Re: Ralph’s comment.

This is another reason I don’t want to go overboard here, because to some extent the argument is taking my own career trajectory and saying, “More please”. Now I don’t think I’m unique in feeling that I’ve been able in a place like Swarthmore to move back to what I consider to be the intellectual and emotional roots of my attraction to academic life in the first place: there are other faculty here and at other small liberal arts institutions who feel the same way, and I think Invisible Adjunct’s site helped to tap into a deep well of similar sentiments and desires. I think for that reason alone it would be interesting to actively pursue this vision institutionally rather than just stumble into it.

But at the same time I’m on record many times as suggesting that academia needs more pluralism–not just the somewhat tedious complaint that what we need is political or ideological pluralism, but far more methodological pluralism. I think even an instititution committed to generalism ought to have a strong mix of dedicated disciplinary specialists–in fact, people who can make a convincing case for the value of deep specialization as an approach to knowledge. There is a good, sound, principled case to be made for that: my main beef might be that too many academics assume that case as a default, and give it relatively little thought–they rely on institutions to enforce that vision rather than making it an active, declarative credo.

I’d also say that there are generalists like me and then there are “connective” specialists and they’re not quite the same thing. Someone who works on science policy, sociology of science, philosophy of science, is not necessarily a generalist. But even as specialists, they return a distinctive value to a small institution. I think if you forever conceive new opportunities in a small college as a catalogue of disciplinary absences, you really are self-defining as an inadequate little university. If on the other hand you say, “When we need new things, what we need are people (specialists or generalists) who bridge gaps between departments”, I think you’re not defining yourself in terms of disciplinary areas of insufficiency. And I really don’t think of myself as such a person–a person who bridges a specific gap. I’m much more of a dilettante–much more careless, much more whimsical. In that respect, I wouldn’t say to try and find more of me: quite the contrary.

He wrote back and said essentially, “Well, we don’t have any teaching positions open right now, but thanks for asking.”

Assistant professors are hired as they are now, on the basis of excellence in a specialty as demonstrated by a Ph. D. in whatever field — plus whatever publications and teaching experience one has.

Tenure (at whatever rank) requires that one can place one’s speciality in a broad intellectual context. Just how one makes this demonstration is not at all clear to me and, in any event, would entail a somewhat subtle judgement call. Perhaps one teaches a broadly-defined introductory course in some field of which one’s speciality is a subset. Or perhaps one writes a book appealing to the general audience. The idea is that you can’t get tenure simply on the strength of excellence in a specialty. You have to know, understand, and be concerned about the wider fabric of knowlege.

To get a full professorship you have to demonstrate accomplishment (e.g. publications in appropriate journals) in some specialty that is distinctly different from one’s Ph. D. specialty. Just what is mean by “distinctly different” is, of course, somewhat problematic. But the idea is that someone who, for example, did a disseration on Charles Dickens, cannot get a full professorship simply by demonstrating accomplishment in Dickens studies, nor even in the 19th century British (or even American) novel. This person must also demonstrate knowlege of, e.g. evolutionary psychology, cognitive science, experimental economics, physical anthropology, and so forth. I figure this requirement will drive folks nuts. But, my sense is that our deepest and most productive thinkers do this sort of thing automatically. It’s time we routinze this style of intellectual career and make it a requirement for achieving a full professorship. Obviously doing this requires that one invest a considerable amount of time in learning a new mode of thought rather than in publishing more or less the same ideal three times a year for three or four years running.