Wilfred Cude

Background

Cude was born in Canada, though neither the date nor the year of his birth is known.

Education

Cude graduated from the University of Alberta with a Ph.D.

Career

Cude is a writer and publisher who has challenged the benefit of doctoral programs in North America. In The Ph.D. Trap and The Ph.D. Trap Revisited, Cude lays out the negative consequences for individuals pursuing doctorates and on the education system, they operate within.

Cude's thesis and first book, A Due Sense of Differences: An Evaluative Approach to Canadian Literature, was published in 1980. In this work, he examined several Canadian works of literature and critiqued and evaluated their lasting worth. Because his thesis was published before he defended it, his graduate committee never formally examined it. Consequently, he became part of the sixty percent of doctoral students who never complete their degrees, commented Philip Milner in his St. Francis Xavier University Web site profile of Cude.

After Cude's thesis was published, but not officially accepted, he decided to write about the Ph.D. itself. Unshackled by a Ph.D. himself, he wrote and self-published his second book in 1987, The Ph.D. Trap. He self-published only after the book had been accepted, and then rejected, by a Toronto publisher because an editor suggested it might be an affront to the academic community, Milner noted.

The Ph.D. Trap outlines some of the problems with the education system. Ph.D.'s are often requirements for becoming a university professor, and so aspiring teachers and researchers are trapped, sometimes futilely, in a struggle to attain the degree. "Cude argues that North Americans have been for too long fixated on the Ph.D. as the be-all and end-all of academic training," P. J. M. Robertson wrote in the Queen's Quarterly.

Cude's follow-up text, The Ph.D. Trap Revisited, published in 2001, doubles the length of its predecessor and remakes, and amplifies, its arguments. With new data and statistics, Cude calls many Ph.D. programs exploitative, cruel, and hurtful to honest intellectual quests. He probes the broader problems of doctorates, including accounts of Ph.D. students who murdered or bludgeoned their supervisors. He also points out scholars who have contributed without first attaining a doctorate. Cude closes the book with suggestions for system improvements, including caution for prospective doctoral students and a call for reforms by professors who have the power to alter the system.

Achievements

• Cude is best known as the author of The Ph.D. Trap and The Ph.D. Trap Revisited. He has also written numerous scholarly articles on English literature, Canadian history, critical methodology, and educational traditions.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Ph.D. Trap 1987
  • A Due Sense of Differences: An Evaluative Approach to Canadian Literature 1980

References

• Contemporary Authors Volume 221
  2004