American higher education contains its own erroneous nomenclature. Most notably, people having earned one degree in law or medicine are told even by their schools that the degree is doctorates. Common sense alone can point out that merely three or four years of courses in an academic discipline do not a doctorate make, especially considering that the first year or two consist of survey courses (i.e., courses that survey the different areas in a subject rather than go into depth). That having a prior bachelor’s degree is a required does not mean that the first degree in law, medicine, or divinity is advanced, for the prior degree is not in those schools (of knowledge). For instance, a person can go to a law school in America with a BA in English. Even if a person in one's first degree in medicine, the MD, has earned a prior degree in biochemistry, that subject is not medicine and thus is not relied on. I was surprised when a medical student told me that very little of even his bio-chemistry major was taught to the first-degree medical students. Hence medical students can major in different subjects without being at a disadvantage in the survey courses in the first degree in medical schools.
Why, then, does admittance into a divinity, law, or medical school require a prior degree in another subject? The answer is not academic; rather, it lies in American political philosophy (which would not be a bad major prior to going to law school). The American founders, realizing that the American electorate, the popular sovereign, would be playing a decisive role in the new representative democracy, wanted citizens to be broadly educated. Judgments in casting votes would benefit from having knowledge beyond one school of knowledge, or specialization because political judgments are not technocratic.
So first-degree law students (i.e., in a LLB aka JD program) have made a lateral rather than upward move after receiving a first degree in another school (e.g., Liberal Arts and Sciences). Therefore, studying for a second university degree does not necessarily mean that it is graduate. To be so, the degree must not be the first in a given school, like medicine or law.
As an aside, I went to Yale to study theology, history, and philosophy (and film) by enrolling in the masters of divinity degree program. The M.Div., being the first degree in the school of divinity, is actually the undergraduate degree of divinity schools. The degree was labeled the B.D. until 1968 at Yale, when even thought the knowledge-content and courses did not change, all of a sudden graduates of that first degree in a divinity school had M.Div.s: masters of divinity. Mine actually labels the degree as a masters of theology, so the M.Div. may be a misnomer in two respects. But my degree from Yale is not a masters in substance, and I, apparently unlike some students before me, am just fine with two bachelors degrees. That the M.Div degree is the prerequisite for the STM degree (Masters in Sacred Theology) at Yale should be enough of an indication that the M.Div degree is not really a masters. The hierarchy of degrees within a school (or academic discipline) consists in ascending order of the bachelors, masters, and doctoral degree. Before 1968, a Yale divinity student graduating with a BD would have had no problem understanding that the next step would be the STM degree, followed by the DD (Harvard's divinity school offers the Th.D. too; the DD being more practitioner and less research oriented).
Regarding the academic coursework requirements of the first degrees in divinity/theology, law, and medicine, the inclusion of the survey courses typically in the first half of the program should be enough to indicate that the students are at the beginning stage of obtaining knowledge in the given subject, and a year or two of seminars on top correlate with a junior and senior year of a person's first college degree[1]. Yet this point is conveniently missed or arrogantly dismissed by so many ministers/priests, physicians and lawyers whose professional degrees have been granted by universities in America. The ignorance of something so visible and arrogant presumption based on false-entitlement, like arrogance on stilts during a flood, are without foundation and yet they last, reinforced not only in the respective professions, but even by all but a few of those professional schools at American universities.
A doctorate must be a terminal degree (i.e., the highest degree possible in a given school of knowledge, such as divinity, law, medicine, and liberal arts and sciences). A doctoral program must include a comprehensive exam prior to graduation, and thus given by professors rather than an industry board after graduation. Thirdly, a dissertation of substantial original research must be turned in and approved by a committee of the faculty. For many disciplines (excluding math and natural science), a dissertation is book-length. So the thesis of a first-degree medical, law, or liberal arts and sciences student would not suffice.
Furthermore, residency in a hospital, clerking for a judge, or being a postulate for the priesthood in a Christian denomination do not turn a first degree in medicine, law, and divinity, respectively, into a doctorate. I informed two physicians at a church of this, and their anger flared as they held stubbornly to their ignorance, perhaps due to the cultural esteem put on their profession or an erroneous statement made by a supervising physician or even a medical school administrator. Again, common sense would tell the two physicians that what is done after graduation AND not even at the university is exogenous to the degree itself that has already been granted. I was stunned, and more than just a little worried, that people charged with saving lives could be so stupid and lack common sense.
Some physicians and lawyers have told me that the MD and JD, respectively, are considered doctorates because the particular university does not offer the doctorate. A doctoral degree is a doctorate whether a particular university grants one or not; the bachelors degree (i.e., MD and JD) does not become a doctorate simply because a university doesn't offer the doctorate. Schools that don't offer the doctorate in law (i.e., the JSD) do not add coursework, a comprehensive exam (which is distinct from the bar exam, which is extrinsic to a law school and after graduation), and a dissertation onto the three years of coursework (survey courses and seminars) of a JD degree. Again, looking at the academic program is vital to grasping whether a degree is a bachelors, masters, or doctorate.
