A recent op-ed by Mark Taylor in the New York Times rightly points out that graduate school isn’t just broken, but has been broken for decades now. Anyone familiar with University, Inc. will know this has something to do with Vannevar Bush‘s creation of the military-education complex coupled with the change in university funding implemented back in the early 80s. Nowadays, it’s mostly symbolized by the underpaid graduate teaching assistants and the commuting lecturers that missed their chance at tenure on the business side and the ever-more specialized professors in ever more insular departments who think that interdisciplinary means getting a soil scientist to talk to a hydrologist. In my own experience, I’ve been told that groundbreaking research and multidisciplinary synthesis is exciting and wonderful, but it isn’t a dissertation. It’s particularly hard to develop digital media, as there’s no peer review system in place to give credit to humanities scholars who produce something other than text. Real innovation in the university isn’t just frowned on, it’s downright grimaced at.
One result of this is a trend toward the production of humanities knowledge by quasi-amateurs. Jared Diamond started this, writing a Pullitzer-winning study of history without ever studying history in academia, having received his PhD in Membrane Biophysics and a career in physiology. David Montgomery did the same thing with Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, which highlights the importance of soil in socio-political reproduction (Montgomery is a professor of geomorphology which, if my undergraduate experience was any indication, would have included a couple sorely lacking World History courses, if that). Don’t get me wrong, Diamond’s books are valuable pieces of scholarship and Dirt highlights several major, important issues that have been underrepresented by traditional historical scholarship, but these works lack the kind of historiographical complexity that matches their environmental complexity. As a result, academic historians hate Jared Diamond as much as they hate Wikipedia, though for superficially dissimilar reasons. It’s only natural that we’d see the frontiers of environmental history scholarship advanced by academics outside of history, because they actually took classes on environmental systems and understand their importance and their comprehensibility. There are signs that the daunting nature of Nature is finally being addressed by history departments in the academy, but it’s been made very difficult for historians, who are trained to study languages and political ideologies, to make a late-in-life leap to understanding monsoonal shifts, pedogenesis and desertification. This is a direct result of the specialization that Mark Taylor criticizes, and it’s most visible in academics who transition into the humanities (Richard Dawkins, for instance, thinks himself a philosopher) because the humanities is considered to be less rigorous than the sciences.
And so we sit here, complaining about the anti-expert bias at Wikipedia while scholars bemoan the creation of feckless experts in academia, and what do you know, one of the biggest critics of Wikipedia gets to co-edit a peer-reviewed academic journal despite not being an academic philosopher for years. It’s about time we reexamine the creation of experts, the weakness of their specialization, and its relation to our modern, over-connected society. I feel lucky that I went to graduate school at a place that didn’t even have classrooms the first year, much less a robust Chinese History program, so I was forced to supplement my study of history with courses on environmental science and digital tools, but if we don’t change the university system soon, then choosing to build your PhD outside what Taylor calls “the Detroit of higher learning ” will continue to go unrewarded and prove to be more foolish than focusing on the role of early 19th century French medallions in social history and hoping that you luck out with a tenure job at Wissiapa U.
This entry was posted on Friday, May 1st, 2009 at 5:37 PM and is filed under Academia, Digital Innovation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.