Last April Mark Taylor, chairman of the religion department at Columbia, published a very provocative op-ed in the New York Times. His piece began like this:
His complaints? Narrow scholarship and underpaid graduate students. I won't argue with him about underpaid graduate students, but narrow scholarship? Give me a break.
I'm sure Professor Taylor is a respected scholar, but when I read a piece by a respected scholar,1 I expect to see evidence for the major assertions -- even in a short op-ed piece. The evidence for "rapidly rising cost" and "sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans"? Even though I said I'm not going to argue the point, you just read all of the evidence for those assertions.
His evidence for narrow scholarship?
GRADUATE education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans).
His complaints? Narrow scholarship and underpaid graduate students. I won't argue with him about underpaid graduate students, but narrow scholarship? Give me a break.
I'm sure Professor Taylor is a respected scholar, but when I read a piece by a respected scholar,1 I expect to see evidence for the major assertions -- even in a short op-ed piece. The evidence for "rapidly rising cost" and "sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans"? Even though I said I'm not going to argue the point, you just read all of the evidence for those assertions.
His evidence for narrow scholarship?
A colleague recently boasted to me that his best student was doing his dissertation on how the medieval theologian Duns Scotus used citations.
Now I don't know anything about citation analysis, but Andre Vellino does, and he wishes "this graduate student well in his or her use of a 21st century tool to discover new things about Scotus that were heretofore unknown about his thinking." It sounds to me as if the student in question is applying novel techniques to understanding a very important medieval philosopher, techniques that are well outside the analytical philosophy or textual analysis traditionally used in theology. Sounds a little interdisciplinary to me.
And as many commentators have pointed out, dissertations are supposed to be deep, original contributions to knowledge. Since you can't really be interdisciplinary until you have a firm foundation in at least one discipline, it wouldn't be surprising if many dissertations were firmly grounded in a single discipline.
But they aren't. Or at least they aren't in the fields I know best -- evolutionary biology, ecology, systematics, and conservation biology.
Just three recent examples from my department:
- One student developed complex statistical models to predict plant distributions, using geographic information systems, developing new statistical techniques, and synthesizing data from plant distributions, climate models, and soil chemistry.
- Another used nitrogen isotope ratios to show that a common plant "steals" nitrogen from a rare New England legume while also using molecular genetic data to show that the loss of populations occurred primarily in the last three decade.
- The third is developing statistical techniques to assess biodiversity patterns, verifying those patterns on the ground, comparing those patterns with the distribution of protected areas, and working with indigenous people and local and regional NGOs to develop sustainable conservation plans that protect the livelihoods of local people.
OK. That's only three examples, but I think you get my point. The "narrow" focus of modern scholarship is a frequent complaint. Maybe I'm narrow myself, it's going to take more evidence than Taylor provides to convince me that there's a problem here requiring wholesale restructuring of universities.2
Since Taylor misdiagnosed the problem, there's little point in discussing his treatments.
1You don't rise to the chairmanship of a department in a major university without being a widely respected scholar.
2Don't get me wrong. There are some good reasons for substantial restructuring of universities. Taylor just failed to identify them.
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