(continued from previous article)

In the end, Damrosch's superficial attention to history clouds his diagnosis and vitiates his prescription. Neither kinder, gentler professors, nor more flexible dissertations, nor more cooperation in the classroom can do much to erode specialization and glue together the fragments of knowledge. The "rituals of training and acculturation" into specialism that he laments will not crumble on contact with collaboration, for the evolution of specialization owed little to the agonistic individualism of the professoriate. Rather, it stemmed from a newer but deeper root-growing directly out of the basic structure of modern academic knowledge and its epistemological prejudices. We can no more combine specialization with "generalizing" scholarship than crossbreed a rabbit with zinc. Overcoming "The Triumph of Specialization" requires more than "Changing the Culture of the University." It requires reconstructing knowledge itself.

The division of academic learning into "disciplines" in the late nineteenth century was the revolution that spawned our peculiarly modern fragmentation of knowledge. Damrosch understands that "disciplinary nationalism" dates only from "decisions made a century ago when the American university assumed its modern form," and he sees vaguely that this development lies at the origin of the problems he laments. But he fails to grasp the character of this historic shift-to which he devotes two badly informed sentences-and so cannot see the sheer incompatibility of disciplinary knowledge with any kind of "generalizing" that might really mitigate specialization. For it is not merely "specialization" that characterizes modern knowledge but "disciplinary specialization."

Disciplinary specialization developed from the breakup of an older model of academic knowledge. In nineteenth-century American colleges, this model took a specific form borrowed more or less from Scottish universities and the Scottish Enlightenment more broadly. But the specific form matters less than the basic axiom, shared with European universities, of the unity of knowledge. Knowledge formed a seamless whole, it was assumed, because all knowledge referred either to the one Creator or to his one creation.

Thus there could exist an academic subject like philosophy (as John Henry Newman described it in The Idea of a University) that could show, in principle at least, how various specific bodies of knowledge related to each other and to the larger whole. Likewise, scholars could presume to employ whatever methods and pursue their researches across whatever fields they thought fit; for, though in practice expertise in astronomy offered scant help to a student of government, both composed parts of a single universe of knowledge, and no epistemological principle divided one study from any other. Put differently, you could possess specialized expertise, but "specialization" only meant that you knew a lot about one or two places on a continuous map of knowledge-not even necessarily places located near each other.

In roughly the middle of the nineteenth century-perhaps a little earlier in Germany, certainly a bit later in America -this traditional structure of knowledge collapsed. The reasons are complex and, as yet, not well understood by historians. Probably internal developments within both universities and scholarship (by no means coterminous in those days) eroded the institutional underpinnings of the old unity of knowledge. Certainly doubts about the existence of a Creator became common in the intellectual classes of Europe and America, and disbelief in God washed away the very axiom that gave unity to knowledge.

Two novel models of knowledge competed to fill the void. As befitted the new universities that were at this time coming to dominate higher education in the United States, both assumed the research ideal, insisting that erudition and expertise defined a university professor.

One of these new models developed probably in philology (the study of languages and of texts), which reigned over nineteenth-century scholarship in what we now call the human sciences. Professors in this grain continued to regard all knowledge as forming a unified whole (accessible, moreover, to a generally educated public). Most of them assumed that knowledge hung together, not because created by God, but more or less because evolved by human beings (a la Vico).

The other model derived most probably from the natural sciences (or, to be more precise, from the fields of astronomy and physics, increasingly mathematicized and increasingly inaccessible to ordinary educated people). It subdivided the map of knowledge into specialized territories and erected between them methodological barriers hard for nonspecialists to climb over.

This latter was, in short, the model of disciplinary specialization. Its central dogmata are that knowledge does not form a single whole; that, on the contrary, it properly divides itself into distinct compartments; and that life within each of these follows unique methodological principles and scholarly traditions. We understand only dimly why disciplinary specialization triumphed at the end of the last century, but triumph it did. And where the philological model of knowledge at least left room for God, disciplinary specialization, while not necessarily denying his existence, denied that he could have any relation to academic knowledge.

