ABSTRACT
As William James foresaw, the Ph.D. could well be an octopus. Few things in the academic world have been subjected to more derision and also hot criticism than the Ph.D. dissertation. It was the aspect of the newfangled degree that aroused most of William James's contempt for the degree and led him to refer to it as "the octopus." James had several reasons for opposing the new degree. It was quite as William James had predicted: the best in Harvard College would go, on graduation, straight to business or to law school, less often medical school, in other words, straight to career. Philosophy's principal research offering at Berkeley was its Philosophical Union, so called. The attraction of a few years spent in graduate work became greater. There were some good titles conceived by the Berkeley philosophers for their contributions.
