Word: often
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...something like forty per cent of our men are married, this is becoming increasingly more common. They leave with good and serious intentions of returning when they have the money. One good reason gives way to another to prevent the man's ever finishing his work, and all too often the files of the dean's office become a last repository for uncompleted thesis projects...
Then consider the uncertainties about what might be called the enduse of the product. In the world of the Ph.D. there is no licensing, no state examinations, and often no fairly sure concept of what a man is to do with the degree or any fairly precise expectation of this or that salary. This, of course, is a realm in which the universities can do little directly. Yet it involves important matters--fundamentally related to the application of the training--about which we should be militantly aware...
Here too much is obscure and too often the assignment of routine courses replaces careful faculty consideration. Too much is mechanical; too little is personal. It is easier to tell a man to take the traditional courses--unexciting, shallow, and often repetitions survey courses--than to conclude that this particular man could well be allowed to do much of this work on his own--reading and listening and talking where he can profit most. The frequent result is depressing indeed, for we see many a man less mature, less selfpoised, and less confident after two years in a graduate school...
...Reluctance to give up the status quo or the desire, having been hazed yourself, to go and do likewise, have permitted these uncertainties to be kept alive. Still, we might tolerate them if we could proudly point to the results of the system--or lack of system. Far too often we cannot...
...ordeal spiritually dried up. A queer kind of virtue indeed is under test here. The desire for finding out what had not been known, the imaginative urge to reinterpret--these the tired and weary student has gradually lost. He has been wrung dry, and, knowingly or not, he often finishes his thesis with the firm resolve to have no more to do with "scholarship." The drive--almost the poetic drive--which first excited him and sent him on from college to graduate school...