Being a Fox in a Hedgehog World
On expertise and specialization
I am a regular reader of
, one of the greatest Substack success stories. On my mornings runs, I often listen to their Honestly podcast. I think its excellent. The current regular host is Michael Moynihan. I disagree with many of his takes on the world but he is a good and generous interviewer. On a recent episode called “World War II and the Rise of Anti-History,” Moynihan was joined by Victor Davis Hanson to discuss the rise of popular history that has proliferated on the internet largely through podcasts. Their target was Darryl Cooper, a popular and divisive historian who has a popular podcast. What was interesting was the most basic approach to discredit Cooper was to call him an “amateur” historian “with no publishing record—no books, no academic articles.” I am not interested in defending Cooper. In fact, I had no idea who he was before the podcast, and his historical takes seem wrong and odious.But I am interested in the way that we use the notion of expertise and specialization to discredit those with whom we disagree. This is especially true in elite culture particularly in Universities and the press. How many times have we been told that we can’t possibly know what a woman is because we are not biologists or that we cannot speak about COVID lockdowns because we are not epidemiolgists. But, expertise and specialization is only one way that we can attend the world intellectually and has tremendous shortcomings. At the very least, expertise certainly is not the same as wisdom and certainly can obscure wisdom in many contexts.
I recently wrote a piece about this for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. It was a thereupeutic piece for me as I enter middle age and think about what it means for me to be dispositionally a non-expert/specialist in the world of academia for which expertise and specialization are the only currency. I want to thank
from the Post Gazette for letting me republish this piece. The version that I am adding here is slightly different than what appeared on line. It was the penultimate draft before the final edit. You can find the entire and cleaner piece here. I hear that my interpretation of the Fox and Hedgehog analogy is ideosyncratic, but I think it works.Being a Fox in Hedgehog World
I have a dirty little secret. I have no interest in being an expert in anything at all. Ostensibly, I am an expert in nurse practitioner policy and practice. My entire tenure review was predicated on this fact. However, I cannot remember the last time that I read an academic paper on nurse practitioners that I did not author or co-author. Instead, over the last few weeks, I have read novels by Houellebecq and Faulkner as well as books on quantum physics, genius and madness, 20th century steel mills, and risk theory. On none of these topics can I claim to be an expert of any kind, not even close. I have always thought that this uninterest in expertise was a bug in my academic programming. It must have had something to do with the fact that I struggle to develop interesting ideas for grant funding. I do not abide with topics long enough to identify emerging, interesting, and fundable research questions, at least by the standards of the National Institutes of Health. But. I realized that my uninterest in expertise is perhaps not a bug but a feature. I am a fox, not a hedgehog.
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The Greek poet Archilochus wrote, "the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." Many commentators have offered varied and sometimes contradictory interpretations of this saying. One plausible interpretation is that Archilochus is describing the two kinds of academic minds. The specialist hedgehog thrives on diving deep into a single topic and learning all there is to know, slowly devouring every detail. The generalist fox darts between different subjects and disciplines taking bits from each and integrating them into a mosaic understanding of various topics and their interconnection.
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There are many theories about the origin moment of modernity. One strong candidate is surely the moment that Adam Smith describes the division of labor in The Wealth of Nations. Division of labor is a social practice in which complicated processes are divided into as many component parts as possible. Each part is assigned to a single worker who becomes a deep specialist in that small little part of the process. The division of labor creates tremendous efficiencies and vast improvements in production. A small set of workers can produce goods at unprecedented rates.
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Not all people are meant to be hedgehog specialists. For many, working within a division of labor is boring and alienating. In a division of labor, no individual worker has any vision over the entire process. The worker becomes largely separated from the final product and the social whole. Many workers also rapidly lose many capabilities required to produce an entire product. It really does take a special kind of worker to function under such conditions. At the advent of the assembly line, the Ford Motor Company had to hire 963 employees to fill 100 jobs as so many men who had just recently been artisans and craftsmen hated the fractured work. It was not until Ford doubled wages that they could finally induce workers to stay. Over time, we have grown accustomed to the division of labor, but foxes remain.
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Academic specialization is a sophisticated form of the division of labor. All human knowledge is broken up into little pieces, and each faculty member has an area of intensive academic focus. Health science faculty are perhaps the most deeply specialized of all. All career incentives within academic nursing are geared to intensive specialization. Tenure reviews explicitly ask reviewers to comment on the extent to which the applicant is an “expert” in their specific area of specialization. Tenure cases rise and fall based on such evidence. R01 funding, the social currency in academic nursing, relies on showing a track record of continued and progressive development within a very specific area of research.
