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Departments and schools are a necessary administrative device, and in some cases the original logic of disciplines and departments is powerful and worth preserving. But as the recent restructurings of biology and anthropology have suggested, a century-old logic is not necessarily a logic that best promotes research, teaching, and inquiry. For many faculty, our current departments reflect only a part of our intellectual and teaching horizons. Much the same is true for our students, as I learned this year. So if the decks were reshuffled, wholly new departments might emerge: a department of evolutionary studies, say, or perhaps...
...understandable. For the most part, we teach science as if it were a technical trade: Learn these facts about cells. Memorize these equations describing motion. Balance these reactions that underlie oxidation. And then demonstrate competence by passing an exam. With this lopsided focus on the end points of research, the scientific explorations themselves receive the most minimal attention...
...field of research, the quest for a unified theory, is no stranger to uncertainty. A unified theory seeks to meld Einstein’s theory of gravity, a framework that’s relevant when things are large, with quantum mechanics, a body of laws that come into play when things are small. We’ve known for half a century that each of these models works well in its own domain, but each also proclaims that the other is defective. Melding the warring antagonists is essential to gaining insight into other great mysteries—what happened...
...emergence of modern disciplines. It’s easy to track the founding of disciplines. Just check the date of the major academic journals: the Political Science Quarterly (founded 1886), American Anthropologist (1888), The American Historical Review (1895), and so on. Departments were invented to house and administer the research and teaching profiles of the new disciplines...
Sara Roy is a senior research scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. She is the author of Failing Peace: Gaza and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict...