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Dear Dick, I have lingered rather a long time in responding to your post of 20 August 2000, but today's post spurs me on. The nagging worry that your earlier post suggested to me was the sense that there was an unreasonable aspect of the design master's that you proposed: that of the practical element. In language that resembled the MFA criteria endorsed by the College Arts Association (CAA), you supported your argument by citing the master's as "the terminal degree of professional design practice" but also following that with the statement that it "should be one of the pathways into doctoral education in design." I agree with the second part of your statement (I called for this pathway in La Clusaz you may recall); however, the first part is a worry in the potential for its interpretation, I think. Some design educators, honing in on the "design project" may well leave out significant design history projects or design criticism 'projects' as not worthy of the project name because they are thesis based. Is this what you mean? Today's post also worries me from the perspective in which I see so many programs (and not just design) focussing and aiming not at the theoretical but at the practical. While I would agree that we have seen times of too much theory without potential application (and that in some programs this remains a problem) I think that today's universities are leaning too far toward the practical, the applicable, the fundable. While the short term potentials for practical outcomes and funding may be immediately useful, I wonder that we may lose some of the richness that theoretical supposing might provide. It is as if the pendulum swings too far in one direction or another, but that the swinging preferable to stasis. Uncomfortable, perhaps, but necessary. The university and the particularly the PhD seem to be the only likely places to 'suppose', if we call for more practicality, more applicability, more projects, what might we lose? Regards, Ellen E. Young School of Design Curtin University of Technology Perth, Western Australia [log in to unmask] %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%