I am always pleased to discover like-minded, progressive professors who are not preoccupied with guarding their small territory. I have argued that the tendency in universities has been to develop autonomous departments and to develop sub-departments that assume all the characteristics of human groups – group boundaries, isolation of specialists, competition for scarce resources, delusions of group importance and competitions for privilege and prestige. The departmentalization and fragmentation of the study of humans by humans is a study in itself.
In the midst of the great 2009 recession, when all prior assumptions became obsolete or at least negotiable, Mark Taylor stated: “ If American higher education is to thrive in the 21st century, colleges and universities, like Wall Street and Detroit, must be rigorously regulated and completely restructured.” He argued the graduate education tended to produce highly specialized people who had limited or no employment opportunities: “The emphasis on narrow scholarship also encourages an educational system that has become a process of cloning. Faculty members cultivate those students whose futures they envision as identical to their own pasts, even though their tenures will stand in the way of these students having futures as full professors.”
For at least three decades I have championed the notion of interdisciplinary collaboration. In Group Dynamics, I stated: “In the most advanced universities some smart people want to connect disciplines and integrate knowledge. Eclectic groups gather to synthesize the information that has accumulated in separate disciplines. Inter-disciplinary groups attract the smartest and most versatile people who are interested in understanding the whole truth, but these humans are not the most effective politicians and seldom are good administrators. The result is that multidisciplinary groups are often short-lived or lack the ability to sustain high levels of funding to achieve a significant and enduring voice in the politics of the organization. A genuine and lasting understanding of human behavior requires that psychology is unified and united with biology, anthropology, sociology paleontology, philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, computer science and all the other disciplines that reveal the underlying patterns, tendencies and problems of humans. Indeed, in university terms, separate and competing departments will have to merge in a unified School of the Human Mind.”
Taylor suggested: “ If American higher education is to thrive in the 21st century, colleges and universities, like Wall Street and Detroit, must be rigorously regulated and completely restructured, a long process to make higher learning more agile, adaptive and imaginative.” He emphasized the need for curricum reform, the elimination of competing departments to be replaced by inclusive cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural studies.
Human problems proliferate at a frantic pace. Crises of greater and greater magnitude continue to emerge. In an ideal world, people who are smart enough to enter university would be focused on problem solving and crisis management, using all the knowledge and tools available. Of course, we do not live in an ideal world and a well-informed realist recocognizes that humans of all shapes, sizes and colors are limited by built-in features of their brain. Humans are critical and disputatious. Humans in Universities acquire superfical civility, but really, most of them are preoccupied with maintaining or advancing their social status and defending their territory. While it is obvious that Universities, banks and car companies all need fundamental re-structuring, who is going to design and lead this reformation?
Citations
Mark C. Taylor. End the University as We Know It. NYT April 27, 2009 (Taylor is the chairman of the religion department at Columbia, is the author of the forthcoming “Field Notes From Elsewhere: Reflections on Dying and Living.”)
See also Stephen Gislason. Group Dynamics.
In the midst of the great 2009 recession, when all prior assumptions became obsolete or at least negotiable, Mark Taylor stated: “ If American higher education is to thrive in the 21st century, colleges and universities, like Wall Street and Detroit, must be rigorously regulated and completely restructured.” He argued the graduate education tended to produce highly specialized people who had limited or no employment opportunities: “The emphasis on narrow scholarship also encourages an educational system that has become a process of cloning. Faculty members cultivate those students whose futures they envision as identical to their own pasts, even though their tenures will stand in the way of these students having futures as full professors.”
For at least three decades I have championed the notion of interdisciplinary collaboration. In Group Dynamics, I stated: “In the most advanced universities some smart people want to connect disciplines and integrate knowledge. Eclectic groups gather to synthesize the information that has accumulated in separate disciplines. Inter-disciplinary groups attract the smartest and most versatile people who are interested in understanding the whole truth, but these humans are not the most effective politicians and seldom are good administrators. The result is that multidisciplinary groups are often short-lived or lack the ability to sustain high levels of funding to achieve a significant and enduring voice in the politics of the organization. A genuine and lasting understanding of human behavior requires that psychology is unified and united with biology, anthropology, sociology paleontology, philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, computer science and all the other disciplines that reveal the underlying patterns, tendencies and problems of humans. Indeed, in university terms, separate and competing departments will have to merge in a unified School of the Human Mind.”
Taylor suggested: “ If American higher education is to thrive in the 21st century, colleges and universities, like Wall Street and Detroit, must be rigorously regulated and completely restructured, a long process to make higher learning more agile, adaptive and imaginative.” He emphasized the need for curricum reform, the elimination of competing departments to be replaced by inclusive cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural studies.
Human problems proliferate at a frantic pace. Crises of greater and greater magnitude continue to emerge. In an ideal world, people who are smart enough to enter university would be focused on problem solving and crisis management, using all the knowledge and tools available. Of course, we do not live in an ideal world and a well-informed realist recocognizes that humans of all shapes, sizes and colors are limited by built-in features of their brain. Humans are critical and disputatious. Humans in Universities acquire superfical civility, but really, most of them are preoccupied with maintaining or advancing their social status and defending their territory. While it is obvious that Universities, banks and car companies all need fundamental re-structuring, who is going to design and lead this reformation?
Citations
Mark C. Taylor. End the University as We Know It. NYT April 27, 2009 (Taylor is the chairman of the religion department at Columbia, is the author of the forthcoming “Field Notes From Elsewhere: Reflections on Dying and Living.”)
See also Stephen Gislason. Group Dynamics.