Academics Getting Too Specialized?
For the last couple days, I attended a conference that involved a number academics. Listening to the discussion got me thinking: Has academics become to specialized?
Not too long ago, I read the excellent book, How the Scots Invented the Modern World. Among other things, it focuses on Scotland during the Enlightenment, and it reminded me how great thinkers of that era were not specialists. The most famous, of course, is Leonardo da Vinci. He was a painter, inventor, scientist and mathematician. As such, he was aware of the many other great thinkers of his age.
Like Da Vinci, famed father of modern economics, Adam Smith, was an enlightenment era academic. But he famously spent huge amount of his time in the coffee houses of Edinburgh and Glasgow exchanging ideas with the greatest minds of his age from a wide range of disciplines.
Mutli-disciplinary expertise wasn’t limited to Smith and Da Vinci. Surgeons were naturalists. Geologists were moral and natural philosophers. Lawyers were interested in physics and chemistry. (Check out this list for many more examples.)
As such, the great thinkers were constantly challenged by the best ideas from other disciplines. Myopia induced by specialization was impossible.
Over the last few days, I listened to hours of academic presentations. Only once did a speaker suggest looking to other disciplines for guidance. And his remarks, it seemed, were met with skepticism among the assembly.
Why shouldn’t the principles that underly physics or philosophy or psychology impact the theory and practice of communications? It seems to me that it should. And it seems to me that professors of all stripes could benefit from looking beyond their own fields a little more often.