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.
Doctrix- This is an excellent point. I also think that what we are seeing is the University changing to focus more on delivering research PRODUCT. To your point, this is a mimicry of the factory system. So, we need specialists to efficiently turn their disciplinary screw to get more and more product out. It's less about education and leisure and more about delivering a product. Market forces are relevant here. I do wonder if women are foxier, that is a good question. I'd need to ponder more.
Wondering--at a practical level, what do you think the role of foxes should be in these circles? Should we have nonspecialists serving as oversight for the specialists, nonspecialist research, or just a general goal of getting everyone a wider nonspecialist base to engage in their hedgehog activities with a wider perspective? I suppose this gets at the systematic change you're talking about: There's just not a clear space for anything other than expertise right now.
Pat- Thanks so much for your engagement. I need to think this one through a bit more. I really don't know where we should go from here. Namely, this is a substantial question about what a University is. In many ways, it is a jumbled mess with many, many different purposes that in many ways work against each other. For example, simply in terms of the educational mission of the University, One question would be Is the University in the business of promoting good leisure? If the answer is no, then a specialist model probably makes sense. We are trying to produce expert workers. If that is true. I think we have another question: Is the purpose of the University to produce technicians or practitioners? If the former, again, the deep specialist model is fine. Get a bunch of Hedgehogs who can help get students skills. If we want to produce people within a moral practice, I suspect that we'd need specialists who can function as generalists. The research purposes of the University are another thing altogether. Another post methinks.
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.
Doctrix- This is an excellent point. I also think that what we are seeing is the University changing to focus more on delivering research PRODUCT. To your point, this is a mimicry of the factory system. So, we need specialists to efficiently turn their disciplinary screw to get more and more product out. It's less about education and leisure and more about delivering a product. Market forces are relevant here. I do wonder if women are foxier, that is a good question. I'd need to ponder more.
Great article as always.
Wondering--at a practical level, what do you think the role of foxes should be in these circles? Should we have nonspecialists serving as oversight for the specialists, nonspecialist research, or just a general goal of getting everyone a wider nonspecialist base to engage in their hedgehog activities with a wider perspective? I suppose this gets at the systematic change you're talking about: There's just not a clear space for anything other than expertise right now.
Pat- Thanks so much for your engagement. I need to think this one through a bit more. I really don't know where we should go from here. Namely, this is a substantial question about what a University is. In many ways, it is a jumbled mess with many, many different purposes that in many ways work against each other. For example, simply in terms of the educational mission of the University, One question would be Is the University in the business of promoting good leisure? If the answer is no, then a specialist model probably makes sense. We are trying to produce expert workers. If that is true. I think we have another question: Is the purpose of the University to produce technicians or practitioners? If the former, again, the deep specialist model is fine. Get a bunch of Hedgehogs who can help get students skills. If we want to produce people within a moral practice, I suspect that we'd need specialists who can function as generalists. The research purposes of the University are another thing altogether. Another post methinks.