DEGREE IS NOT TITLE

 

A degree (B.A., M.Sc. or Ph.D.) awarded by a university or other organisation, with adequate authority, is a university degree, not a title like Mudali or Duchess of Kent. These latter titles are awarded by a king/queen or a government and may be revoked; degrees awarded by universities cannot be revoked unless there was malfeasance in the award of the degree. The learned physician who identified a Ph.D. degree as a title (The Island, 13/12/24) was wrong. The cardiologist had missed the heart of the matter.

What is the heart of the matter? The degree comes from Latin gradus meaning a step; a step in the progress of a university student. Why a Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)? Because, in Latin it is doctor philosophiae and that is why Oxford University awards a D.Phil. degree. Most other universities use the form of Ph.D. But why Latin? Because where universities were founded, the language of learning (and much else) was Latin. The term university comes from universitas vestra, (You all) which was used in Bulls issued by a Pope to address a group (students or masters) who sought a charter from him to establish a university e.g. St. Andrews in Scotland in 1413. To understand why that procedure, one has to learn about feudal Europe.

But why does a person who studies medicine receive a D.Phil. degree (e.g. the eminent professor Tashi Chang at Colombo)? Go back to the history of universities in Europe. In those universities, there were only 5 faculties of study: arts, law, theology, medicine and philosophy. Note that there was no science faculty.  There were grades, in the sense gradus. The lowest was the arts faculty; every student had to graduate from that faculty.

They often referred to the other four as ‘superior faculties’. You still get a B.A. degree in engineering (in Cambridge) or in history at Peradeniya; it is the first step in one’s academic journey. If one continues one’s studies, one may earn a Master’s Degree (M.A.) in the arts faculty. It was a degree essential for anyone to teach in a university. With an M.A. degree, one became a docent who could teach in any university or its predecessor studium generale(e.g.Montpellier) anywhere, provided one had attended the prescribed lectures and successfully engaged in disputation (disputandum).  The term ‘docent’ is still used in Europe: France, Germany and Poland.

A student may proceed to a superior faculty. They could study law (either canon or civil), medicine, theology, or philosophy. In rank, the faculty of philosophy was superior to all others and the degree from that faculty still remains the highest degree that a student may earn from a university.  Someone who satisfies the requirements at MIT receives a Ph.D. degree. (Still higher degrees (e.g. D.Lit., D.C.L, D.Sc. are awarded for outstanding academic achievement as judged by the university.)  Non-university institutions may elect such distinguished men and women as Fellows of the Royal Society or of the British Academy in England. This process has been kept intact in most universities in US. To proceed to a Ph.D. degree in whatever discipline, it is necessary to have obtained a good (grade point average) B.A. degree or an M.A. degree. In addition, they need to do well in the respective entrance examinations: MCAT for medical schools or GMAT for business schools.

The old procedure of disputations in public is a requirement for the award of a Ph.D. In both the US and most universities in Europe. (In old Europe, before written examinations were introduced, the other requirement that a student had to satisfy, was that he had attended classes where prescribed books were read in a lecture. In pre-Gutenberg Europe, books were rare and expensive and had to be listened to when read by a lecturer. Are we in Sri Lanka still there?) Hence university lecturers. In most other universities today, that disputation takes place in the viva voce examination of the thesis of a candidate for a higher degree.

It is unfortunate that in our society most people find a degree a TITLE: something to display. A Ph.D. or D.Phil. Degree is only a gradus, the terminal step for a student in a university.

Philosophiae Doctor 

(Canterbrigensis)

Source: The Island