The Persisting European Heritage of the American Ph.D.

Inasmuch as American Doctor of Philosophy degree programs are st ll occasionally c arged with being medieval in design and too encrusted with 19th century German influence, this paper sketches the medieval European history of the Ph.D. degree and the Germanic legacy with which the degree is still supposedly en crusted. The great intellectual achievement during the Middle Ages was the university, an accomplishment that Rash dall,9 (p. 3), the recognized authority of the history of European higher education for the period, termed com parable to the political attainments of constitutional kingship, parliament, and trial by jury. The historian Boyd1 records that during the Middle Ages the term described the societies or guilds of masters or students organized for mutual he1p and protection inasmuch as in medieval Europe both masters and students resided in a foreign country at their own risk. Additionally, the perilous confrontations at the time between town and gown demanded that the masters and students achieve the unity and concord implicit in the prefix of the term if the fledgling social system were to survive the external threats to it. The social cohesion that the system mustered to counter the external threats was versatile enough to protect it as effectively from internal threats. Boyd and Rashdall both examined the external and internal parameters of this social cohesiveness. Boyd wrote that the doctoral guilds of the 12th century, their members recalcitrant often to the point of contumacy, defied student guilds, State, and Church to dictate academic matters. These doctoral guilds, Rashdall9 (pp. 148-9) argued, had to be superseded before the modern uni versity could take root and added that the university student of the Middle Ages unknowingly assisted in transforming the medieval university into the modern university by boycotting the doctoral guilds ruthlessly. In the uprising the student guilds sheared the doctoral guilds of exclusive control of all functions of the doctoral collegium except one: the prerogative of the members of the collegium to review the qualifications of the candidate seeking to the profession. Thus the only prerogative of the early academician to remain uneroded in the confrontation between the stu dents' and the doctors' guilds was recruitment to the profession, symbolized by the conferral of the upon the candidate and carrying with it, originally only at Bologna in the law faculty, the right to teach on the faculty. Boyd1 (pp. 148-9) documented that the custom of recruiting new members into the profession, which had originated in the law guild of Bologna, soon spread to the doctoral guilds of all the faculties?law, theology, medicine, philosophy?throughout the major univer sities of Eastern and Western Europe. In the 13th century the guilds, assisted by the Pope, extended the concomitant right to teach on the faculty into the right to teach anywhere in the world, the Bull of Nicholas IV officially recognizing the extension in 1292. Rashdall0 (p. 223) added that in sanctioning ius docendi ubique, the right to teach anywhere, the Bull established the as an order of intellectual nobility, an aura which the American retains today. This support of the university by the Church, in tended, partially at least, to widen the breach between the university and the State, resulted, according to Eells5 (pp. 17-8), in a jockeying for control by Church, State, and university and ultimately in a restructuring of power. Eells and Rashdall in sketching the struggles for power wrote that after the famous jurist, Irnerius, had brought renown to the University of Bologna, the distinguished quartet of jurists who had succeeded him and who in European intellectual history are known as the Four Doctors formed a collegium ostensibly to counteract the 1158 transformation of Bologna by Frederick I into a student controlled university. In their first official act the Four Doctors prescribed the con ditions under which others might become recognized members of the teaching body and thus have the right to be designated also as doctors. (p. 17) The prescrip tion the doctoral collegia soon transformed into a pro gram affecting both the substance and the procedures of doctoral education. Implemented, the program shortly became fully operational throughout most Western European universities. Boyd however recorded that this professional hegemony was short lived, for after the beginning of the 13th century when monarchs and popes commenced founding universities for reasons of policy and, ironi cally, after the issuance of the Bull of 1292, both Crown and Church regarded the of new doctors partly their prerogative, eroding thus every vestige of exclusive control of the collegia. In his second volume Rashdall further documented the erosion, stating that by the 14th century the Pope claimed the right to dis pense with the whole or any part of the preliminaries required for the doctorate and to demand admission of the candidate either immediately or after a certain limited period of residence (p. 30). Good6 similarly