For almost two centuries, writers on American higher education have gnashed their teeth, rent their garments, rolled in ashes. These penitential rituals are so routine as to have become banal. Nonetheless, moments do arrive when the cries of Jeremiah ring especially loudly, when throughout the land the noise of lamentation puts eardrums at risk. Such a time was the 1820s; such was the 1870s; and such another has been the past decade.

The present rise in decibels of woe stems from the merging of two distinct strains of complaint. The first we owe to a generational shift in the professoriate. The Young Turks who populated graduate schools in the later 1960s and early 1970s have turned grey, lost muscle tone, and aged into control of academic departments and college administrations. Not surprisingly, their generally leftish ideology has come to dominate the politics of the mainstream academy. (In the spirit of truth-in-packaging, I confess that I did inhale, that I now shudder at the freshman Republicans in the House, am losing my hair, and sit on appointments committees.) Marxism having wandered away with its tail between its legs, this new orthodoxy perseverates on race and gender. Why should anyone be shocked?

Equally unsurprisingly, the to rch passed to a left-leaning generation of tenure-granters has singed academics to their right. Howls issue both from the professorial generation being displaced and from a fresh wave of Young Turks (who perforce often dwell on some well-funded fringe of universitydom). From among the elders, the late Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind was most widely heard (indeed, Bloom may well be regarded as patriarch of the new tribe of Jeremiah), while among the youngsters perhaps Dinesh D'Souza in Illiberal Education screamed most loudly. In the past few years, right-wing critics have focused their discontent on "political correctness": the alleged use of academic power to enforce a left-wing conformity on campus. Without doubt there have occurred a few egregious instances of political witch-hunting. But socialists and New Conservatives also had to dodge prejudice and occasional persecution in the 1950s, as did critics of big business in the 1890s. Nothing new.

Now, as then, what really dampens originality of thought and diversity of views is not the infrequent witch-hunt; it is routine academic conformism, pushing to the margin any currently heterodox opinion. Harvard is likely more hospitable to dissent than General Motors-at least so universities are meant to operate-but the Yard has rarely seethed with radical questioning. Historically, the oddity is not "political correctness" but the unusual liveliness of colleges and universities between the late 1960s and early 1980s. Memory being short, the experience of those tonic if uncomfortable years makes us forget how normal is today's drab consensus. Perhaps the only fair complaint to lodge against the new academic ruling class is that the street theater of 1968 promised something more interesting. In any case, railing against political correctness seems unlikely to change human nature.

Moreover, the noise has had an unfortunate side effect: to obscure a second, far more substantial critique of American academic culture. Although sometimes blurring into the first, this second species of criticism has no genetic connection with the censure of ideological conformism. Its target is a very different disease of the academic mind: the specialization and fragmentation of knowledge.

This problem goes far deeper than political correctness. It results from-more exactly, it is-the way in which universities have organized knowledge throughout the twentieth century. The principle of disciplinary specialization divides learning into separate compartments, each with distinct problems and paradigms, methods and approaches. As a result, knowledge today lies scattered around us in great unrelated lumps. Not only do sociologists, literary scholars, biologists, philosophers, and chemists rarely talk to each other; they understand one another poorly if they do. This fragmentation has patently impoverished public discourse. More to the point at hand, it has made any true "general education" virtually inconceivable. Even before specialization won out (around 1900), eminent scholars worried about its consequences; and calls for "interdisciplinary" work, increasingly common since the 1930s, aimed to correct them.

It was to little avail. Specialization appeared to pay huge dividends, especially in the natural sciences and medicine; and it certainly enabled professors to imagine themselves superior to their fellow citizens: they were lords of epistemology even if (perhaps because) serfs at the bank. So, as the century rolled on, specialization divided academic fields into ever-smaller bits. Only in recent years, in the climate of postmodernism, with all foundations of knowledge under suspicion, has "The Triumph of Specialization" started to take really hard knocks.

The quoted phrase comes from a chapter title in one of the best-aimed kicks, David Damrosch's We Scholars. Damrosch, a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, subtitles his book Changing the Culture of the University, for he offers not only sane criticism but a number of thoughtful suggestions for improvement.

