As any recent Ph.D. recipient can attest, the writing of a doctoral dissertation is at times a process fraught with uncertainty and anxiety over the “meaning” of one's work and its implications for the growth of knowledge in the discipline. The dissertation usually marks the first opportunity for a graduate student to exercise a great deal of independence and autonomy on a research project of one's own choosing; and the successful defense of the completed dissertation represents the final phase in a socialization process designed to initiate the newcomer into the sacred “holies” of academic folkways and mores.
From its inception in 1861, when Yale became the first American university to grant the Ph.D. degree, the doctoral degree was viewed as a “research degree” and the writing of a dissertation was justified in terms of making an “original contribution” to the scholar's own discipline. A casual glance through several recent graduate school catalogues indicates that the official rhetoric concerning the dissertation continues to stress the notion of an “original contribution.”