The Marketplace of Ideas (8 page)

What the recent history of the disciplines does suggest, though, is that it is wise to avoid the following narrative: when more women and non-whites came into the system, traditional norms of scholarly constraint disappeared. The argument is not that this narrative is undesirable—although, amazingly, one sometimes hears proponents of diversity reiterating an upbeat version of it. The argument is that the narrative is incorrect. Within the history of higher education, the Cold War university was the anomaly, and what are criticized as deviations and diffusions in the present system are largely reactions against that earlier dispensation. People may admire the old dispensation, or feel some nostalgia for it, but it was fundamentally untenable.

6.

What the humanities experienced between 1970 and 1990 was the intellectual and institutional equivalent of a revolution. Despite what some critics claimed, the humanities did not make themselves irrelevant by this transformation. On the contrary: the humanities helped to make the rest of the academic world alive to issues surrounding objectivity and interpretation, and to the significance of racial and gender difference. Scholars in the humanities were complicating social science models of human motivation and behavior for years before social scientists began doing the same thing via research in cognitive science. That political and economic behavior is often non-rational is not news to literature professors. And humanists can hope that someday more social scientists and psychologists will consider the mediating role of culture in their accounts of belief and behavior.

But do fields such as literature, philosophy, and the arts need to have consistent, stable, and articulable paradigms for research and teaching? Paradigms are put into place by including some methods and subject matter and excluding other methods and subject matter, and this means that, informally, paradigm creation and paradigm enforcement are always going on. Trying to avoid them is like giving every student an A: not everything can count, and part of the purpose of organized knowledge production is deciding what does count and what does not. But how formal do these paradigms need to be?

Most of the shocks to the philosophical foundations of teaching and scholarship in the humanities, from the interpretive turn in the sixties and seventies to the diversity turn in the eighties and nineties, arose from challenges to prevailing understandings of what counts. Legitimacy—is this really knowledge or is it something else?—was precisely what was at stake in that revolution.
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It is probably impossible, after the revolution, to put the toothpaste back in the tube. Eclecticism seems to be the fate of the academic humanities. But there is no reason why that cannot in itself constitute a claim to legitimacy. If one part of the university is (along with its many other projects) continually enacting a “crisis of institutional legitimation,” it is performing a service for the rest of the university. It is pursuing an ongoing inquiry into the limits of inquiry. And it is not just asking questions about knowledge; it is creating knowledge by asking the questions. Skepticism about the forms of knowledge is itself a form of knowledge.

1.

THERE ARE FEW TERMS
in twenty-first-century higher education with a greater buzz factor than “interdisciplinarity”—the name for teaching and scholarship that bring together methods and materials from more than one academic discipline. No one, or almost no one, says a word against it. It is evoked by professors and by deans with equal enthusiasm. And in some fields, job and fellowship applicants find it almost de rigueur to stress the interdisciplinarity of their research. The buzziness has to do with the suggestion that interdisciplinarity is a new way to organize teaching and scholarship, that it holds out the promise of some kind of unification of knowledge (scientists and humanists speaking the same language, for example), and even that it is mildly transgressive—that it can refresh old paradigms and, almost by itself, generate radically new perspectives and ideas, that it can put scholarship into closer touch with life. Interdisciplinarity stands for the notion that what is holding things back is disciplinarity, the persistence of the academic silos known as departments, and that if colleges and universities could get past that outmoded dispensation, a lot of their problems would disappear.

With all these possibilities hovering over it, talk about interdisciplinarity tends to have an anxious tone. But it is hard to see how interdisciplinarity is an adequate correlative to the anxiety. The anxiety feels existential, and interdisciplinarity is, at bottom, a professional and institutional issue. Interdisciplinarity is attainable to the extent that professors are professionally motivated and institutionally supported to practice it. Professors may not be so motivated and institutions may not be supportive. But interdisciplinarity is not, as a thing in itself, subversive or transgressive or transformational or even new.
¹
In many respects, interdisciplinarity is a ratification of existing arrangements. And it can become a rationale for future arrangements that are less accommodating than the ones professors live with now. So what are academics talking about when they talk about interdisciplinarity? Is it really interdisciplinarity? Do they care about interdisciplinarity
as such
? Or is there something else that they are anxious about for which talk of interdisciplinarity serves as a kind of screen discourse?

