BY AARON BARLOW
The Age of Specialists. Ehrhart, S. D. (Samuel D.), approximately 1862-1937, artist [Public domain]
Part of the problem is the way “interdisciplinary” has been defined. Each of us on the faculty, the reasoning goes, works within a discipline so, alone, could never teach an interdisciplinary course. This is hogwash, of course. Few professors’ pursuits are narrow; most of us explore areas far beyond any disciplinary brief. There are engineering professors who also have expertise in popular music and would love to be able to combine the two. Physicists who entranced by Sufi mysticism. Theater profs who love mathematics. And more. And more.
They are not considered experts in both fields, however, because they lack certification in the second. Even though their knowledge of that one can be as extensive as that of a specialist, even though they stand at unique crossroads between interests, they cannot, on their own, create official interdisciplinary courses on many campuses. They have to bring in a scholar certified in the other field, sharing the course. This can have advantages, but it can also diffuse the vision and even confirm the disciplinary boundaries it is meant to break down. In addition, it says to the faculty that the skills of exploration gained through a career of study are less important than content-area certification. That content specialization is more important than generalized knowledge and exploration.
Quite frankly, who is doing the teaching is a lot more important than what. In fact, a good teacher can teach almost anything; expertise just makes it easier. This flies in the face of today’s skills-oriented, teacher-denigrating vision of education, but it is true, nonetheless. Sixty years of being taught, teaching and observing teachers has shown me that. Allowing a teacher to expand from her or his base knowledge always makes that teacher more effective. If that teacher wants to bring in others within the exercise, more power to him or her—but that should never be a necessary prerequisite, for it confines knowledge and exploration and implies that we teachers should focus on what ‘we are good at,” leaving all else to other specialists.
This is not how the best lives, classes or scholarship—or art—should work.
New York Times columnist David Brooks writes about a book called Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein. I haven’t read the book, but its title reflects something I have been trying to point out for years, that specialization, especially early specialization, is not a great model for either education or scholarship. According to Brooks, the book “shows the same pattern in domain after domain: People who specialize in one thing succeed early, but then they slide back to mediocrity as their minds rigidify.” By creating interdisciplinary courses that assume the primacy of specialty, we continue the unfortunate deification of specialization, providing a meager, not expansive, view of future possibilities for our students.
Admittedly, I am a little biased. When I became a full-time college professor in my mid-fifties, I had already explored multiple careers (including starting and running a business for over a decade) and had lived in a variety of places (including four years in Africa). My experiences outside of my academic specialization, however, counted for nothing, I found, in academia. I was treated as though I had no more experience than a recently minted PhD pushing thirty.
Many of us bring a variety of experiences into our academic careers, but we are encouraged to keep these separate or, at least, sub rosa. This is particularly true of the adjuncts who, at our larger institutions, bear the largest instructional burden, especially at the lower levels. They are expected to follow rigid syllabi that leave little room for them to use their own experiences and passions to enhance student experience. This is a loss for the institutions and an unnecessary one caused by short-sighted economy. One of the virtues of using part-time faculty is that they generally bring in a breadth of experience that full-time specialists sometimes lack. We seem to have forgotten that completely.
Brooks ends his essay with this:
I was reading about how rich the pluralistic life is, and how stifling a homogeneous life is. And I was realizing that while we’re learning to preach gospel of openness and diversity, we’re mostly not living it. In the realm of public life, many live as monads, within the small circles of one specialty, one code, no greatness.
Our academic obsession with specialization, and our current fix of a false “interdisciplinary” structure that only cements specialization as the basis for everything, flies in the face, as Brooks points out, of our worship of “openness and diversity.” We ignore the diversity that is around us right now as we continue to fetishize the specialist.
Colleges and universities: trust the faculty and bust the disciplines! Stop confining us. Let us teach as we will (stop this “learning outcome” nonsense) and as best we can. Let us study what we will and count all of it–even that far outside our specialties–as part of our scholarly contribution.
Our students will be the better for it. So will our institutions.
Interesting arguments here, and I taught many years in an interdisciplinary center/department. But I would be very careful about this statement you made, “a good teacher can teach almost anything; expertise just makes it easier.” For isn’t this a case for the adjunctification of the university? I HOPE what you meant is that having expertise, as evidenced by a doctorate in one’s discipline, is what makes someone capable of skillfully moving beyond their home discipline when they teach a college course. If that is not what you meant, then we might as well have high school teachers teaching lower-level university courses, since many of them are good teachers.
There are many high school teachers with Masters degrees, many of whom are better trained and more highly skilled at teaching than those who teach lower-level college courses. Unfortunately, few doctoral programs stress teaching at all, letting grad students learn on their own as TAs or adjuncts themselves.
Is mine a case for adjunctification of the university? I don’t think so. An important part of what professors do is scholarship–which should, in my mind, intertwine with teaching. That is, activity as a scholar, like much activity outside of the classroom, can have a positive impact on one’s teaching, and should.
What I am trying to do, when you come right down to it, is re-establish the importance of teaching and teachers. Having an advanced degree does not make one a good teacher but, as a culture, we have decided that there’s nothing to teaching, anyhow. Anyone can do it. To me, that’s bunk.
Okay, so filling much of this article with quotes from David Brooks – who pontificates ad nauseum about matters that he doesn’t understand, because he lacks expertise in them and has Dunning-Kruger out the wazoo – does not help your case. Neither does openly admitting you didn’t even read his book :/
It’s undeniably true that teaching outside of one’s discipline is invigorating, but also dangerous. It’s very easy to read a few books and think you’re expert enough to teach the subject, when a true expert would realize how biased and wacky your literature selection was. Reading a few JAMA articles doesn’t give you the network of knowledge you need to grapple with a medical condition the way a physician would.
Some disciplines – one would hope most? – require actual expertise. You mention physicists “entranced by Sufi mysticism”. I sure hope there aren’t actually any of those, but try going the other way to see how disturbing this is: imagine a Sufi mystic with no physics degrees teaching a university class in physics. Engineers so trained would kill us all.
Brooks has never been a favorite of mine, but sometimes he is right. And it is not a book by Brooks that I mention. And it is the title of Epstein’s book that interests me here. Saying I haven’t read it is a simple courtesy, for mention often implies familiarity.
You conflate undergraduate teaching with expertise. Until one gets to very deliberate and necessary specialization, generally in graduate school, the ability to teach is more important than expertise.