Kieran Healy

Science as a vocation

Timothy Burke lets fly with an impassioned post about the state of academic life. Channelling Nietzsche, he complains that a combination of timidity born of careerism and ignorance born of overspecialization combine to form a “vacuum at the heart of academic life”.

It is not because we are too busy. It is because we are afraid. For one, we are afraid because of having tenure, not because we have yet to have it: all of us with tenure fear starting a conversation that will reveal an irresolvable intellectual and political divide between ourselves and a colleague. …

We are afraid of our own intellectual ambitions, afraid that other academics will think us simple or lacking knowledge and expert command of our subject matter. That is partly an artifact of graduate school training, its internalization of shame and its paranoid wariness.

More potently, it is an artifact of the massive saturation of the intellectual marketplace with published knowledge and academic performances of knowledge at conferences, workshops and events. We fear exposure of ignorance because in truth, most of us are ignorant.

He calls instead for “histories and sociologies and anthropologies that have the emotional intimacy and ambiguity of the best and richest fiction” to replace “derivative, second-order knowledge, of monographs or experiments”. We should create an interdisciplinary world “humming with passion for ideas and a generosity of spirit … where the excitement of discussion and debate replaces the damp silence that nestles over the academic calendar like a fog.”

Well, I don’t know. Don’t get me wrong: I’m all in favor of the sort of talk between the disciplines that Timothy wants. Who could be against it? A response is difficult because he’s dug himself in pretty well, rhetorically. He is on the side of Motherhood and against sin. If I disagree, I risk looking like a frightened, ignorant specialist. But at least I’m talking across the disciplinary fence at him. (Maybe this means I win both ways: performatively I follow his advice, but substantively I advance my career.) So let me play Weber to Timothy’s Nietzsche.

Three observations. First, Romantic objections to overspecialization are almost as old as the division of academic labor. The Invisible Adjunct produces a quote from David Hume bemoaning that learning is “shut up in Colleges and Cells … cultivated by Men without any Taste of Life or Manners, and without that Liberty and Facility of Thought and Expression, which can only be acquir’d by Conversation.” Hume confirms Burke’s acuity in one sense, but undermines it on the other. It’s a real issue, but also a perennial complaint of the chattier sort of scholar.

Second, you can’t have interdisciplinary conversations unless you have disciplines. There are no boundaries without territories, if you like. So the interdisciplinary buzz that Timothy craves can only be created in a world of specialists.

Third, and more generally, Weber was right.

In our time, the internal situation, in contrast to the organization of science as a vocation, is first of all conditioned by the facts that science has entered a phase of specialization previously unknown and that this will forever remain the case. Not only externally, but inwardly, matters stand at a point where the individual can acquire the sure consciousness of achieving something truly perfect in the field of science only in case he is a strict specialist. … A really definitive and good accomplishment is today always a specialized accomplishment.

Weber didn’t think that specialization of this sort was necessarily dull, just that it was unavoidable. It has strong rewards of its own:

And whoever lacks the capacity to put on blinders, so to speak, and to come up to the idea that the fate of his soul depends upon whether or not he makes the correct conjecture at this passage of this manuscript may as well stay away from science. He will never have what one may call the ‘personal experience’ of science. Without this strange intoxication, ridiculed by every outsider; without this passion … you have no calling for science and you should do something else. For nothing is worthy of man as man unless he can pursue it with passionate devotion.

Weber was well aware that the actual organization of academia fell far short of the ideal. Earlier in the essay he notes that academic life is a “mad hazard” and offers much the same advice to prospective profs as that given by the Invisible Adjunct and Timothy himself.

But one must ask every other man: Do you in all conscience believe that you can stand seeing mediocrity after mediocrity, year after year, climb beyond you, without becoming embittered and without coming to grief? Naturally, one always receives the answer: ‘Of course, I live only for my “calling.” ’ Yet, I have found that only a few men could endure this situation without coming to grief.

