What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun."
Those words were written more than 2,000 years ago, and it is with a premature sigh they already resonate with me at 22 years old. But every now and then I am reminded that there is far more new to me than I can ever learn.
Such a reminder came last week when I listened to a lecture from Calvin DeWitt, professor of environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. DeWitt gave a culture seminar titled "Environmental Studies as a Nexus for Recovery from Fragmentation in Higher Education."
Don't be intimidated - though the title was apt, its wordiness did not reveal anything about its author. DeWitt is in his early 70s, but his exhilaration for his subject and the world in general rivals that of a toddler - except with a doctorate in molecular biology. At one point during his lecture he dropped an anecdote describing the French revolutionaries' attempt at a 10-day week to up productivity. His scholarly assessment?
"It worked great…except the horses died, and uh, that's not cool." Could he have said it better?
Professor DeWitt brought far more than youthful vitality though - he diagnosed a serious problem in academia.
Before the Civil War, higher education consisted of colleges, not universities, and it was taken as a given that knowledge is unified. That is, you have to know language before you can learn mathematics, and math is needed for all the hard sciences, and so on. Any and all divisions of knowledge are ultimately artificial - we made them because they help us learn.
Well, the segmentation has gone way too far. The various "departments" are increasingly isolated from each other, and it is crippling the pursuit of knowledge in each field.
For example, DeWitt needed to assist an environmentalist who was protesting the proliferation of bird feeders, reasoning that it would disrupt the dietary habits of robins. The problem was, robins don't eat seed - they eat worms. The person was angry over nothing. Here was an environmental ethicist who knew a great deal about ethics and obviously very little about the environment.
It is difficult to overstate this problem: The segmentation of knowledge is making the university increasingly irrelevant to the culture it inhabits. Historians are misinterpreting statistical analyses. Psychologists without any philosophical moorings are constantly confusing correlation and causation. More and more, journalists know how to describe the world without understanding it at all.
Stemming the tide of hyper-specialization is simply a matter of walking from one part of campus to another. Interdisciplinary foundations and studies are sorely needed. If your graduate research does not involve at least a phone call to another department, I'd be willing to bet it's missing something substantial.
Of course, DeWitt identified the biggest deterrent to tackling the problem of academic fragmentation: "There are no academic rewards for integration. It's hard to write a paper that gets accepted in any journal at all for gluing things together that have been cut asunder."
Why are academics concerned about scholastic rewards and publishing accolades? For my opinion on that I return to my friend quoted above: "Behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind."
Gerald Liles is a history and religion senior. His column appears on Tuesdays.
