A Matter of Degrees

The CEO has a PhD and an MD. The CFO is an MD and a CPA.

Joseph Dimento is a PhD with a JD. Roger Walsh is an MD with a PhD. Charles Webb--two PhDs.

Then there's Richard Perry--PhD, linguistics, UC Berkeley; JD, Stanford University; Philosophy of Law, University of Louvain, Belgium.

While most of us struggle with algebra and grasp for the multiplicity of meaning in Melville, there is an increasing number of seasoned academics who whiz through graduate school and then turn around and do it again. Their hunger to learn is so prodigious they earn second and third advanced degrees from some of the nation's most prestigious universities.

Richard Perry, a scholar who has studied eight languages--French, Italian, Arabic, Indonesian, Spanish, German, Latin and African Chagga, uses the phrase "gradual students" to describe himself and others who have done double time in graduate school.

At UC Irvine, where Perry is a professor, there are so many faculty members with more than one degree no one indulges them with kudos or singles them out as freaks.

Perry says combining highly theoretical disciplines with practical training opens up whole new ways of thinking. Just as learning "to live another language is to experience another way of being," the study of, say, German philosopher Martin Heidegger and homelessness, adds dimension to the study of complex social problems. Perry uses Heidegger, who analyzed human existence, as a reference when analyzing issues such as the legal rights of Native Americans.

William Thompson, 43, is a UCI professor with a law degree from Berkeley, a doctorate in psychology from Stanford, expertise in DNA, former membership on the O.J. Simpson defense team and credentials as a Little League referee.

"Knowledge really is power," he says. "The world needs worker bees and people who break the rules and look outside traditional ways of thinking--people who can think broadly. Narrow training tends to make you calcified. I'm convinced everyone will have to be interdisciplinary in the future."

There always have been a few inveterate scholars who have endured the agony and ecstasy of a rigorous graduate education, only to become so disillusioned with their chosen field that they bailed out. Best-selling author Michael Crichton earned a hard-won medical degree from Harvard Medical School, which he loathed. The ink was barely dry or his diploma when he wrote "The Andromeda Strain" in 1969. He went on to write several other blockbusters, including "Jurassic Park." He never donned a white coat.