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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.