Weber has his own pathos about the life of the specialist that’s oddly romantic itself. The ecology of academic life is more variegated than he allows, and there are roles for boundary-crossers and idea-importers and popularizers. But there’s really no getting around the central point that specialization is unavoidable. It may be true that inside every hedgehog there is a fox trying to get out. But even Jon Elster says somewhere that you can’t really be a scholar without really mastering one thing. (I’ll look that quote up once I get to the office.)

Every academic shares something of Timothy’s angst sometime or other, and we all have the desire—as he puts it—to “ride the wave of information in its wild state, embrace the strange attractors that lure us from one subject to the next.” We can follow that urge at times, but the reason we don’t give in to it isn’t just because we’re afraid or ignorant. It’s also because, as Weber points out, we have a contradictory drive to focus on a single topic or problem and get it right. There’s no shame in that.

Actually, I pretty much agree with your thoughts, Kieran. What I think I didn’t make clear is that I’m really talking about conversations WITHIN disciplines. The best conversations I am having now and have had my whole career have been across disciplines, and for precisely some of the reasons you cite.

Kenneth Mostern’s essay struck a chord in me because he’s talking about the culture within a single department, and the strange silences he found within it. My department is a fine bunch of people, but we’ve even all agreed when we’ve talked about it that it is weirdly difficult to sit down and talk about our shared discipline. I would say, loosely speaking, that this is relatively common. In other words, the organization of academia is somehow interfering with fostering the conversations that should be most satisfying and most common, within a single discipline.

I certainly agree that the dance from specialization to generalization and back again is an important one to follow . Although I would add that I would actually like to see institutions inhabit dedicated “market niches”, with research universities privileging specialization and small liberal arts colleges privileging generalization and connection.

“What I think I didn’t make clear is that I’m really talking about conversations WITHIN disciplines.”

I think I may have muddied the waters by not making this clear in my comment, and by taking it in another direction: ie, toward the connection between specialized academic work and the culture at large.

I agree on the necessity of disciplines and of specialties within disciplines. But I also believe that scholars should be able to speak not only to other scholars in the same discipline but also to scholars in related disciplines and even to some broader constituency beyond the world of scholarship. Or at least (and this may speak to a disciplinary divide between humanities and social sciences) I think this should be the case with the humanities, which has lost a good deal of cultural authority in part because its scholars are increasingly viewed as inward-looking, narrowly focused and irrelevant to a broader culture. For me, it’s not a question of abandoning specialization, but of recovering or recreating some larger framework which gives the pursuit of specialized studies relevance and meaning.

But I readily acknowledge that “romantic objections to overspecialization are almost as old as the division of academic labor” and will plead “somewhat guilty” to the charge of romanticism.

No trackback in blogger: for FWIW, my observations are at

http://www.junius.blogspot.com/2003_04_27_junius_archive.html#200216360

The entire problem arises as the result of the excessive fear on the part of the academic of being made redundant. My proposal would be that it should be impossible by law to be appointed to a research post in a British university for a period of ten years after taking one’s doctorate.

Re-reading my own words, I will cop I guess to the fact that I am also laying a charge on us all towards general legibility and transparency between disciplines (and even between the academy and its publics). Specialization has its place, but specialization which cannot be in any meaningful way communicated to the non-specialist is generally (though not invariably) of little use. That this insight is an old one (go Hume!) doesn’t to my mind invalidate it.

I also think that there is something different quantitatively if not qualitatively about this old problem now, that the crisis of overproduction and the emptiness at the heart of the enterprise are becoming very serious, and ultimately fatal, in their extent.

I will cop to romanticism as well when it comes to the “romance of communication”—but not when it comes to the nature of knowledge itself, where I am an auld son of the Enlightenment and a believer in the unfashionable pursuit of knowable truth. Little-t, not big-T, though.

I like the observation about what happens to conversation with colleagues after tenure.

The other perennial concern along these lines is the ability of the specialist to speak to the lay person. A lot of worry is done along these lines too, often in terms of, say, Jacoby’s (sometimes valid, often overstated) concerns about the ‘death’ of public intellectuals.

