Mark C. Taylor: How To Destroy Academia
Episode 1

Academia has its problems. Yes it does.

This, however, is approximately the worst set of recommendations for change I've ever seen. In fact, I would bet large amounts of money that this set of recommendations, if followed, would come pretty darned close to destroying the university. Even if you think changes need to be made, you should not think that these changes need to be made.

Now, I'm an experimentalist about such things--I'm disinclined to rule too much out too quickly and without giving it a try. But some of Professor Taylor's suggestions are almost certain to be disastrous.

In this installment, let's look at Taylor's worst suggestion, his suggestion 2:

Abolish permanent departments, even for undergraduate education, and create problem-focused programs. These constantly evolving programs would have sunset clauses, and every seven years each one should be evaluated and either abolished, continued or significantly changed. It is possible to imagine a broad range of topics around which such zones of inquiry could be organized: Mind, Body, Law, Information, Networks, Language, Space, Time, Media, Money, Life and Water.

Now, it's not clear that academic disciplines divide inquirers up in optimal ways. And it's clear that the divisions are in some ways artificial. And it's clear that cross-disciplinary collaboration can sometimes be beneficial.

But this suggestion, if implemented, might very well relegate the American university system to second-rate status almost immediately.

First: this model of flexible, topic-specific departments is popular largely in the weaker parts of the humanities and social sciences. Women's studies, cultural studies, every-geographical-region-you-can-think-of studies...these are the parts of the university where you find some of the weakest scholarship, easiest courses, and most absurd theories. To restructure the most rigorous, reputable and successful parts of the university (e.g. the sciences) on the model of the least rigorous, reputable and successful parts is not exactly a smart move. Believe me, the very last thing we want is for the physics department to look more like the "communications" department...

At my own institution, the more frivolous bits are in constant flux, combining, dividing and recombining into new centers, programs and special curricula...always looking for the magic bullet...something that will bring something like success without requiring genuinely hard intellectual work. New is good; change is good. Much energy is given over to meetings and administrative busy-work that could better be spent on scholarship. Though, given the nature of the scholarship in the relevant areas, I suppose that might not actually be true...

(Let me also note that Taylor's suggestion makes me hypothesize that there is an intellectual/political agenda behind it. He is in religious studies, a discipline infected by the virulent viruses of recent intellectual fads (postmodernism, poststructuralism, cultural studies, etc., etc.). "Antiessentialism" is the orthodoxy in many such places. Although there's a great deal of confusion about what such folk mean by 'antiessentialism'--they only sort of mean what philosophers mean by it--the short version is: nothing (e.g. the study of history or biology included) is what it is because of its real properties. More fashionable is the view that we make things what they are by how we represent or categorize them. My guess is that this (indefensible yet fashionable) theory might be behind Professor Taylor's suggestion.)

Currently, people are already doing much collaborative work outside their disciplines, and universities are encouraging and facilitating such collaboration (it used to be called "interdisciplinary" work, but now the buzzword is "multidisciplinary"). Consequently, there is no very good reason to destroy the disciplines to achieve such collaboration. To destroy them that is, in favor of an ever-mutating stew of temporary quasi-disciplines...which, if I read Taylor's suggestion right, would differ from university to university, thus making collaboration by people in different institutions more difficult.

And let's be clear on this: Taylor's suggestion simply would not work. We're on the trailing edge of a restructuring of colleges in my university. It was a fairly simple one that merely moved departments around. It has taken years and uncounted professor-hours of work. There is simply no way to radically restructure the entire university every few years with no determinate disciplinary divisions to guide us. On Taylor's suggestion, every individual professor could theoretically be recombined with others in an infinite number of different ways. Whatever else could be said for any of Taylor's other suggestions, make no mistake about it: this is a blueprint for disaster. It cannot work, and should not even be tried. The meetings alone would take untold thousands of person-hours over the course of years--and this in every university in the country. Anyone who has worked in academia should be able to see that this is simply not an even vaguely sensible suggestion.

My worry, however, is that this suggestion will be taken seriously. More and more, the university is run by an administrative class--non-scholars who got degrees in academic administration. (Yes, sadly, there are such degrees.) Conventional wisdom at my institution is that we entered our current state of perpetual flux when these people showed up on the scene--professional administrators build their CVs by changing things, not by keeping them the same. I have wasted great huge chunks of my life in endless inane meetings that almost never leave the institution in a better place than it was before. My worry is that, somewhere out there, these administrators are salivating at Taylor's idea, which would require more administrators and more meetings, and give over more time to bureaucratic busywork and less to teaching and scholarship.

Needless to say, I could be wrong (and I often am). But this is one of the worst ideas I've heard in a long, long time.