Alena Selezneva
A couple of decades ago, about three-quarters of the way into the Western States 100-mile trail race, the runner I was pacing and I came across a guy running solo.
It’s unusual to go it alone in the last section of an ultramarathon, and I was impressed and/or worried. Pacers are there not to keep the pace, but to make sure the runner stays safe during that last portion of the event. All sorts of bad things can happen when you run through the night in the mountains. Hallucinations. Dehydration. Getting lost. Or, well, just feeling lonely. It’s a long time to stay in your own head, which, for many of us, can be a dangerous neighborhood.
This guy was big and strong and running well, so, being professionally nosy, I started chatting with him and asked where he was from.
Palo Alto.
What did he do?
Worked at Stanford.
What did he do there?
Teach.
You might be forgiven for thinking he was a graduate instructor or a lecturer, because it sure seemed that way. But I kept digging.
Turned out this guy was a big-deal scientist. I mean, a big honking deal. I later learned that he’s not always as humble as he first seemed at mile 78. (When I sent him a draft of this essay to check if I had correctly remembered our conversation from 25 years ago, he wondered why I didn’t include his name. I said, “You get enough attention.”)
But a lesson stayed with me about how he had triaged his answer: He presented himself first as an employee. Then as a teacher. And only after my intrusive questions (that revealed I too had been around a few academic blocks) did he reveal his status and discipline.
When I became a faculty member, I answered these kinds of questions exactly as he did, though I have nothing close to his bragging rights. But I wonder how many others do the same. I often hear academics respond to the “what do you do for work” question by leading with their field: I’m a historian. A philosopher. A physicist. A sociologist. A geologist.
Our first allegiance tends to be to the discipline in which we were trained. Then maybe we say we’re professors. Even those not on the tenure track, like graduate students, often respond this way. Our next loyalty is to our students and our identity as teachers.
Only after we get through all that do we say where we work. Unless, of course, you’re at a fancy-pants institution and you want to impress. Or maybe you do the opposite: “I teach in New Haven.” (Is reverse snobbery worse?) That’s because this hierarchy reflects what we value and want to protect most fiercely.
Why does this matter?
If we care most about our disciplines, we tend to build institutional fences to protect our borders and fiefdoms to justify our existence. We didn’t just want to become professors; we wanted to study and contribute to a field we love. We tend not to feel passionately about the places that issue our paychecks and in fact often dis them when we’re unhappy with administrative decisions. This creates problems for struggling institutions.
Why? Because the primary way departments justify their existence and protect their resources is through majors. And when enrollments decline, territorial battles intensify.
Majors used to matter more when we were living in a world that was less complicated and we didn’t have, with one good AI prompt, a way to synthesize lots of information or, you know, write code. Now what I heard from employers from a wide array of fields for my book about getting jobs is that they’re going to have to train new hires in how they want things done. What they look for is mindset. Humble, hungry and smart, plus some experience working for and with others, means a lot more than a bunch of narrowly focused coursework.
If you ask students what they care about, they will often parrot what they’ve been told by family members and say it’s getting a job; they’ve been led to believe that means choosing the right major. But if you frame the question differently and ask what problems they want to work on, the answer might be a lot more interesting.
We cleave to our old ways at our peril. I have a bit of a moral hangover from my days as an acquisitions editor, when I published narrow monographs that did nothing other than kill trees and earn someone tenure. Faculty are still being forced to publish tiny hole-filling work in their fields to advance professionally, and it’s hard to know which tightly focused study will make an important contribution. But since most of us got degrees from places that were fancier than where we currently teach, we still tend to act like we’re all at research universities. And that’s how we’re rewarded.
These incentive structures exist for reasons: job security, clear metrics for tenure decisions, disciplinary expertise that took years to develop. Faculty aren’t being unreasonable when they resist. But the question is whether these 20th-century structures serve 21st-century students.
How great would it be to find ways to encourage curricular innovation by making co-teaching and the creation of interdisciplinary fields count as much as, or more than, that fourth multi-author journal article? I’ve long maintained you could teach every discipline in a university under the heading “Animal Studies.” Hard science, psychology, ethics, statistics, literature. And then you could add in experiential learning at medical clinics, publications and dog parks. (Sign me up to take students to visit Mars at the Tanganyika Wildlife Park near Wichita and learn about how to create viral videos.)
This idea won’t work everywhere and shouldn’t. We still need to have people doing deep scholarly research in order to, you know, make societal progress. But: Eckerd College has an animal studies major (yes, I stole this great idea and can’t stop talking about it) and recently introduced problem-based minors. Cleveland State has integrated degrees and just rolled out an inquiry-based core curriculum. These (completely different) institutions, and a few others, recognize that we all live in an inter- and multidisciplinary world. The turmoil created by tech and changing demographics, not to mention questions about the value of degrees, means we have an exciting opportunity to rethink some of what we do. I believe many faculty would welcome such a change.
When I showed a draft of this to my old 100-mile buddy, Chris Garcia (fine! more attention for Mr. Big) said majors are for “building foundations of didactic knowledge and establishing intellectual discipline.” Sure, that works at Stanford. But he also noted that “most serious scientists just focus on their specific areas of interest; departmental boundaries don’t mean much” to them.
The problem is that at many institutions, those boundaries mean everything to everyone else: to hiring committees, to resource allocation, to who gets to teach what. And that’s exactly what needs to change if those of us who are not at fancy-pants places are going to survive. And, more important, serve our students and prepare them for what comes next.