One reason to suspect that interdisciplinarity is not what people are really talking about when they talk about interdisciplinarity is that when you ask them why interdisciplinarity is important, they often answer by saying that it solves the problem of disciplinarity. But this is a non sequitur. Interdisciplinarity is simply disciplinarity raised to a higher power. It is not an escape from disciplinarity; it is the scholarly and pedagogical ratification of disciplinarity. If it is disciplinarity that academics want to get rid of, then they cannot call the new order interdisciplinarity. They also cannot call the new order anti-disciplinarity. It might be called postdisciplinarity, but that is asking for trouble. Maybe academics are stuck. Being stuck can certainly be a reason for anxiety. How did higher education get to a place where interdisciplinarity became a vision of salvation?

2.

The place to begin talking about interdisciplinarity is disciplinarity, and the first (and obvious) thing to be said about disciplinarity is that the disciplines are not what philosophers call natural kinds. The academic disciplines do not carve knowledge at the joints, and they did not drop down out of God’s blue sky. The disciplines were constructed at a particular historical moment, and teachers and students in the twenty-first-century university are the heirs of that moment. Understanding how and for what purposes that construction was accomplished gives us a little bit of help in understanding why disciplinarity is so firmly rooted in educational practice that academics can name an alternative to it interdisciplinarity.

Academic disciplinarity—the creation and institutionalization of separate and effectively autonomous departments of research—is an episode in the history of the division of labor. The disciplines emerged with the modern research university, between 1870 and 1915. That period, only forty-five years, was the big bang of American higher education. It saw the creation of new institutions and the conversion of existing ones to the model we know today: a program of undergraduate instruction joined to a graduate and professional school operation designed for training researchers and producing specialized research. Almost every aspect of higher education that we are familiar with dates from this period: undergraduate electives; the requirement of a bachelor’s degree for admission to professional school; graduate schools for the education of specialists who will educate the undergraduates; the expectation that faculty will have doctorates and produce scholarly publications; and the articulation of the principle of academic freedom, signaled by the founding of the American Association of University Professors in 1915. And two other developments, as well: the establishment of national professional associations for scholars and the creation of the modern academic departments.

As the historian Walter Metzger says, “Between 1870 and 1900 nearly every subject in the academic curriculum was fitted out with a new or refurbished external organization—a learned or disciplinary association, national in membership and specialized in scope—and with a new and modified internal organization—a department of instruction made the building block of most academic administrations. These were more than formal arrangements of the campus workforce; they testified to and tightened the hold of specialization in academic life.”
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We can see the creation of the “new or refurbished external organization” Metzger mentions in the evolution of the American Social Science Association (ASSA), which was founded in 1865 as a group for amateur students in a broadly defined range of social science subjects. After 1880, the ASSA split up, rather rapidly, into separate groups of modern language teachers and scholars, the Modern Language Association (founded in 1883); the American Historical Association (founded in 1884); and associations for economists (1885), church historians (1888), folklorists (1888), and political scientists (1889). The American Mathematical Society was formed in 1888, the American Physical Society in 1889, and the American Sociological Society in 1905—all university-based communities of academic professionals, jealous of the autonomy of their disciplines and (as is still the case) with no umbrella organization coordinating their intellectual activities.
³

At the same time that these national scholarly associations were establishing themselves, universities were undergoing an equally rapid period of department formation, and by 1900 a departmental system of administration was in place in most of the leading schools. In other words, academic work was completely restructured inside the span of a single generation.
⁴
And the restructuring accompanied a dramatic expansion of the system. In 1870, there were 563 institutions of higher learning in the United States with 63,000 students. By 1900, there were 977 institutions and 238,000 students. In 1930, there were 1,409 schools enrolling 1.1 million students. There were 5,553 professors in the United States in 1870; in 1890, there were 15,809; in 1930, there were 23,868.
⁵

The rise of the modern university and the emergence of the modern academic disciplines were part of the same phenomenon: the professionalization of occupation.
⁶
Professionalization means two things: credentialization and specialization. A professional is a person who is licensed—by earning a degree, taking an examination, or passing some other qualifying test—to practice in a specialized field. The late nineteenth century was a period of rapidly increasing professionalization; in fact, one of the reasons higher education transformed itself after 1870 was so that it could operate as the main social institution for training professionals. Universities are very good at this. They have requirements for entrance and requirements for exit, so they make an efficient, standardized, and highly visible gateway. The period that saw the creation of the academic disciplines and their national associations was also the period that saw the professionalization of occupations such as medicine and the law by the creation of national associations and the tightening of requirements for entry into practice. The American Medical Association was founded in 1847, the American Bar Association in 1878. Later on, a bachelor’s degree became required for admission to law and medical school.
⁷
The professionalization of the work that college teachers do is part of this larger context.

