Books

Abstract

former president of Harvard, Derek Bok, called graduate education, so seldom scrutinized, soft underbelly of the research university. Now two giants of academic administration, William Bo wen and Neil Rudenstine, have scrutinized and scrutinized, in 400 big pages and many scores of charts and graphs. Bowen is an economist, the president of the Mellon Foundation, and the former provost and president of Princeton. Neil Rudenstine is an English professor, the new president of Harvard and former provost at Princeton, and second in command at Mellon. The Mellon Foundation supported their project, which was started in 1989 and completed, among their many other duties, in record time. The book claims to be the first comprehensive study of graduate education since Berelson's in 1960. The study is focused on the top echelon of graduate programs, namely, the authors' Ten Universities group Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Cornell (that is, most of the Ivy League), Stanford, Chicago, Berkeley, Michigan, and North Carolina. Remember this list. And it focuses on six fields, namely, English, history, and political science (known euphoniously as EHP), with some attention to math and physics (MP), plus economics. The EHP fields were the most IN PURSUIT OF THE Ph.D. by William G. Bowen and Neil L. Rudenstine. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992, index, $35.