To be sure, claiming to carve knowledge into unconnected tracts was one thing; actually carrying out this almost unprecedented feat was quite another. History has dismally failed as a discipline despite heroic efforts by a lot of historians: it never gave birth to a legitimate method, was forever sneaking off to cohabit with some slatternly other discipline. To be honest, the disciplines rooted most directly in philology have often left a lot to be desired as disciplines.

But others-economics, often sociology and political science, latterly even literature-have made themselves into plausible counterfeits of physics and chemistry. They speak in strange dialects, throw up methodological walls scaleable only by the well-trained, and generally strive to baffle outsiders. Only someone bred in a pseudo-discipline (someone like a professor of English and comparative literature) could believe true collaboration possible across the range of modern disciplines, much less believe increased collaboration is likely to change the culture of the university. For disciplinary specialization denies in principle that disciplines can carry on substantial, prolonged conversation.

To break down the barriers between specialisms, we need more than sociability: we need a counterdisciplinary paradigm of knowledge. It may be on the way.

One of the most striking features of the academic landscape today is a blurring of disciplinary boundaries. Historians are finally dropping disciplinary pretenses. Not a few sociologists deny any distinction between their field and history. Literary scholars talk the argot of Parisian philosophers and psychoanalysts. Anthropology seems near to vanishing as a separate field, etiolating into an ethnographic method now as likely to be found among researchers in education as on a Pacific atoll. What is going on?

This is far from clear. The fashion is to attribute these developments to the radical questioning of knowledge linked with names like Foucault, Lacan, Rorty. Just as likely, it is the other way round: postmodernism owing its vogue to a slow working out of contradictions and contortions entailed in disciplinary specialization.

In either case, the gain is not unmitigated; we have learned, for instance, how poorly equipped most literary scholars are to do philosophy. Nor does the revolt against disciplinarity seem about to sweep all before it. The natural sciences, in particular, where disciplinarity probably originated, still find it durable. Still, there is today a new fluidity, a new openness, a new awareness of the lability of our ways of knowing.

This confusion troubles the Christian scholar as much as any other, but it also gives hope. The defining proclivity of postmodernism is antifoundationalism, and any such relativist epistemology is hard to reconcile with belief in a divinely ordered creation. At the same time, Christians and secular-minded academics share a single house of learning, and the task of rebuilding it offers opportunities for bridging the yawning gap that opened in the late nineteenth century between Christianity and the larger academic world. It is impossible now to imagine what structure, or structures, of knowledge might ultimately cohere to replace, or to coexist with, disciplinary specialization. But Christians have a rich scholarly heritage to use as a kind of toolkit in the long task of fumbling to assemble the pieces; for, however various and conflicted our intellectual traditions, all have tried to grasp knowledge as unified under the lordship of the Creator. Even secular colleagues may learn from the centuries of efforts by Christian scholars to integrate knowledge-provided that we can show their relevance.

Restoring coherence to knowledge is not a job whose outcome we can predict, nor one likely ever to yield a finished product; but it is one in which Christians should roll up their sleeves and labor side by side with non-Christians. Reconstructing a unitary discursive field, even though we can never expect it to be stable, matters greatly for general education and for the public culture all Americans share. It also matters in another way for Christians.

A reunified knowledge could once again-in ways impossible now to conceive in particulars-allow Christian scholars to relate their research and teaching concretely and in specifics to the Creator, even if secular scholars were to use the same discursive space differently. God might return to the university from the exile into which disciplinary specialization sent him. Whatever comes next, Christians surely have no reason to mourn the death of disciplines.

We Scholars: Changing the Culture of the University

By David Damrosch

Harvard University Press

240 pp.; $32.50, hardcover;

$15.95, paper

Copyright (c) 1996 Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture Magazine

September/October 1996, Page 26

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