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.
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!
Yes, I often feel that way myself. Asking "What is it that I actually can do?" It's a pretty narrow band of capacities. You're describing the shift that I ma taking in my own career. That's a big part of this Substack. Trying to play around in lots of different topics, methods, ways of thinking, etc. It's been really great.
This was an encouraging read for me, Grant! Thanks for sharing. I have often been discouraged by research environments that prioritize productivity over curiosity. ("Is that curiosity of yours going to lead you to an empirical question that you can investigate using the data we have available, then publish? No? Probably not worth asking.")
I'm curious about your suggestion to reduce clinical requirements in academic nursing curricula as a way to promote "foxiness". Admittedly, I don't know what clinical work looks like for nursing students. But in my clinical psych PhD program, I have often found that our clinical requirements -- which involve providing psychotherapy to individuals and families across the lifespan -- expose the limits of over-specialization. Therapy clients (like all humans) are complicated. Research expertise in, say, the neural underpinnings of adolescent anxiety disorders, is not much help when you're sitting with parents struggling with their three-year-old's tantrums or an adult trying to understand their spouse's perspective. You have to read widely, think holistically, make creative connections etc, in order to connect with clients and guide them toward change. Unlike other requirements like research milestones or coursework, I have found that clinical work rewards those few generalists who somehow found their way into PhD programs in the first place.
Sonia- This is a very good point. I think what I would want is to find space for nursing students to be a bit more well-rounded intellectually taking more humanities courses, reading more novels, and looking at more art. I think that this would make them better humanists and ultimately better clinicians. But to your point, reduced clinicals may not be the best way to do this.
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.
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!
Yes, I often feel that way myself. Asking "What is it that I actually can do?" It's a pretty narrow band of capacities. You're describing the shift that I ma taking in my own career. That's a big part of this Substack. Trying to play around in lots of different topics, methods, ways of thinking, etc. It's been really great.
This was an encouraging read for me, Grant! Thanks for sharing. I have often been discouraged by research environments that prioritize productivity over curiosity. ("Is that curiosity of yours going to lead you to an empirical question that you can investigate using the data we have available, then publish? No? Probably not worth asking.")
I'm curious about your suggestion to reduce clinical requirements in academic nursing curricula as a way to promote "foxiness". Admittedly, I don't know what clinical work looks like for nursing students. But in my clinical psych PhD program, I have often found that our clinical requirements -- which involve providing psychotherapy to individuals and families across the lifespan -- expose the limits of over-specialization. Therapy clients (like all humans) are complicated. Research expertise in, say, the neural underpinnings of adolescent anxiety disorders, is not much help when you're sitting with parents struggling with their three-year-old's tantrums or an adult trying to understand their spouse's perspective. You have to read widely, think holistically, make creative connections etc, in order to connect with clients and guide them toward change. Unlike other requirements like research milestones or coursework, I have found that clinical work rewards those few generalists who somehow found their way into PhD programs in the first place.
Sonia- This is a very good point. I think what I would want is to find space for nursing students to be a bit more well-rounded intellectually taking more humanities courses, reading more novels, and looking at more art. I think that this would make them better humanists and ultimately better clinicians. But to your point, reduced clinicals may not be the best way to do this.
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.