Contextual culture of the master's degree and the decline of the M.L.S. thesis: an exploratory review essay.(Iconoclast: Abraham Flexner and a Life in Learning)(Book Review)

Iconoclast: Abraham Flexner and a Life in Learning. By Thomas Neville Bonner. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. 432 pp. $36.00. ISBN 0-80187-124-7.

Higher education has never really been free of critics, nowhere more so than in the United States, where until recently higher education has enjoyed a near mythological stature within the collective mind. American colleges and graduate and professional schools have been instrumental in providing necessary training and education for the nation, signaling a qualified success. (1) However, as with any human enterprise, such activities must undergo scrutiny and periodic pulse reading. Abraham Flexner proved to be one of the most powerful observers of higher education, and to this day he would comprehend many of its ills with measured concern. Bonner's biography is a well-conceived tour de force, situating Flexner within the intellectual and educational milieu in which he operated.

Of humble origins, Flexner joined the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and evolved into an influential figure affecting the course of medical education by releasing his 1910 report, which paved the way for research-based hospitals and medical scientific education. Later he became a leading figure in philanthropy through the Rockefeller Foundation, and founded the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton. A flawed individual, Flexner is portrayed as a champion of criticism and reform, a watchdog of higher learning. (2) A staunch supporter of law and medicine within the academy, he held professional programs other than the former as philistine, better offered elsewhere. (3)

Iconoclast is a richly drawn texture of intellectual history and a necessary signpost for further reflection. It masterfully addresses an individual crusader whose ideas and concerns loom large for all professional programs, especially where research and scholarly acculturation are concerned. The influence and concern Flexner exercised are best illustrated when viewing the protean nature of master's education in America. The drive to professionalize various occupations has led to the Flexnerian prognostication that higher learning was not only in jeopardy in his time but has metastasized into the unbridled enterprise it is today. (4)

When Abraham Flexner's Universities: American, English, German first appeared in 1930, it focused concentrated criticism on American higher education. Like a laser cutting through moribund flesh, Flexner left little to be misunderstood, so much so that higher education officials and the interested public knew exactly where his philosophy lay within the growing enterprise that was American higher education. Most striking was the added vehemence leveled against graduate education in the main but especially professional education. (5) In light of the almost universal celebratory response to American higher education and its continued success since Flexner's first critique, graduate education has evolved into a massive enterprise. Compounding Flexner's position, which at times could appear Eurocentric and unmistakably elitist, coexisted an equally strong disdain for classical education as conceived in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, especially as it manifested itself in American colleges and universities prior to the turn of the twentieth century. Evenly tempered by a willful sense of purpose and idealism bordering upon the purist form of Bildung, Flexner's perceived attack on American higher education must be seen as an attempt to foster a sustained respect for the life of the mind for the seriousness it deserves. Consequently, professional education within the confines of such sacred groves as the University of Chicago, Harvard, or elsewhere, including some large state universities (e.g., the University of Illinois, the University of California at Berkeley or Los Angeles), was an aberration to be excised from the otherwise robust body of higher education.

Incisive and cogently critical, Flexner navigated among the diverse and fluid definitional concerns of the public perception of what constituted proper higher education and the accommodating forces of utilitarian-driven responses of boards of trustees and, a la Flexner, vacillating higher education administrators. Serious intent and purpose in attending an institution of higher learning was just that--a centered and elevating enterprise, free of countervailing forces intent on diluting curricula and mission other than fostering disinterested learning. Pure disciplinary pursuit was the true objective and focus of higher learning, not the proliferating cacophony of programs and their corresponding degrees. Flexner's true and most acerbic criticism was especially vehement when applied to professional programs. Both undergraduate and, especially, graduate studies in those programs came under swift and terrible scrutiny. After having produced the most compelling report on medical education in American history, Flexner's comparison with European universities came full force against the enterprising American penchant for creating new programs and sanctifying each with a degree designation, a phenomenon that continues to the present. Expansion of higher education as manifested then was an open door to the degradation of higher learning--today's massification of the higher education enterprise would be anathema.

Especial vehemence toward business, education, journalism, library science, or any professional program relegated such to necessary training programs otherwise ensconced elsewhere. Today's proliferation of programs to meet every professional need in industry or services only confounds if not conflates the whole problem vexing Flexner. (6) Business, education, and home economics were singled out for sustained approbation, but Columbia University's and the University of Chicago's education and home economics theses became salient examples for ridicule. (7) Flexner was certain to state that such professions were useful and required in a complex and evolving society, but training for such professional roles was best obtained other than in higher education facilities. Were Flexner's philosophy extrapolated, theses and dissertations in fields other than professional programs would have been easy targets, especially if narrow and exceedingly pedestrian topics revealed a research incapable of posing the most difficult and penetrating of questions. Following Flexnerian thinking, most library science these and dissertations would have been relegated to the dustbin.

Graduate education has grown to such proportions that it would be virtually unrecognizable to Flexner, confirming his worst suspicions. Indeed, the burgeoning enterprise of higher education was made real by demands and, therefore, deformations of spirit and character. Nowhere would this be most evident than at the master's degree level. Today, with the promise of more permutations, the master's degree's protean nature can seemingly accommodate almost any professional justification. Recent permutations vis-a-vis the master's degree into the professional science master's degree in mathematics and the sciences has made science graduate studies more effectively aligned with marketplace requirements and interests. (8) Contrary to received truth, such commodification of learning has existed since the problem of granting the master's degree to teachers and is nowhere truer than at the level of the master's degree. (9) Since the 1920's and 1930's master's degrees have been awarded on an expansive plane, where all manner of possibility exists for their inception. The history of library science degrees has been no exception, especially the master's degree.

Historical Context

The long history of academic degree structures is as old as the history of higher education in the Western world. Today the master's degree is regarded as an all-purpose degree--this was not always the case. Within the academic degree structure as it has developed over time in the United States, intermediate degrees are seen as capping formalized programs. The primary degrees awarded have generally been bachelor's and the doctoral degree. During the Middle Ages the master's degree was awarded to scholars who could then teach within the universities--master was synonymous with the candidate being a master who was qualified to teach a subject. (10) Whether the teacher-scholar was a holder of the doctorate was not crucial, although doctoral degrees were available and conferred.

The history of the master's degree in the United Sates has been one fraught with particular difficulty, one that cannot be easily dismissed. The master's degree was originally an importation from Great Britain. At Oxford and Cambridge Universities, from the seventeenth century onward, the master's was conferred as an honorary degree upon former students who had managed to remain--at least to the university--on good and honorable terms. (11) This practice continued overseas and became institutionalized in the American colonies and early academic culture of the United States until the late nineteenth century, whereupon the master's degree became a postbaccalaureate degree through a period of study and examination. Today there is a multitude of possibilities for one to acquire a master's degree in any number of fields of interest. Both professional and academic programs are represented in the structure of contemporary higher education. More often than not one can find a listing of myriad designations for degrees starting with "Master of ..." (12)

To this day the master's degree has been characterized as a diploma so amorphous that it justifiably defies definition. Since the first concerted attempts at investigation were initiated by the Council of Graduate Schools in 1902, into its status within the pedagogical and research degree structure in American higher education, the degree has met with derision if not serious suspicion, and its stated or implied quality and value have been badly tarnished. (13) This diminished status of the master's degree has not effectively changed since the early twentieth century. It is now regarded as a professional qualification for the further certification of secondary school teachers seeking…