Mark C. Taylor, the chairman of the religion department at Columbia, offers his ideas to shake up the university system with a little (okay a lot) of pluralism amongst other approaches.
The division-of-labor model of separate departments is obsolete and must be replaced with a curriculum structured like a web or complex adaptive network. Responsible teaching and scholarship must become cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural…
It would be far more effective to bring together people working on questions of religion, politics, history, economics, anthropology, sociology, literature, art, religion and philosophy to engage in comparative analysis of common problems.
Abolish permanent departments, even for undergraduate education, and create problem-focused programs…It is possible to imagine a broad range of topics around which such zones of inquiry could be organized: Mind, Body, Law, Information, Networks, Language, Space, Time, Media, Money, Life and Water.
These bold demands (and others in the article) may seem extreme, but as money grows tighter and more potential students start second guessing the enormous price tags that accompany a graduate and even undergraduate education, universities may start implementing these or similar ideas.
These are great ideas and are gaining traction in the academic community. My dad is on the board of trustees at a small liberal arts university in Indiana, and at a board meeting, they were tasked with visioning what the university would look like in 30 years. These are the sorts of conclusions they came to.
My only reservation is whether faculty are being trained in a way that would adequately facilitate more complex and meaningful cross-disciplinary collaboration. Sure, places like Notre Dame have minors like Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, but this training doesn’t happen so much at the graduate level, as far as I know.
I would totally have gone to a college with problem-focused programs. It just makes so much sense: a student interested in issues such as immigration, development or energy would learn to use skills from economics, sociology, anthropology, political science, and philosophy, all of which are necessary to understand and improve a situation effectively. Then when we graduate, we would be well equipped to use these skills to think critically about other problems. We would learn how to think critically about the world in which we live. Sign me up.
I have several concerns. Given our experience with the econ department here, we should be cautious about what form a “rigorously regulated and restructured” university would take. What do the “powers that be” view to be the problems for the future (Taylor points out water, but his bias shows through in the article: he thinks religion should play a larger role in these debates. But I don’t think everybody would agree…)? There are no obvious answers to this question.
And isn’t there the possibility that these “problems” will just morph into a new type of “department?” Could those working on the “Space” or “Money” become just as myopic in their research as those currently researching medieval footnotes?
Chris Kelty’s reponse: http://savageminds.org/2009/04/28/et-tu-mark-taylor/