You have /5 articles left.
Sign up for a free account or log in.
A blight besets the groves of academe: the increasing isolation of one academic discipline from another.
Were I to identify the single worst development in the life of the mind over the past half century, it is intellectual segregation. The cross-fertilization that gave rise to the ferment of the late 1960s and 1970s has given way to disciplines that exist separate and apart from one another with little interdisciplinary communication. Departments, in short, have become increasingly ghettoized.
When I think back to the life of the mind a half century ago, what stands out is eclecticism and cross-pollination.
At Yale, every doctoral student in the humanities and social sciences was expected to be familiar the writings of Clifford Geertz, Sidney Mintz, Marshall Sahlins, Victor Turner and Eric Wolf in anthropology; E. O. Wilson in biology; Perry Anderson, Eric Hobsbawm, E. P. Thompson and Immanuel Wallerstein in history; Louis Althusser, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault in literary studies and philosophy; Benedict Anderson, Hannah Arendt, Robert Dahl, Seymour Martin Lipset and James C. Scott in political science; Gordon Allport, Albert Bandura, John Bowlby, Urie Bronfenbrenner, Erik Erikson, Howard Gardner, Carol Gilligan, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, Elizabeth Loftis and Endel Tulving in psychology; and Herbert Gans, Erving Goffman, David Riesman, Richard Sennett and Theda Skocpol in sociology.
Nothing better demonstrates these scholars’ influence than their book sales. Let me offer a few examples from the field of sociology. Elliot Liebow’s Tally’s Corner and Philip Slater’s Pursuit of Loneliness sold over half a million copies (by 1995), William Ryan’s Blaming the Victim, Lillian Rubin’s Worlds of Pain and Sennett’s Fall of Public Man more than 400,000; Sennett and Jonathan Cobb’s Hidden Injuries of Class and Rubin’s Intimate Strangers more than 300,000; and Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward’s Regulating the Poor, Sennett’s Uses of Disorder and Carol Stack’s All Our Kin more than 200,000.
By academic and even commercial press standards, those books were best sellers. Today, few academic books can begin to rival those sales figures. Among the most popular trade books by academics is Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s The Coddling of the American Mind. According to an estimate I’ve seen, that book has sold roughly 200,000 copies.
In the field of education, despite having a potential market of teachers far larger than higher ed’s, estimated sales figures for even the most widely publicized books are strikingly low. Joe Feldman’s Grading for Equity has apparently sold somewhat more than 50,000 copies; Lisa Delpit’s Other People’s Children, Geneva Gay’s Culturally Responsive Teaching and Robert J. Marzano’s The New Science of Teaching and Learning, 20,000; Jonathan Zimmerman’s Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools, 10,000; and Anthony Abraham Jack’s The Privileged Poor, 5,000.
Not bad, but certainly nowhere near competitive with the academic books of the 1970s.
Let’s contrast those figures with some other academic books published in the 1970s. Kai Erikson’s Everything in Its Path and his Wayward Puritans and Arlie Hochschild’s Second Shift sold more than 100,000 copies; Daniel Bell’s Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism more than 75,000; Nancy Chodorow’s Reproduction of Motherhood, Mirra Komarovsky’s Blue-Collar Marriage and Immanuel Wallerstein’s Modern World-System more than 60,000 copies; and Skocpol’s States and Social Revolution and William Julius Wilson’s Declining Significance of Race sold more than 50,000 copies.
What about more narrowly focused works? According to one account, “In 1980, a scholarly publisher could expect to sell 2,000 copies of any given history book. By 1990, that number had plummeted to 500 copies.” Today, I’m told, the figure is fewer than 300.
Without a doubt, academic authors have taken a severe financial hit. Far worse, in my view, is the decline in cross-disciplinary dialogue. Think of the pioneers of the new social history—who in American history included John Demos, Philip Greven, Kenneth Lockridge and Michael Zuckerman. These historians made use of a new methodology, family reconstitution, drawn from anthropology and demography; theoretical frameworks derived from psychology; and an interest in community, child rearing practices, courtship, family relations and gender dynamics that grew largely out of sociology. They were truly social science historians.
They have few counterparts today. Given the decline in formal training within the discipline of history in demography, econometrics, statistics and anthropological, psychological and sociological theory, fewer and fewer historians are well equipped to critically evaluate scholarship outside their own field.
What’s true of history is also true of many of its humanities and social science counterparts.
As admissions into doctoral programs in the humanities and social sciences shrinks, the time is ripe to radically rethink the way we train Ph.D. students.
Every Ph.D.-granting institution, in my opinion, should engage in an intensive reimagining of the humanities (and social sciences) doctoral program process like Duke has. The goal of such a process should not be simply to prepare Ph.D.s for a broader range of careers, but to rethink and reinvent the curriculum and infuse with training and educational experiences that go beyond a student’s core discipline.
At Duke, that means offering paid internships, participation in collaborative research projects, training in policy analysis and public engagement and access to a new Ph.D. program in Computational Media, Arts & Cultures.
As Edward J. Balleisen, a professor of history and public policy at Duke and vice provost for interdisciplinary studies, and Maria LaMonaca Wisdom, the project manager for Duke’s NEH NextGen Ph.D. implementation grant, report, success requires faculty and student buy-in and strong links between the humanities, the social sciences, the sciences and institution’s professional schools.
None of these initiatives will have the hoped-for impact:
- If the program is regarded primarily as a distinct career diversity track for those doctoral students who don’t aspire to professorships.
- If faculty across department lines fail to collaborate in curriculum redesign and team teaching.
- If departments regard internships and interdisciplinary courses as a diversion from their program’s core mission.
- If the institution fails to provide the advising, coaching and administrative support that arranging, implementing and monitoring off-campus internships requires.
There are other models for emulation.
Wouldn’t it be great if more institutions followed Princeton’s example and introduced an interdisciplinary doctoral program in the humanities, offering team-taught seminars and hosting lunch talks, lectures and interdisciplinary reading groups?
Or how about creating an interdisciplinary program in race, diaspora and Indigeneity, along the University of Chicago’s lines, that speaks directly to issues of equity, postcolonialism and social justice? Such a program seeks to investigate the historical and social processes that have given rise to modern ideas of race and human difference, the development of new structures of power, political and aesthetic meaning making and the dispersion of ethnic populations and the impact of migration on collective identities and cultures.
Balleisen and LaMonaca Wisdom identify a series of challenges that all doctoral programs in the humanities face. These include the need to:
- Diversify Ph.D. cohorts
- Enhance doctoral student advising and mentoring
- Address the mental health issues that beset many doctoral students
- Attend to the failure to adequately align Ph.D. programs with job market realities
- Remedy hyperspecialized graduate student research that that doesn’t “translate well across disciplines or beyond the academy.”
To which I’d add another pressing challenge: producing scholars who are well prepared to generate scholarship that is comparative, interdisciplinary and methodologically and conceptually cutting-edge.
The core humanities disciplines continue to produce great scholarship, but they aren’t, I fear, delivering the methodological, conceptual and theoretical breakthroughs that are academy’s lifeblood.
Business as usual won’t cut it. Disciplines that fail to produce paradigm-shifting scholarship are fields in decline.