Professionalism was born of contradictory impulses. On the one hand, it belongs to the movement toward a democratic society and a free market economy. Professionalism promises to open careers to talent. You can’t inherit your occupational status; you have to earn it through some credentialing process in which every entrant is treated equally. Professionalism is also an extension of the division of labor, which is a characteristic of market economies, to the higher-status occupations. Advanced economies generate tasks that call for more specific knowledge than one person can possibly acquire, and professionalization is a mechanism for producing the specialized experts who are needed to perform those tasks.

On the other hand, professions are monopolistic: people who don’t have the credential can’t practice the trade. This monopolistic aspect of professionalization is clearly a reaction against the principles of the free market. Every profession has a side that is turned away from the anarchy of open competition—away from the system that the profession serves and that made professionalization necessary in the first place. Requiring that people earn a credential before they can be allowed to work in one’s business is a way of defending oneself and one’s fellow practitioners from market forces. In fact, the necessity of avoiding the destabilizing effects of the free market is part of every rationale offered for professionalization in the sociological literature at the turn of the nineteenth century—it is found in Emile Durkheim’s
The Social Division of Labor
, in Herbert Croly’s
The Promise of American Life
, and in R. H. Tawney’s
The Acquisitive Society
.
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The praise of professionalism was part of a progressive politics in the early years of the twentieth century: Croly was a key figure in progressive circles, a supporter of the trustbuster Theodore Roosevelt and one of the founders of
The New Republic
. All these books argue that the protection that professions afford against market forces is the only way of elevating excellence above profits in a capitalist economy. In a system that is designed to be driven by efficiency and self-interest, professions set standards for performance that rate quality above dollars. Professionals are people who behave not self-interestedly (as other economic actors theoretically do) but disinterestedly. Doctors sacrifice short-term gains—by, for example, not performing unnecessary operations—in the interests of “good medicine.” The reward for their unselfishness is permission to work in a protected market; and since entrance to that market is controlled, professionals usually command superior wages and a high degree of job security. By agreeing to forego the windfalls they could enjoy if they exploited their privileged positions, professionals take their gains over the long term.

Two features of professionalism are supposed to make disinterestedness possible. One is the autonomy of the professional organization. Professions are largely self-regulating: they set the standards for entrance and performance in their specialized areas, and they do so by the light of what is good for the profession rather than what market conditions or external forces, such as legislators or citizens’ groups, demand. The American Medical Association exists, among other reasons, to insist that the standard of care not be compromised in response to financial considerations, just as the American Association of University Professors exists to insist that academic freedom not be compromised in response to political considerations. Since professionals are mostly rewarded (or disciplined) according to standards internal to the profession, they have to adhere, most of the time, only to professional standards.

The second feature of professionalism that is supposed to ensure disinterestedness is the very act of specialization itself. Specialization makes work more productive because it narrows the field and therefore allows it to be more deeply and expertly mastered. In Adam Smith’s famous example, the worker who pulls the wire in the manufacture of pins pulls it more efficiently for not having spread himself thin by mastering the very different art of affixing the heads.
⁹
But specialization also performs a profoundly important social function. For the idea behind it is that the knowledge and skills needed for a particular specialized endeavor are transmissible but not transferable. The transmissibility is what makes it possible for the professions to monopolize the production of future professionals. Professions reproduce themselves by passing professional acquirements along from one generation to the next. Professionals are trained by other professionals. People with JDs educate future JDs. The non-transferability of the credential, though, ensures that competence in one profession can never be exercised in another profession. Lawyers cannot treat patients in a hospital and physicians cannot represent clients in a courtroom. People with doctorates in English do not get to decide who deserves a doctorate in sociology. This non-transferability of expertise is the balance wheel of professionalized economies: it prevents excessive claims to authority being made by well-educated people. It provides a check to the elitism inherent in any market-circumventing system. Professionalism is a way of using smart people productively without giving them too much social power.