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The time was the mid-1980s, and the scene was a relaxed departmental social occasion, where lowly graduate students like myself had a chance to wolf down hors d'oeuvres, guzzle some decent white wine, and mingle with the faculty. After a while, I found myself drawing apart from the chattering crowd, settling into easy conversation with one of the senior members of the department. A man of considerable scholarly distinction, he also was known, despite his warmly congenial manner, as an exceptionally frustrating and arbitrary taskmaster with his own graduate students. But it was said that he occasionally let down his guard with students who were not his own.

What, I asked, was the hardest part of his job? I was just awkwardly trying to make conversation. But he took the question seriously and pondered it for a while, much longer than I had expected, his gaze sinking toward the floor. Then he gave a surprising answer, the words emerging with the emphatic certainty that one reserves for convictions tested by experience. He had been pondering not what to say, but whether he should actually say it. "You know what is really terrible?" he asked, slowly raising his eyes to face mine intently. "It's watching what happens to young people when they come to graduate school. They arrive bright-eyed, eager, charming people of wide interests, who are so happy to find themselves in a place where ideas are talked about, and where they can meet people who have written the books they read in college."

He paused for a moment, then continued, his voice tightening. "It is our job to break down that enthusiasm, to narrow them, to socialize them into an academic profession. To turn them into drudges." He reflected on what he had said, and gave a resigned shrug. "Sometimes it's the best ones that leave in the first or second years. Sometimes the ones who finish, and go into the profession, are the least interesting." Another pause, and then an ironic smile which tacitly said "end of discussion." And then we were quickly on to another subject. In the twinkling of an eye, his guard had gone back up, and I never again heard him say such things. But I never forgot what he said—and the fact that he, of all people, had said it. He was a true-believing, by-the-book graduate professor, at the pinnacle of his profession. But he knew something was wrong with the whole arrangement. And strangely enough, I took heart from hearing the truth spoken, however fatalistically.

No area of American higher education is more in need of reform, and less likely to receive it, than graduate education. True, we probably do it better here than it is done anyplace else. But it is cold comfort to know that we are the world's best at the routinization of intellectual inquiry and the fragmentation of knowledge. As our chief means of forming college teachers, graduate training could hardly be more dysfunctional if we had set out to make it that way. It is miraculous that there are so many thoughtful teachers and independent-minded scholars in our colleges, when they have been run through a dismal regimen that is as hostile to human nurture as it is to critical thinking.

There is good reason to be concerned about the intellectual orthodoxies that have taken over the academy in recent years. Christians in particular are justified in complaining of the secularization of the academy, a related though slightly different pathology. But it may be that the expanding reach of professionalization itself represents the greatest barrier to the existence of a vital and vibrant intellectual culture in America. This is not a new observation. It is one that William James made exactly a century ago, in his 1903 essay on "the Ph.D. octopus," an essay still widely admired—and honored entirely in breach rather than observance.

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September (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47