The Professor and the Pupil: Addressing Secularization and Disciplinary Fragmentation in Academia (original) (raw)
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The Professor and the Pupil: Addressing Secularization and Disciplinary Fragmentation in Academia A
Secularization, fragmentation of the disciplines, and reductionism in academia increasingly pose a problem for our ability to understand and to engage responsibly the highly connected world system in which we live and work. The separations that divide disciplines, departments, science and humanities divisions, colleges, and seminaries help establish and perpetuate this problem. Also perpetuating this problem is staffing of our institutions with professors whose training immediately prior to taking their first faculty position has been highly specialized and "focused." They are caught in the disciplinary web that constrains them from rectifying this problem. Moreover this problem is re-enforced by college administrators and academic policy that seeks to give courses and programs for undergraduates that are understood and accepted by graduate and professional schools. Beginning with what I hope is a thought-provoking epigraph, my paper works from the thinking of Michael Polanyi on "irreducibility" to considering the structure and controls of complex systems, and from this develops a consideration of the necessity of holding together-in one integrated systemscientia, ethics, and praxis.
Academic Disciplines: Synthesis or Demise
New England Journal of Higher Education, 2018
Current anxiety over the values and directions of what we used to call " higher education " has rich and complex roots in the past, as well as problematic branches into the future. A crucial and core aspect of the subject not yet adequately understood is the structure and strategy of scholarship itself, and its future. Forty-five years ago, in the heyday of " multiversities " lauded in books by presidents Clark Kerr (UC Berkeley) and James Perkins (Cornell), an article appeared in the Journal of Higher Education entitled " Multiversity and University. " It contrasted the two models of scholarship, and contended that, whereas multiversity academic disciplines are each internally rigorous as scholarship, taken together as a putative whole, the multiversity had never been defended as scholarship and could not be so defended, because it is not scholarship. The disciplines arose and came together by historical accidents, not by intentional, systematic, scholarly or philosophical design. They arose in the early modern period of Western history—the 15th to 18th centuries, with the Renaissance, Reformation, Scientific Revolution, Absolutism and Enlightenment—arguably the first " Age of Paradigm Shifts " in every field, significantly driven by Gutenberg's IT revolution in printing. Each of the various modern disciplines created its own vocabulary and conceptualization, which were based on analyses of contemporary events and developments, and—this is crucial— were exclusively specialized. Scholarship is always necessarily specialized—it examines the world in detail. What is distinctively modern with the multiversity is that its specializations exclude other subjects—studying each one (e.g. economics, politics, astronomy) separately, to the exclusion of others, in various languages that are mutually incompatible and incommensurable. Collectively, modern academic disciplines imply that scholarship at its highest levels describes the world as if it were fragmented, in separate silos. This structure and strategy of knowledge, inquiry and education played a leading role in producing modern secular Western civilization. Its long-term effects have been profound. Exclusive specialization was originally intended only to separate each field from religion in a period of religious wars. The cumulative effect—coincidentally and inadvertently—was that they also excluded each other, obviating our sense of reality as a coherent whole, which it actually is. This also gradually undermined authentic liberal education, which seeks self-development in wholeness of life. In the multiversity, " higher education " — advanced self-development—has devolved, as we see today, into advanced technical training— information and skills development. As such, it leads to lives fragmented accordingly—even divided against themselves. Translated into public policy in the real world, the disciplines' exclusions feed back as problems—in the early '70s Journal of Higher Education article the prime examples were our failures in Vietnam and the deepening ecological crisis caused by technology ignoring ecology. In sum, the flaws of fragmented scholarship have inclined us to problems at strategic levels in modern culture—in knowledge, education, public policy, and personal values—owing to the unattended gaps among the disciplines.
Between Piety and Expertise: Professionalization of College Faculty in the "Age of the University
Pennsylvania history, 1979
P RESIDENT Carter's attacks upon the legal and medical "establishments" have revived public debate about the impact of professions upon American society. It is surely appropriate, and even urgent, that we reexamine the way that the structures and assumptions embodied in professional organizations channel important aspects of national life. The origins and evolution of professionalization have received considerable attention from historians. Recently Burton Bledstein has broadened the discussion with his thesis that a "culture of professionalism" provides the best conceptual framework for understanding the middle class of urbanizing and industrializing America. Although, as Thomas Haskell suggests, Bledstein overstates the case, his work promises to provoke new and broadly ranging discussion of professionalization and its relationship to higher education.' The organization of the traditional professions as well as some newer ones proceeded with dramatic speed between the Civil War and World War I. National organizations were founded or revived, training was extended, licensing standardized, and group consciousness raised. Law, medicine, and engineering were particularly prominent in establishing the pattern. Its adoption signalled the ascendency of a faction in each field that found the new structures and practices to be an effective way of gaining control of the profession. The battle over "scientific" medicine is the best-known of the internal disputes that occurred within each area. 2 The academic world shared this tradition.
INTRODUCTION: The unrestrained particularization of the Object of Human Sciences , reducing fields of study of man to overlimited outlook and standpoints ,and decreasing or lessening the subject of enquiry to an alienated qualified individual endanger the ' necessary comprehension ' of man in his whole for existence, life , and experience on the earth.The absolute [or unrestricted] institutionalization of knowledge, especially of its human science branch, in one way or another, challenges, and also negates, the original meaning and the authentic philosophy of Higher Education and of sciences in their fully extended sense. It makes Knowledge ‛schooled' and in a sense ‛orientationalized' and 'indoctrinated' somehow. It would, of course, obstruct the innate, dynamic, and multiplying functiIt puts man's familiaty and on of knowledge, particularly human science branch dealt with in this paper. It interferes with its pluralizing and reproductive characteristics.closeness to the earth at critical risk.The earth requires the whole and true subject to exist and challenge with ,avoiding any disturbing danger and endangering. Knowledge is always expected to be able to provide safeguarding provisions and environments for reproduction and regeneration of man's better understanding and responses against various problems, troubles and impairments of his life materially or immaterially. Human Sciences are like ‛living creatures' who multiply and regenerate. They require oxygen and victuals. Stopping living creatures of their multiplying and regenerating ‚is‚ dangerous and is against life and its necessities. Both the term and the practice of Higher Education are associated with concepts and phrases such as advancement, nobility, promotion, intellectualism, rationalism, reasonableness, improvement, readiness and willingness to upgrade oneself and to serve human kind, elevation, achievement and many other terms that indicate and appeal to positive and ambitious qualities and trends. Higher Education equals higher level of knowledge and definitely masses several expectations and due nesses within and around its permanent temple: knowledge and human experience. Its permanency ensures its everlasting multiplication and regeneration vice versa. Whatever variation and classification may be imposed upon it, its dynamic multiplication guarantees its unceasing perpetuity. Dynamic durability and lasting multiplication have inherent and interdependent relationships to each other indeed. The expectancies that higher education endows graduating people are sometimes very
Provoking the slumbering giant: Waking up the soul of the disciplines
psy.gla.ac.uk
Democracy cannot afford for its academics to sleep-walk through the rooms of their disciplines. Yet increasing specialisation, limited conceptions of whom to value in terms of knowledge holders and producers, and the apparent growth of managerialism with its attendant bureaucracy all seem to be occurring in the slumber-time of the disciplines as experienced in Higher Education.