The Professor and the Pupil: Addressing Secularization and Disciplinary Fragmentation in Academia (original) (raw)

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 “ir...