The answer to why most American medical and law schools do not offer their respective doctoral degrees hinges on the vaunted hyper-extended status of the two (wealthy) professions in American culture. Whereas in the E.U., a doctorate in law is required in order to become a tenured professor of law, law professors in the U.S. need only have the first degree (i.e., undergraduate) in law. Sometimes truth can be straight in front of a person and yet be for all intents and purposes invisible. Put another way, sometimes people have incredible difficult in "connecting the dots" when the line is clear as day. It likely would come as a shock to virtually every American that law and medical professors in the U.S. rarely have more than a year or two of survey classes and another year or two of seminars--without there even being a concentration, or major! A law journal with articles by professors holding two undergraduate degrees can demonstrate the writing (and editing) level that could be expected of a college graduate, rather than someone holding a doctorate (with a dissertation!). Reading articles on federalism in law journals, I found that pieces of ninety pages could easily and more concisely be thirty, and I won't get into the grammar and sentence structure.
How did the Americans get themselves in such a mess? In short, students complained about going seven or eight years in college with only two bachelors-level degrees. Changing the names of degrees without changing their academics is itself dubious or suspicious of an ulterior motive when the "B" gets changed to a "M" or even a "D."
The case of law schools is illustrative. In law schools, the JD (Juris Doctor, which is distinct from Doctorate) name of the first degree in that professional school began to replace LLB (Bachelors in the Letters of Law) name (only) at the founding of a law school at the University of Chicago in 1893. The college's administration (aka marketers) decided to change the name to attract students. The comparative advantage stemmed from the fact that prospective law students generally did not like the fact that seven years of college resulted in two bachelors degrees (e.g., BA and LLB). Changing the name of the degree did not make it a doctorate, so the "D" for doctor in "JD" was misleading, and thus unethical. The doctorate of law is the JSD (Doctorate in Juridical Science). The masters (LLM), stands between the undergraduate (i.e., first degree in the school) JD (or LLB) degree and the doctorate. Again, we can refer to common sense, which raises eyebrows at the fact that a Juris Doctor degree is a prerequisite for admission into a Masters in the Letters of Law (LLM) program.
Similarly, the doctorate in Medicine is the DSciM. (Doctorate in the Science of Medicine). The MD degree is a prerequisite, hence it cannot be a terminal degree in medicine—the DSciM. is higher). The "D" in the MD stands for doctor whereas the "D" in the DSciM stands for doctorate. Physicians are typically called doctors, but are never called doctorates. Even though subtle, this distinction is vital to understanding the qualitative difference between the two degrees; only one is a graduate degree in medical schools, even if a particular university does not offer the degree, whereas the other degree is the undergraduate degree in medicine. "Undergraduate" does not refer only to a person's first college degree, but, is relative to the school of knowledge being studied. In the U.S., this point is virtually unknown, which is staggering because common sense alone should make clear that a year or two of survey courses and one or two more of narrower subjects (within those surveyed) are not advanced in terms of the knowledge in a given academic field or school (of knowledge).
Even in the face of all this, the self-vaunting lawyer or physician is apt to presume that he or she has in fact earned a doctorate, and ministers or priests holding the M.Div degree typically belies any claim to humility by claiming a graduate degree in theology for just three years of study!
More abstractly, error itself may even be presumed to have a certain right to an over-reaching hegemony over knowledge in a society in which higher education is not valued in itself. Too often the case, American universities have come to be confined to fitting the criteria of vocation rather than education. Just because lawyers and physicians in private practice make enough money to be in the upper-middle economic stratum does not mean that their practitioner-degrees have the status of advanced scholarly degrees.
Furthermore, American law and medical schools need not dilute themselves by continuing to grant tenure to people holding two undergraduate degrees. Shifting laterally from one school of knowledge to another does not make a student a scholar of either one. Yet the credibility of tenured professors of law and medicine is well ensconced in even the most elite of American universities. Even they have undercut academia in the service of other values in American society. Even those universities can be characterized as having voluntarily weakened themselves. Those that know what the degrees mean are particularly blameworthy, for they know what they are doing and they do it anyway!
Yale's law school's academic administrators, for instance, know that the JD degree is an undergraduate degree, and yet the vast majority of tenured law professors there only have the one degree in law. A few might have the Ph.D. degree, but that degree would be in another academic discipline (not in law). and going sideways doesn't count the same as having the doctorate in law (i.e., the JSD) among the school's faculty.
It is hardly a feat of human nature that the human brain can so utterly fail to see what lies visible just ahead. Such is the warping effect that group-think (or culture more generally) can have. Even in seeking the truth, it may remain elusive to even the most innocent. Add pride and vested interest to the mix and the visible can conveniently remain as though invisible.
Epilogue
"I've wondered why it took us so long to catch on. We saw it and yet we didn't see it. Or rather we were trained not to see it. Conned, perhaps . . . The truth knocks on the door and you say, 'Go away, I'm looking for the truth,' and so it goes away. Puzzling. But once we caught on, . . . "[2]
1. A person's first college degree may be in a college of liberal arts and sciences or one of the professional schools (e.g., business, engineering, pharmacy, education, nursing) except for law, medicine, and divinity. Hence a first college degree can be distinguished from the first degree of a professional school even though the latter is also a bachelors degree. According to the registrar at Yale's law school, and the book she "had me read" (in typical Yale fashion), the first degree in a school/college is the undergraduate in that school/college. Hence, the graduate programs at Yale's law school consist of those for the LLM and JSD degrees, but not the JD degree. "That's our undergraduate degree," the registrar said of the JD (or LLB) degree. I had been puzzled why the JD (or LLB) was not in the Graduate Programs Office.
2. Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (New York: Mariner Books, 1974), p. 13.
