The Autonomy of Scholarship

IT IS perhaps no accident that the center of controversy among American educators, in both graduate and undergraduate institutions, is the The bitterest faculty debates in colleges, law schools, graduate schools of arts and sciences, and in universities generally, have recently centered on the question of some new versus some old curriculum. Curriculum committees consume no small part of the extracurricular time of faculty members. Graduate schools of the humanities and the social sciences-and it is with them that I am primarily concerned-have been so preoccupied with the question of what curriculum is needed that they have become blind their primary assumption, namely, that graduate study is roughly synonymous with the pursuit of a prescribed course of study according a specified timetable.' The word curriculum happens be precise and felicitous for expressing the spirit of contemporary graduate studies. It is, as you know, a word of Latin origin, derived from currere, meaning to run, or hasten, and I believe that the Romans the word curriculum meant a racecourse. Much contemporary debate on the nature and purpose of graduate study is

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