A persistent theme for me in writing my earlier weblog Easily Distracted was reflecting on my own desire to be a generalist, in particular to work towards maintaining some kind of baseline literacy across the disciplines such that I could at least get some sense of what most of my colleagues do as researchers.
You’d think that would get easier to do over time. I’m discovering—as so many academics do—that it gets harder. It gets harder because that kind of literacy is fragile. You achieve it not by learning about other fields in depth but by a sort of breathless grazing. You look for scholarship that is striving to be legible outside of a discipline or a field and use that as a kind of key to that discipline’s ciphers without really knowing whether the translation it is offering is valid or not. You can’t do work in most of those other fields and you have to skip around published or disseminated work that is a demonstration of method or a detailed breakdown of findings and outcomes.
It gets harder because you become aware of—and embarrassed by—the hubris you were exhibiting in trying to have that wide an understanding. You start to really realize how little you know even about the things you know best, let alone fields and disciplines that are far away from the work you’ve been trained to do.
Imposter syndrome is a common sensation. This isn’t news. And I don’t entirely regret the aspiration to understand a mile-wide swath of scholarly work even if that was at best an inch-deep. My goal was—and still remains—to be knowledgeably appreciative of what my colleagues here and across academia are doing, and to connect what we do in academia to research and reportage done outside of our institutions.
I’m happiest when I remember moments where I’ve hit that mark in a way that lifted everything up. For example, we have a committee that evaluates requests for second-semester funding for faculty who are approved for sabbaticals. I intensely disliked my appearances before that committee when the faculty sitting on it approached the task of handing out the limited funding available in an adversarial spirit. I felt as if the mood should be friendly, celebratory, and engaged even if everybody knew the odds of getting the funding were long. I think to do that right you can’t just be generically collegial—you have to try and ask knowing, supportive, uplifting questions that are interesting or exciting to a colleague presenting work, that demonstrate that you’re taking them seriously, that you’ve taken the time to look into what they’re doing. So when I was on that committee, that’s what I tried to do.
Any professor trying to do that is going to hit a limit. My hard limits are with mathematics and a few other disciplines, where I just lack too much baseline knowledge to even know what a knowing question might be. (I think it must be especially exasperating for mathematicians to have to constantly field really crudely instrumental questions about what the use of a particular research question or investigation might be.)
I think I succeeded on that occasion and on others. Today, however, I was looking back on some administrative work from about ten years ago and realizing (not for the first time) that as a colleague or a program is doing work that gets closer and closer to your own knowledge and expertise, an appreciative engagement can start to curdle into a more adversarial, more meddling posture. The hubris in generalism rises not when you know only a little but when you know too much.
I was once really insulted by a colleague in another department who stridently insisted that no one outside of that department could possibly understand or know anything about the discipline it represented and could have no valid opinions about the current status or future of that department or discipline. That insulted me because it was both generally false as a proposition and specifically false in my personal case. If it were propositionally true, faculty governance and collective bargaining are impossible by their nature. In my own personal case, it was a discipline that I read in heavily and that I incorporate into my own scholarship: I wasn’t about to accept a dictate that insisted that I could in fact know nothing of what I knew that I knew.
As I’ve often replayed that long-ago discussion in my head, however, I’ve come to appreciate one thing that I think my colleague was getting at, which is that however intellectually substantive your opinion about someone else’s field or discipline might be, if you’re not in that discipline, you won’t have to live with the consequences of that opinion being used to make decisions about a department or program. That was on my mind also today as I had to dig back into my participation on a temporary steering committee for another department in order to write a letter for an external review. I remembered with some embarrassment that I had a really strong view about what the future direction of that program should be that rested on a very overconfident and unwarranted sense of my own knowledge of the field. It’s not that my view was wrong in a substantive sense, but it wasn’t leavened enough by a consideration of what that direction meant in tangible terms for people who were committed to that program.
Of course I can think of examples of departments at other institutions that represent a given discipline or program of study differently than most peer departments and I can be intellectually excited by that sense of originality and distinctiveness. Sometimes I’ve had a chance to visit or interact with such a department and have come away thinking that it also feels like a great place to be—that the distinctive configuration of fields and approaches is a sign of amity and creativity shared between faculty. Other times, on the other hand, I’ve realized that what looks like a unicorn is in fact a chimera—that the unusual mix of fields and approaches is an accident or the result of outside meddling by know-it-all colleagues and administrators and that life inside that department is a miserable and contentious mess.
Knowing enough to meddle is a temptation in planning and governance. At best, it lets you ask questions that need to be answered that arise from a wider sense of the intellectual and institutional realities of that field. It’s more important to recognize that this knowledge tells you very little about how to build a department or program that is highly functional, and that generally it’s the people who will have to work in that program whose views matter most. It’s not just about administrative structures, either. A discipline that gets strongly pushed in a new direction by critical engagements by people outside the discipline is in real peril, because those new directions are going to invalidate existing careers or force a lot of new and unplanned labor on people within the discipline while the critics who caused that change walk away scot-free. The steering currents towards a kind of thoughtful thoughtlessness are always there. To swim against them takes being mindful about the tangible consequences of expressing a view about what other people ought to be doing.