The Third Degree

WHEN two or more Doctors of Philosophy are gathered together, their erudite conversation sometime or other gets round to the happily remembered horrors of their final examinations. There is no sport quite so delightful to them as putting the fear of the examiners in the hearts of prospective candidates. In fact, one might almost believe that the solemn torture of doctor-making is kept alive for the sport of the initiation ceremonies.

There used to be some fun in it, so the veterans of the day when we sent our professors, as well as our opera singers, to Germany for a final grooming like to remind us. You learned in a few weeks to speak the dialect of your professors, endured the Seminar in Old Frisian, wrote a thesis out of the Dictionary of National Biography. Finally you bought a dress suit, called on your professors, and told them what you’d like best to be questioned on. The hour arrived. The hall was crowded or wasn’t crowded, depending on the kind of show you were expected to furnish. A friend of mine, the first American to invade a certain Swiss university, arrived, perspiring and quaking in new dress clothes cut by a Swiss tailor, to find the whole town awaiting him, from the mayor, the curé, and the prefect of police down to the dog catcher. The examiners, one of them borrowed from France to make sure no American bought even a doctor’s degree at market price, were as fussed as the candidate and asked questions no one, not even they themselves, could answer. He got the degree; the enthusiastic crowd would have mobbed the professors otherwise, for they admired his heroism under fire.

Always there was the consolation of the coming frolic to be anticipated, even in those terrible moments when the preoccupied professor forgot his instructions as to the limits of your knowledge and ventured into the quicksands. How many tales have I heard from the lips of sober deans and heads of departments, busy now in closing ‘speak-easies ’ to sophomores, of nights spent in Faustian revels, of inns where the bewildered host believed the Walpurgis Night had descended on his bar, astounding tales of waking up in the morning battered and half-naked under strange hedges. No matter how many officials tried to collect damages done to wrecked villages in the path of the celebrating doctors, you had the degree safely stowed away, and it was now only a matter of making a quick getaway.

And what a difference! Like the procession of sacrificial lambs in a Chicago abattoir they stream into our doctorfactory in this latter day. A few bleats, a well-directed blow from the Lord High Executioner, and that is all. One university I know still advertises its doctoral examinations as ‘public,’ but the public usually consists of a clerk from the graduate office sent to see that the professors don’t cheat by going home to lunch before the time is up, a stray, morbidly-minded undergraduate, well-meaning but ill-advised friends of the candidate, and an extra professor fatally addicted to intellectual autopsies. Once a mother came and sat knitting to make her son feel at home while juggling with the parts of the strong verb in Gothic.

In most places there is no attempt to conceal the fact that it’s a nasty business. The guillotiners shut the door on the secret session and stuff the keyhole so that the wails of the victim will not penetrate to the world outside. One never really knows what goes on within, because, while the sacrifice rejoices to show his wounds, he can never recall what horrible things were done to make them. Out of the sky comes a sudden bolt aimed straight and unescapable, or the professor prefers to creep up by a circuitous route, covering all avenues of escape until he confronts his victim with the dilemma. He can remember perfectly the names of the poets laureate from Shadwell to Pye, but the author of the Faerie Queene escapes him and he is inclined to think it is Shakespeare.¹ One influential member of the Modern Language Association of America, when asked by his examiners — hoping in this way to stop the wavering of his knees — the name of his Alma Mater, gave it out as Harvard. Now he had really gone to Williams, but before finally admitting the fact, under pressure, he tried to claim Amherst! Such are the minor madnesses of a doctor’s examination.

Now and again a candidate has to be revived before he can get through to the end. I ran into one a few months ago being supported along the path from the library while his chagrined professor babbled to him of green fields and tried to make him forget how sadly he’d confused the writings of Giles and Phineas Fletcher. Occasionally one goes mad, — temporarily, of course, — but so evidently that his fantastic rearrangements of the cherished facts of his subject cannot be laid to a natural indisposition of mind.

Two alleviating practices let me, finally, commend, for we may not hope that the cult of the Ph.D. will die out in our time. Certain professors seem to regard the examination as a kind of intellectual spree. They lead their candidate where neither he nor the rest of the committee can find a trail out. The moment is painful for the candidate, but let him be at rest; minutes will rush by while the triumphant examiner leads the procession out of the woods, only to be hotly challenged by his colleagues immediately he emerges. In the ensuing battle the incipient doctor may draw breath safe from danger. One American professor, now unfortunately emeritus, employed a painless method of extracting a minimum of information which used to enrage his bloodthirsty fellow examiners but anæsthetized the candidate. I commend it to all graduate-school committees inclined to mercy. He held the novel opinion that, the examiners were present to learn. He poked about in the miscellaneous knowledge of his victim until he came on something new. He continued to pump him dry and then looked about for more — humiliating for his colleagues, most flattering to the candidate, and apparently considerable fun for the whimsical doctor.