I HAVE followed with interest discussion of the proposed $21 million building to house the Jefferson Scholars Foundation. The focus of discussion so far has been on the fate of Beta House, on which I shall not comment. To my knowledge, another issue has been missed: the relation of the $21 million building to graduate training at the University of Virginia.
A recent Cavalier Daily news article ("City defers $21M bond," Sept. 20) attributes to Jefferson Scholars Foundation President James Wright the view that "the center could help the foundation attract high-caliber graduate students."
Far be it for me to object to the construction of another new building at the University of Virginia. I am sure that it will contain attractive offices, meeting rooms, and whatever else the Foundation decides to include in it.
However, any claim that such a building will have a significant impact on the recruitment of "high-caliber" graduate students to the University is deeply flawed. Serious graduate training is a matter of initiating graduate students into the work of a discipline, sub-discipline, or cross-disciplinary research area. Such work does not occur in multi-disciplinary conversations under the auspices of persons who are not themselves engaged in the preservation and carrying forward of scientific and scholarly knowledge.
It is suggested in the news article that the proposed graduate center "would be a place where [graduate] students could do research." This is surely false. In the physical and biological sciences, most graduate students ought to be spending as much time as possible in their labs and in interaction with other specialists in their research area, not in a Jefferson Scholars Graduate Center. In the humanities and social sciences the situation is much the same, although the proper venue for research is more likely to be the library, archive, public record office, or other place where facts can be gathered, observations made, hypotheses tested, methods refined, and criticism by experts in the field offered and addressed.
"Foundations" do not attract first-rate graduate students. Further, any graduate student who would be attracted to the University by an elegant building is surely not worth having. Excellent graduate students are attracted by eminent professors who have produced significant research and publications in their fields and have active research programs currently underway. But a second thing is also needed: adequate financial support for the majority of our graduate students, and not just for a very small number of privileged Jefferson Scholars.
Support for graduate students at this university is pitiful when measured against what our most serious competitors, the rich private universities, offer to all persons they admit into their Ph.D. programs. Their comparative advantage over us has dramatically increased over the last few years. Even such public universities as Michigan, Maryland and North Carolina are routinely offering substantially greater support than we do. I do not need to harp on a situation that is well known to faculty in almost every department in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
Properly invested, the $21 million that is to be sunk into the Jefferson Scholars Building could produce something like $800,000 annually, in real terms, in perpetuity -- money that could be devoted to what is really needed: direct support for graduate students. Such an amount would make it possible for us to attract some of the highly competitive candidates whom we now lose to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Duke, and Stanford, not to mention North Carolina and Maryland.
To be sure, $21 million would not be enough to entirely rescue the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences from its current non-competitiveness. I have heard $80 million mentioned as a sum likely to achieve that end. But $21 million devoted to the real needs of our graduate program would move the University roughly a quarter of the way in the right direction. The sinking of $21 million into a fancy new building will not. In fact, such a use of the money may very well do positive harm, for it suggests that those who have the power to make decisions at the University have no understanding of what a graduate program is or does.
Allan Megill is a professor of history.
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