Specialisation always runs the risk of insularity but as Kieran notes, we can’t do without specialists. In public debate, the trick is to ensure that specialist knowledge informs public opinion, rather than, as tends to happen, replaces it. (Means are probably rightfully the realm of the specialist, but in a democracy we should all get a say in ends.)

For that democratic meeting of the minds to happen, you really do need the specialist to be able to make him/herself understood by the non-specialists. You also need some sort arrangement where the power differential between specialist and general public is overcome – with the best will in the world, one on one, the specialist will tend to intimidate the lay person.

Concerns like this are precisely why some of us see blogging as a potentially useful (though not utopic) tool: they certainly are one way for specialist and lay person to talk to each other on a more equal footing. Maybe they could help between disciplines too.

Fascinating.

Not personally from the ranks of academia, I nonetheless recognize this don’t-talk-too-much-to-the-other-guy phenomenon. When I became a UAW steward, I fully expected that our steward meetings would include a lot of exchange about our respective brushes with insufficiently restrained power. Nope. Everyone struggled for sufficiently inconsequential things to say, and the goal of meetings was to adjourn ASAP! This, in a group supposedly specially interested in attaining some form of justice and respect for persons in an immediate, real-world, pressure-cooker environment.

I simply want to suggest for now that the problem, or phenomenon, being discussed isn’t necessarily restricted to academia.

Unabashed and unashamed Romantic here. Go Hume! indeed.

I was involved in academic philosophy for quite a while. One of my passions was taking the knotty complexities and jargons around a problem and translating them to a language that my non-philosopher friends could understand. That’s why I loved teaching, as well.

After all, I thought the problems were important. If I didn’t, why would I spend all my time studying and thinking about them? But if you DO think they are important, why would you want to speak only to a very few others in the same specialty (and, as Burke points out, rarely even to them)?

Specialization is fine and appropriate for the sciences and disciplines, like Kieran’s, that aspire to be one. But I don’t see why most humanities (philosophy and literature come to mind) should aspire to it. Specialization in the humanities has far less to do with the necessity Weber identifies and far more to do with the defensiveness of scholars in those areas, and structural issues related to higher education.

By the way, there’s a way we can all help to alleviate this problem: start talking.

I’m inclined to agree with Realish here. I’m in the final stages of a PhD in theology from an interdepartmental department—funny how that works—that deals with literature, theology, and the arts. I’ve taken to calling what I do ‘car crash theology’, nodding occasionally to the appropriate pages in Delillo’s White Noise. What I mean, basically, is to emphasize the violence in which I seek to crash two discourses together. For instance, most recently, there were the theological maneuvers of Pascal and the dynamics of modern casino gambling; but instead of looking at the tidy connections between the two, I spent the better part of 20,000 words talking about what might be created by such a collision. It is my hope anyway that this kind of interdisciplinary creativity might be a fruitful hope, or perhaps dream, for the Humanities academic (and discourse) in general—and is perhaps what distinguishes her from the specialization of, say, a social scientist or mathematician.

On the flip side, this kind of interdisciplinarity highlights the same problems that Timothy Burke is talking about: the problem of intradepartmental dialogue. It is the fear of the blank stare, the intellectual snub, that prevents those who do try to expand the confines of their disciplines from ever actually doing so, because they are often more or less denied a voice there; and in those instances that they are given a voice, they are resented by those who inevitably bide their time until the hoped for discipinary identity crisis sets in, and anything inter- is summarily purged.

In the end, Kieran is right. Disciplinary divides are not going anywhere, and my gut opinion is that, even if is a radical change tomorrow, neither are the problems Burke laments. They’re the bag of disciplinarity. The key it seems (to one like me who doesn’t even have the degree yet!) is assessing the degree to which the subsequent angst and antagonism might be channelled positively to the individual academic’s pursuit of truth (little ‘t’) and survival.

If any of you want a military history grad student’s take on this issue, you can find it at:

http://archidamus.blogspot.com

Best Regards,

Wayne Hsieh

Count me in please.

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