds for publishing the
list. It would seem to me that some one of the large institutions whose
libraries publish bulletins and other matter, or possibly the Library of
Congress might assume the expense as a matter of patriotic service to
learning in the United States. And it might not be out of place for this
section, should it care to follow up the matter, to enter into
communication with them on the subject. It might be also, that some
enterprising publisher would be glad to undertake the task of both
editing and publishing, if it could be shown him that he would thus do a
favor to American libraries.
One final word should be said before closing. The inevitable delays
incident to the publication of such a list would be more than offset by
the delays in publishing theses. Many a man is called "Doctor" who has
never received his diploma for that degree because his thesis remains
unpublished. The laxity in this matter in some quarters is very great.
It may be that such a publication of titles as I have proposed might
perceptibly hasten the publication of theses.