| Demonstrated competence in the real world should be considered as another alternative. The author marshals an impressive list of undoctored scholars - Kenneth Boulding, George Lyman Kittredge (Pages 245-246) in the United States and Michael Ondaatje, Northrop Frye, Robertson Davies, George Woodcock, and Farley Mowatt (Pages 279-281) in Canada. Since those illustrious scholars had at least some academic qualifications, they are grudgingly admitted into the academy. Autodidacts, like Eric Hoffer and Robert Fulford, are however excluded. While Chairman of a Department of Communication Studies, I tried to hire Pierre Juneau, who had just completed an illustrious career in which he had been President of CBC and Chairman of CRTC. My colleagues balked. He didn't have a Ph. D.! The scholar believes that "the unexamined life is not worth living" and the retort from outside the cloisters is "the unlived life is not worth examining".
Another recommendation from Cude is that we should explore the metaphor of professor is to graduate student as master is to apprentice. This is a valuable analogy even if only to pinpoint the difficulty in dealing with the increase in subjectivity with the increase in abstraction of the product. A table is a clearer demonstration of competence than a thesis. It is certainly a better metaphor than that of the king to the knight, which is closer to the current situation. The king sends the knight off to fight the dragon in order to get the hand - and the rest - of the princess. Fighting dragons is not useful preparation for keeping up the mortgage on half a kingdom. It's a test of motivation. It's also a way for the king to get rid of the dragon without suffering the fate of Beowulf who got killed fighting it himself.
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