Styles of Scholarly Production

Abstract

THE LAST DECADE has seen an almost obses sive concern among college administrators and professors in the classification and evaluation of j American institutions of higher education. This ferment has been actuated by the desire to evaluate comparative achievements, and in part to plot new courses of institutional development. Such con cerns have inevitably raised the question of types and varieties of American higher educational insti tutions. Thus, institutions have been variously classified. This writer has classified them as public and private, universities and colleges, church-controlled and non-denominational, and by region, cost and size, upon the a priori assump tion that these represent meaningful categories (1, 2). The present article seeks in a modest way to approach the problem of types and varieties of institutions of higher education in a quite different manner, namely, in terms of the type of scholar produced by such an institution. It is, the authors believe, unique that this typology rests not upon a priori categories but rather upon statistical evi dence from which an inductive classification is derived. The data employed in the present study are taken from Doctorate Production in United States Universities 1936-1956, National Academy of Sci ences (3). The authors of this publication have selected the 95 institutions yielding the greatest number of gradu?t s who have subsequently taken a Ph.D. within the time span indicated. For each of these 95 institutions, the number of Ph.Ds. tak ing their baccalaureate degrees from each of 31 fields of scholarship is recorded. In the develop ment of this study these numbers were combined under five main headings, namely, Physical Scien ces, Biological Sciences, Humanities, Social Sci ences, and Education. It should also be noted that the authors took the liberty of eliminating certain categories and combining others. Thus, for exam ROBERT H. KNAPP