One hundred years ago a broad war was fought over the function and structure of the American university. It pitted humanist defenders of the liberal-arts tradition, who believed in transmitting the practical and aesthetic wisdom of the ages to new generations, against those who wanted professional training and cutting-edge research modeled on the natural sciences. The humanists lost badly.
The "naturalist" model first conquered a handful of research universities such as the Johns Hopkins University. Land-grant universities, already oriented toward technical training, were then easy marks. The most prestigious universities, like Harvard, frequently resisted in the name of forming an elite with a broad vision rather than a narrow set of skills, but they too eventually fell. Over the course of the 20th century, even liberal-arts colleges were gradually remade in the naturalist image, as research became an ever more important criterion for tenure, and a departmental and disciplinary structure emerged that reflected the professional training young Ph.D.'s were receiving in the universities.
The rhetoric of liberal education could not be dropped, only the reality. Part of the appeal of higher education to this day is the inherent satisfaction of knowing history, of understanding and appreciating the arts, of reading great literature (and recognizing it), of thinking about the underlying order of the universe.
If universities continue to use the image of liberal education to sell their products to one public -- students and their parents -- they use a different one in legitimating their needs to the government agencies that finance them. For this "public," which has grown more and more important over time, naturalist rhetoric about pushing back the frontiers of knowledge is the key pitch. For alumni as well, increasingly, the fund-raising appeal is a new cure for breast cancer, predictions of earthquakes, genetic manipulations: the public (but individual) benefits of research. Medicine has been the most fruitful area for this.
What does it mean for universities to structure themselves on the model of the natural sciences? And specifically, what does it mean for academic careers? It means a division of labor into departments and disciplines that only make sense if they correspond to objective aspects of the world out there that can be divided into tiny fragments. It means evaluation criteria that turn to the disciplines. Only other experts in your sub-subfield can judge your work, so peer review is used not only for publications but also promotions. It means a lopsided emphasis on research more than teaching, despite occasional lip service to the contrary (those outside experts who review you for promotion cannot evaluate your teaching). And finally, it means the ability to attract outside grants.
This model has worked well in the natural sciences. Specialization works here -- precisely because it often ignores the disciplinary boundaries laid down 100 years ago. (Identifying a new peptide may require the collaboration of chemists, biologists, even physicists.) Experiments are reported tersely in short journal articles for other specialists. All the better if concise jargon, even symbols, can replace more cumbersome (but potentially elegant) natural languages. And if each research report contributes a tiny bit to a large puzzle that is gradually being filled in, then the quantity of publications is a reasonable, or at least defensible, indicator of productivity. There is little payoff in thinking about the big picture.
What does the naturalist model imply for those in the social sciences and humanities, however? Here, hyperspecialization can be the death not only of creativity but of solid understanding, for it is often the big picture that is most important. Social scientists are encouraged to gather precise data through carefully crafted studies, even sometimes experiments, but we are often at a loss what to do with the results. Broad patterns of social change or international relations get reduced to mathematical models of dubious real-world relevance. Economists study price changes but, clueless about political institutions and other "exogenous" factors, they are constantly thwarted in their efforts at predictions. The rare interdisciplinary seminar is seen as fun, not an integral part of one's life as a scholar or teacher.
Journal articles, the briefer the better, are favored over books. An untenured professor cannot afford the 5 or 10 years it takes to write a (potentially) important book, except perhaps in history departments. Some of the most important questions cannot be answered in 5,000-word journal articles, even with charts and tables. As a result most books consist of journal articles strung together as chapters -- and it shows. Natural scientists don't need books as a means of expression; other disciplines do.
Naturalism also affects the content of scholarship. Grants tend to go to those with the safest projects, most like the narrow focus of "normal science." Creativity in theory or methods is too risky for funding agencies. The best grant proposal is for research you've already done, since you can be more precise about what the likely results will be. All the incentives favor doing the same thing over and over. In social science, this makes some sense for those who are gathering useful data, for instance on trends in equality, that we as a society need for public debate. But it hardly opens up new ways of understanding those data. It is dull work. At mid-career, scholars often begin to bore themselves -- the minority who haven't already given up active research and publication.
Grant-getting abilities have become an important criterion in faculty searches. It is one thing for administrators to favor this, as they are responsible for balancing budgets. But why should potential colleagues value it in and of itself? Grants are a means to doing good research, which should, in turn, speak for itself. If someone gets grants without producing quality research, that is hardly a recommendation. Yes, grad students are often trained on grants, but they mysteriously seem to get trained even in the absence of outside grants.
The situation is perhaps worse for scholars in the humanities, whose status within the naturalist university is already low because of the relative scarcity of outside grant money. When they try to extract "data sets" from their research materials, they frequently kill the essentials of the art. The objects they study -- words on pages, acrylic on canvas, musical notes -- embody both local and universal truths about the human condition, but under naturalism they must be treated as though they were the codes of specialists, puzzles to be interpreted like a biologist decoding DNA strands. Literary criticism imports dubious theories from other disciplines, crafting brilliant but obscure exercises in imagining the deeper layers of reality that "generate" works of art.
Whenever scholars wish to establish their disciplines as sciences, they posit unseen forces and structures at work. These are often difficult to understand, because they don't exist in the same way that, say, tectonic plates do. Durkheim spoke of "social facts" as the domain of sociological science; Lévi-Strauss turned to the invisible play of signifiers to establish anthropology as a proper science. But no one can invent the telescope or microscope capable of seeing entities like these. They are not just unseen but unseeable. Nonspecialists seeking to appreciate a painting by Courbet or understand the causes of inequality in modern Brazil will be disappointed when they turn to professors' latest articles, which are more likely to deal with the "aporias of the text" or the "representation of representation."
If specialization in the natural sciences forms around concrete entities, this is often mimicked in other disciplines through networks formed around theoretical perspectives and social ties. People cite their friends. This pseudo-specialization precludes fruitful dialogue across points of view; it often encourages the self-congratulatory repetition of supposedly known truths.
The naturalist pursuit of objective knowledge and the humanist expression of practical and aesthetic wisdom have always coexisted uneasily. Unfortunately, the softer disciplines that would likely benefit from a recognition of the importance of liberal education may feel that they would be even more vulnerable to the naturalist faith if they did not try to look scientific. They have little choice but to imitate the natural sciences. Important audiences believe that science is the university's only function. If Congress, for instance, were deciding which departments a university needed, how long would sociology or comparative literature last? Indeed, it is possible that the uneasy combination of (and switching between) naturalist and humanist rhetoric has allowed the American university to flourish in a culture full of suspicion of eggheads, intellectual authorities whom populists despise.
I don't know if there is a solution to the naturalist trap. As long as that rhetoric works with crucial funding audiences in government or among alumni, trustees and administrators will organize their institutions along "scientific" lines. Many humanists will resist, drawn by the equally powerful image of liberal education. Unfortunately, they will continue to suffer for their resistance. They must choose between wisdom and career success.
