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The Establishment of the Ph.D. at Toronto: A Case of American Influence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Peter N. Ross*
Affiliation:
Faculty of Lakeshore Teachers College, York University, Toronto, Canada

Extract

In 1902 the University of Toronto joined American universities in celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of Johns Hopkins University. For the occasion, A. Bruce Macallum, Professor of Physiology and holder of the Johns Hopkins' Ph.D. (1888), wrote a short essay in commemoration of the American institution. He acknowledged the contemporary debt owed to Johns Hopkins and, by inference, the obligation of Toronto to its example:

But what the Johns Hopkins University lacked in age it made up in service to American scholarship and higher education. In those few years it completely reformed American university ideals, and it developed the higher university work on this continent to a degree that no other university succeeded in doing.

Type
Science, Professionalism, and the Higher Learning
Copyright
Copyright © 1972 by New York University 

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References

Notes

1. Macallum, A. Bruce who graduated in 1880 from the University of Toronto, taught there from 1883 to 1917. During the period 1896 to 1917, he actively promoted the establishment of the Ph.D. degree at Toronto, its extension to a larger number of disciplines, and the creation of a graduate school. In 1917 he resigned his position at the University to undertake the chairmanship of the newly formed National Research Council of Canada.Google Scholar

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91. In 1906 a Royal Commission was appointed to investigate the problems that Toronto faced as a provincial university. A number of briefs from the colleges and individuals argued the importance of liberal culture (Ontario, Royal Commission on the University of Toronto, Report [Toronto, 1906]).Google Scholar

92. Alexander was the first Canadian to earn the Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins.Google Scholar

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97. That the University of Toronto followed the general pattern that was emerging during the 1890s is confirmed by a comparison of the regulations for the Ph.D. at Toronto and at nine leading American universities: California, Chicago, Columbia, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Michigan, Princeton, Wisconsin, and Yale. All nine were charter members of the Association of American Universities and, since they produced the majority of doctorates in the United States, were influential models.Google Scholar