Even the sanest books are not uniformly thoughtful, and Damrosch does nod. Once or twice he even falls fast asleep-as when he parades the legendary Harvard professor Charles Eliot Norton as exemplum of the alienated scholar, "comfortable with the values of isolated work." Damrosch, unfortunately, did not bother to examine Norton's scholarly practice, which would have turned this claim on its head, and he even invokes Henry James to describe "his old teacher" Norton without noticing that James (never Norton's student) lived abroad during Norton's entire tenure as professor-the two having no substantial interaction during the last 35 years of Norton's career. More generally, for someone who likes to argue from the history of universities, Damrosch skates very lightly over the literature on the subject and uses his scant skimmings eccentrically. And in his taxonomy, the genus "university" often seems to contain only the subspecies "Harvard-Yale-Princeton-Columbia."

Such sins might drag the book down if not outweighed by very hefty virtues. Most estimable among them is common sense-hardly common in this genre. In the last decade, possibly only Jaroslav Pelikan's The Idea of the University (1992) has equaled We Scholars for judiciousness. Damrosch writes with admirable balance, soberly weighing points scored by ax-grinders on Right and Left, never himself descending into rant. He sees the interrelatedness and intricacy of the university's current problems more clearly than perhaps any other among the current spate of commentators. He astutely specifies economic and institutional bases of specialization, reminding us of truths so basic that they are usually overlooked, such as the powerful influence of the departmental structures within which most professors live most of the time. And he understands well that fragmentation of knowledge, if to be countered at all, must be confronted at multiple levels: scholarship, general education, graduate school.

Damrosch is nothing if not sound, and his proposals for reform are moderate and practical, calibrated nicely to the problems he wants to solve. Academic specialization itself he takes as a given and, on the whole, a good thing. Yet he believes that (given the long tradition of individualized scholarship handed down from medieval universities) specialization has spawned an "underlying ideology of individual production" fed by, and in turn reinforcing, a kind of hyperspecialization and consequent fragmentation of knowledge. Against this, Damrosch wants to encourage modes of research and teaching "simultaneously generalizing and specialized." Toward this end he proposes several reforms meant to alter the culture of American academic life.

Most fundamentally, he wants to alter "the sorts of academic personality we encourage," to demolish the ideal of the scholar or teacher working in isolation, to discourage "alienation and aggression" as the dominant academic style. Quibbles over details aside, his Hobbesian account of university culture rings true; if rarely short, academic discourse is all too often nasty and brutish.

Damrosch urges that we reshape the academic community by several alterations in basic practices: reform at the sociological level, he believes, will gradually improve professors at the psychological. Scholars ought to pursue research, not in individual isolation, but in concert with and even across established field boundaries. Programs of general education, conceding the unavoidable fact of specialization, ought to bring together clusters of specialists to think collaboratively, teach collectively. Graduate students ought to study with faculty members from more than one discipline, and their dissertations ought to take forms "more open" than the classic monograph to work with several mentors from different subfields. Throughout, the persisting purpose is to replace individualism with collaboration throughout the university.

Damrosch stresses the practicality of his reforms. As he notes, various forms of scholarly collaboration-conferences, multiauthor collections of essays, special thematic issues of journals-are already common. As he might have noted had he turned his eyes momentarily away from Columbia, graduate students at many universities are already required to do some work outside their own discipline. Provosts and deans could do worse than listen to Damrosch. The changes he outlines are, given enough incentive, achievable and, if broadly implemented, would improve how professors teach and what they write. They might even reduce hyperspecialization within fields like literature and history.

Whether these reforms would work a gradual revolution is another question altogether. It is odd that Damrosch scarcely mentions the one great sector of scholarship where cooperative research has long been routine: the natural sciences. Then again, maybe silence is strategic-for no area of scholarship is more hyperspecialized than the hypercollaborative sciences. It is equally strange that he reminds us that scholars have been bad-tempered loners since antiquity. If such behavior did not make them specialists until a century ago, why should personality therapy now turn them into generalists?

(continued in next article)

Copyright (c) 1996 Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture Magazine

September/October 1996, Page 26

bcsep96sc6B526a6919