Criticism from The Crimson

marite
Sun, 11 Mar 2007 13:58:31 +0000

SteveUK:

I was not speaking about undergraduate education but about Ph.D. training which remains broader in the US than in the UK. In fact, the Ph.D qualifying exams, typically taken after two years of coursework, are designed to train graduate students to teach, not just to write their dissertation. And so they are expected to know about a lot more than the topic of their dissertation and to be more theoretical and comparatie in their approach.
You may not know any Brit who’s gone to the US for a Ph.D. I know plenty. I also know plenty of former Oxbridge dons who’ve crossed the pond. Some left because of the higher salaries; others claim that the lack of funding for graduate students in the UK is a key reason why they prefer to teach in the US.
The director of undergraduate studies at Harvard’s math department is from Oxford. For a time, he was touted as Britain’s hope for a Fields Medal.