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Comment by tomrod | Hacker News Reader

This is an excellent support to the thought that, once provided with a standard metric, people tend to focus only on satisfying that metric.

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It's kind of understandable. In some professions we have accreditation and licenses; others sometimes clamor for the same thing. That fellow's Ph. D. diploma on the wall was the effective equivalent of "licensed practitioner of teaching the Liberal Arts" or something like that. That's why the employer insisted on it.

Would we say that a dentist's license had nothing to do with whether they can do dentistry and cheerfully go to one that doesn't have one?

Fact is that by getting the Ph. D., the guy did prove that he was "good" in some way; he had the academic "muscle" and that is relevant to the teaching, even if the subject isn't the same.

You absolutely cannot say that philosophy is irrelevant to literature. That is to say if we examine the statement "[w]e wrote again, pointing out that a Ph.D. in philosophy would prove little anyhow as to one's ability to teach literature" it doesn't really hold up. That fellow simply doesn't cast aside his philosophy background when he gets up in front of the literature class! The way we analyze literature all has philosophical underpinnings. Literature can carry philosphical points of view, and consciously so, even. Fictional literature has been used to transmit philosophical thought, from Socratic dialogues of ancient greece to works like the novels of Ayn Rand.

Considering that he was a professor of philosophy and brother to a novelist, I don't think that William James supposed philosophy to be irrelevant to literature. "Casting one's philosophy background aside" is one thing, neglecting to get a Ph.D. in it quite another.

It's the same though; if you proclaim that a Ph. D. (i.e. some more or less objective demonstration of competence) in philosophy is not relevant to teaching literature, you are in fact saying that philosphy itself is not relevant to teaching literature. If philosophy is relevant to teaching literature, then the instructor's level of achievement matters in some way. If it is relevant, then knowing next to jack squat about philosphy is objectively worse contribution of relevance than being an expert in it with a extensive background. If the level of achievement matters, then so do whatever hoops we use for measuring and accrediting it, like "Ph. D".

Since the school chose an instructor with a philosphy background, they asked that he have an objective certificate of high achievement in that respective field. That was arguably better than asking for a Ph. D. in literature.

Without claiming to know what the administration of an anonymous college thought a century and some years ago, James's clause "after supporting himself by literary labor for three years" suggests to me that the college may have hired this man for his literary reputation rather than his philosophy background.

I do not say that philosophy itself is irrelevant either to literature or the teaching of literature. I will say that there have been very competent philosophers whose judgment in literature is at least suspect--think of Kant quoting the poetry of Frederick the Great, generally regarded as pretty bad stuff--and that there have been very competent writers on literature whose grasp of philosophy isn't strong.

Shall I go home and remove from my shelves the criticism and poetry of T.S. Eliot, who never bothered to show up and defend his Ph.D. thesis at Harvard?

The about face suggests that, as can be expected, more than one person was involved in the decision. At one point, Administrator X, being a principal influence in the hiring decision, was swayed by the literary reputation and influenced the hiring decision. Then later along comes Administrator Y and notices, "we hired this person who has no Ph. D, OMG!". Viewed from the outside, the school exhibits a kind of disordered, fickle personality: hiring someone for literary reputation without considering paper credentials one moment, and then fussing about the paper credentials the next moment.

Spot on.

No, you can argue that a PHD has zero correlations with teaching.

Picture a ven diagram where A overlaps with B, B overlaps with C, but AC does not overlap with A. Remove B and you have two circles that don't overlap at all.

But you also have a different diagram in which B has been removed; a different object.

Purge from your mind a whole aspect of who you are, and some other two parts become disconnected: uncontroversial to me.

The example also works the other way. In a hypothetical example of two non overlapping circles teaching and PHD don't suddenly overlap just because you draw a new circle encompassing some 3rd idea.

Saying A relates to B and B relates to C says nothing about A relating to C.

In some areas you absolutely want a strict standard, to your point on dentists. PhD is an interesting requirement, however, due to the variance in skillset, experience, and training an individual going through the educational process receives compared to vocational programs. The degree can substitute for a license, but it's going to be very noisy. Requiring it leads to less absolute diversity in a hiring pool (as opposed to categorical diversity) which may or may not be the goal of the institution. But once you've found a good hire, who can perform the function of the job to the client's satisfaction, the vocational or educational background is more or less unnecessary. To refer to your dentist example: it may take me a lot of encouragement to trust my Uncle Joe with no dental degree to work on my teeth, but once he's proven himself the need for institutional acknowledgement of his ability is trumped by his performance.

Another tangent point to consider: dentists and other vocationalists have existed long before a licensing board did, and someone, somewhere, got the first History PhD.

I would disagree about professional licensure, and think the same arguments apply there as in other areas, although maybe in different ways. In fact, I think the problem in licensed professions is even worse, because assumptions are never questioned, to avoid being called reckless, and have the weight of law.

In fact, I think this is a prime problem with healthcare in the US in the moment.

The problem James outlines is the same with professional fields: we assume that license X, which often requires degree A, is necessary for competence in an area, and that competence cannot be achieved in an area in any other way. As a result, we stop actually paying attention to competency per se, and focus on licensure, which is not the same. As a result of that, we lose choice: any other way of meeting a demand is assumed to be illegitimate and unsafe, which is untrue. Competition is lost, and monopoly is gained.

In your example, for instance, you suggest a hypothetical case where someone doesn't have a dental degree. But in reality, it's almost certainly not that that person would have no degree at all, and no experience, it's that they would have a different sort of degree, with a different sort of experience.

Dentists are maybe a poor example, because if anything, their profession is an example of one that is being stifled by current practice. I suspect that they are in a position to learn to do a lot more than they are, and are held back by professional licensing laws relative to MDs.

The appropriate example isn't "would you hire someone without a dental degree to treat your cavity?" It's "would you hire a dentist with appropriate surgical training to do jaw surgery?" Would you hire an optometrist with years of opthomological surgery training to do LASIK surgery? Would you hire a psychologist with pharmacology training to prescribe you lithium, or a psychologist with appropriate training to do TMS treatment of your depression? Would you trust your pharmacist to pick the right antibiotic for your infection, that has been precisely characterized by a lab already? What about a neuroscientist with clinical training to interpret your MRI scan?

Licenses, although well-intended, have become hindrances to lower cost and better choice. The tail is wagging the dog in professional fields exactly the way James suggested over a century ago.

But one's ability to conduct research and achieve a Ph.D. in a subject area in no way indicates one's ability to teach others in that same, or another, subject. Research skills do not equate to teaching skills - unless, perhaps, your area of expertise is in developmental and learning psychology.

> Would we say that a dentist's license had nothing to do with whether they can do dentistry and cheerfully go to one that doesn't have one?

The stakes in that case are rather higher. A literature teacher who screws up won't make your life anywhere near as miserable as a dentist who does likewise.

I can say from my own experience that a Ph.D. has no effect on the ability to teach. It's actually kind of weird in the way that if you want to teach high school you have to take education courses, but it is assumed at the university level that you just magically acquire the ability to teach in the course of doing your research.

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