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Human life is integrated, it cannot be split into ever increasingly discrete parts. Same goes for the various human problems that we seek to solve within academia. The increasing focus within nursing on social determinants of health is a tacit recognition that health is a cross-specialization phenomenon. However, in an age of increasing specialization, solving big problems is especially difficult. Researchers have less and less in common with their peers, challenging efforts toward conversation and collaboration.
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Our desire to solve complex human problems works at cross-purposes with our continued focus on producing and rewarding hedgehogs within academic nursing. Plenty of evidence suggests that hedgehogs can be bad at solving complex problems. When they do attempt to solve problems, significant unintended consequences often result. Hedgehogs often cannot see how their specific area of interest might impact and be impacted by broader influences. Complex problem solving occurs best when foxes work closely with hedgehogs.
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Helping students live well through the development of holistic knowledge about oneself and society has long been the focus of a liberal University education. Liberal education was not merely about the instrumental, objective, and technical uses of degrees but to help students construct fully orbed and meaningful lives. Because human lives are not disintegrated, helping students live well through an active engagement of the mind likewise calls for integrated knowledge. Such education likely requires a foxy mode of thinking, helping students make connections from across disciplines and apply them in real time to their lives.
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Getting more foxes into academic nursing is a difficult task that would require systematic changes. One immediate change would involve systematically rethinking the way that we evaluate tenure files. We would need to consider forms of scholarship other than R funding and publications in niche field journals. Likely, the impact of the University fox cannot be quantified and captured in total dollars of funding or H-score. In fact, foxes are probably less “productive” given the efficiencies gained by the division of labor. We probably need to soften up the clinical requirements in the curriculum allowing for room for electives for our students. Such courses are well-delivered by the foxes among us. We might have to develop mechanisms for providing university-wide course that do not have clear disciplinary boundaries for which a course prefix is difficult to determine. My colleagues and I (from nursing, public health, engineering, and English) teach a course called Happiness and Human Flourishing which includes philosophy, theology, social sciences, art, and literature. We try to help students from applied science disciplines gain a deeper understanding of human persons and what contributes to good lives well-lived. Having more foxes around might make us all better at solving societal problems and meeting the intellectual and personal needs of our students.
I think the specialization impetus in academia may be an intellectual product of division of labor in a mechanized work space--a kind of mimicry of what was revolutionary in the later part of the industrial revolution. One only has to go back to the 19th century to have a time when the most expert specialist in, say, medicine, was also someone who was fluent in Latin and Greek, read the classics, and wrote poetry. Even in the earlier part of the 20th century, Vladimir Nabokov was writing novels in multiple languages when he hasn't too busy with his day job of being a butterfly biology specialist. Of course, academics being polymathic foxes is also tied to a time when academia wasn't open to most people, and one already had to have wealth and power to have the opportunity to be an academic in the first place.
Relatedly, I think that until very recently there may be a gender component to who gets to be foxes and hedgehogs among the non-elite. As men moved from farms and home industries to factories, men's jobs became more constrained to very particular areas of expertise. But as long as many women remained homemakers, women got to remain "foxier." (heheh, see what I did there?) You can work at the widget factory and become an increasingly narrow expert on widget manufacture, but you can't be a homemaker who just specializes in, say, canning foods but has no knowledge at all of how to patch a tear, remove stains from a rug, bake a pie, or raise children.
Now that gender component has changed as women have entered the paid workforce, and especially as women have entered higher levels of academia in large numbers, and across all fields. But I wonder whether women have retained more of that fox-like flexibility than many men have been able to, if just because it's more recent that women have also been forced into the specialist work-outside-the-home world of the hedgehogs.
I am reading Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House series to my kids, currently Farmer Boy, about her husband's youth on an upstate NY farm in the late 1800s. The number of skills they all need to keep the farm running is astonishing. Indeed, learning all of them is most of their schooling, on top of whatever the one-room schoolhouse can offer. It makes me and my wife decry how narrow and deskilled we are (personal and collective "we").
I left a PhD program precisely because I couldn't possibly imagine focusing my intellectual efforts on so narrow a topic for year after year. I might wish I could be a hedgehog, but simply am not. Working, I've also shifted careers to work in 3 or 4 different areas -- though all on the computer. A far cry from Laura and Almanzo!