Comments on: The Road to Utopia

By: G. Weaire

G. Weaire — Fri, 01 May 2009 15:52:41 +0000

I’m not sure that departments and disciplines can be so neatly severed, except on a fairly basic conceptual level.

Departmentalization and disciplinarization go hand-in-hand. There is a sense in which I am part of a discipline which can trace its origins back at least as far as Hellenistic Alexandria – and for certain kinds of work that classicists do, that’s a quite reasonable way to look at it. But there’s another sense in which classics has a more recent disciplinary origin in the 18th-19th centuries with the development of the modern German university and its imitators.

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Fri, 01 May 2009 15:14:16 +0000

Obviously, I’m not too bugged personally by becoming locked into a single institution, since I’m such a freakish mutant at this point that I have little marketability. But if an institution were to commit as a matter of policy to encouraging people to stray from narrow disciplinary legibility while most other institutions stayed very ‘vanilla’ it would have to accept the responsibility for making a “revolution in one place”.

By: cjlee1

cjlee1 — Fri, 01 May 2009 14:58:46 +0000

Couldn’t we say, though, that “area studies” was once equally inventive and pragmatically oriented? The thought of training students in East Asian studies and African studies and so forth (and achieving fluency in foreign languages like Arabic and Chinese, no less!) surely was once viewed with equal doubt. And yet such interdisciplinary training fit into a Cold War program that the federal government embraced and funded quite well.

So, I agree with Taylor, and I think the items for measurement you mention are already there in a sense. I just wish Taylor had made two other points to situate his ideas:
1) We have outgrown the Cold War university model; we need to rethink that.
2) Universities are increasingly privatized (a process that escalated toward the end of the Cold War). If a paradigm shift is to occur, this trend also needs to be contemplated. Can private money fund change, or is federal money needed? My sense is that this trend will be very hard to reverse, since it is part of broader pattern related to social security, health care, and so forth.

By: Rana

Rana — Fri, 01 May 2009 14:36:07 +0000

the people who were employed at Mark Taylor???? Special School would instantly become unemployable in much of the rest of academia if they took the bait and really tried to live up to that new design Although, Tim, given that there are many of us who are de facto "unemployable in much of the rest of academia" that might be less of a drawback than you'd think. I'm already on the short end of the stick, making do with what part-time crumbs outside my specialty I can get. The thought that a full-time job doing what I'm interested in (environmental studies and history) might unsuit me for other academic work doesn't bother me all that much.

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 23:07:02 +0000

Hey, manifesto away, but that too is another level of analysis–at that point, complaining about something as ho-hum or quotidian as how universities are organized seems fairly out of place.

By: samth

samth — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 20:50:18 +0000

But if you????e got a comprehensive antipathy towards the contemporary academy, you either need to talk about building alternative institutions (and how that might be done) or talk concretely about the plausible scenarios for reform. Blue-sky doodling is fine, too, but it calls for a much gentler kind of rhetoric, a more tentative voice.

Why should we think this? The argument you’re implicitly making seems to prove way too much. In particular, what would it say about the Declaration of Independence? Or the Communist Manifesto? The Declaration of the Rights of Man?

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 19:03:48 +0000

Yeah, exactly. Every time I’ve done some blue-sky thinking here, someone comes along and says, “Look, there is a place that does something very much like that, and it’s fine, it’s good, but it’s not Robot Jesus, not the perfect thing you’re imagining it would be”. As a lot of folks have noted about Taylor or any attempt to radically revise departments, one of the huge embedded costs of such an effort if it were not done everywhere at once (and how likely is that) is that the people who were employed at Mark Taylor’s Special School would instantly become unemployable in much of the rest of academia if they took the bait and really tried to live up to that new design.

By: Western Dave

Western Dave — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 18:58:19 +0000

It’s interesting when you do get schools that try to experiment or break a mold (like Eugene Lang college of the New School) they often end up conforming more and more to what other colleges are like because they have a hard time attracting students. Who is the market that will attend these new institutions? A variation on point 2.