Professional Responsibilities of the Graduate School
T HE graduate school of most American universities is a professional school which engages in the preparation of professional workers of widely differing types. Usually, however, it proceeds as though it were educating only one professional group-research specialists. A. M. Carr-Saunders and P. A. Wilson point out that one of the characteristics of all professions is a technique which makes specialized service possible. "Techniques," they state, "may be either scientific or institutional. The former are founded on the knowledge acquired by the study of a natural science, while the latter, of which law is an example, are based upon the study of human institutions."' The authors might properly have pointed out that there are two types of professions founded on the knowledge acquired by the scientific study of any discipline. One type is concerned with extending the boundaries of knowledge in a specialized area, but without any controlling interest in the usefulness of the new knowledge for the improvement of human institutions. The program and the standards of the graduate school have been built up around the needs of this group. The other type is primarily concerned with the improvement of human institutions and engages in the study of the special field with the specific purpose of discovering the ways and means of effecting such improvement. Though this group constitutes a large part of the enrollment of the graduate school, though there is no other institution in which it can be educated, and though the social need for professionals of this type is obvious, few graduate schools offer programs or standards which are adjusted to its needs. In how many American graduate schools, for example, is it possible for the prospective college, junior-college, or high-school teacher of biological science to secure the breadth of preparation which is needed if that teacher is to interpret to students the potentialities of these related disciplines for the advancement of human welfare? In most graduate schools this prospective teacher will be curtly informed that he must limit himself to some highly specialized and socially neutral aspect of botany, zoology, bacteriology, or physiology. For this kind 'The Professions, pp. 284-87.