IvyGate has a great article about a Columbia Professor, head of Religion Department Mark Taylor, who has come out criticizing the increasing specialization of academic work. Taylor says that specialization:
…has led to separation where there ought to be collaboration and to ever-increasing specialization. In my own religion department, for example, we have 10 faculty members, working in eight subfields, with little overlap. And as departments fragment, research and publication become more and more about less and less. Each academic becomes the trustee not of a branch of the sciences, but of limited knowledge that all too often is irrelevant for genuinely important problems. A colleague recently boasted to me that his best student was doing his dissertation on how the medieval theologian Duns Scotus used citations.
His proposed solution includes more emphasis on interdisciplinary work and the elimination of disciplinary departments in favor of “problem focused programs.”
