The Disappearing Academic Fox? (Part I)

Edward Carr has an excellent article in the Autumn edition of Intelligent Life, The Last Days Of The Polymath.  In it, Carr discusses the lives and careers of several polymaths (basically, people who know a lot) including two law school professors: Judge Richard Posner and Alexander McCall Smith.  Smith is probably best known, especially in the U.S., for the 60 books he has authored, including The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency Series (although I prefer The Sunday Philosophy Club series, featuring the Isabel Dalhousie character).  But Smith is also an Emeritus Professor of Medical Law at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland.  McCall Smith’s fields of expertise are medical law and criminal law, and he has written books, articles, and chapters in those fields and has served on British and international committees concerned with those issues.

One of the polymaths interviewed by Carr, Carl Djerassi (the chemist, novelist, and playwright, who is credited as one of the developers of oral contraceptives), actually rejects the term, noting that it connotes dabbling – an intellectual promiscuity – when he prefers to think of himself as an intellectual polygamist who has various marriages, each one important.

But the theme of Carr’s piece is how poorly today’s polymaths compare with the polymaths of the past. Carr writes that, “as human learning has flowered, the man or woman who does great things in many fields has become a rare species.” According to Carr:

Over the past 200 years the nature of intellectual endeavour has changed profoundly. The polymaths of old were one-brain universities. These days you count as a polymath if you excel at one thing and go on to write a decent book about another.

Being a polymath is more difficult today, because breaking new ground is more difficult.  There is more research out there to wade through and master before one can stake out a promising research path of one’s own.  (Carr points to the older age, by about six years, at which the 1998 Nobel Laureates did their seminal research, as compared to those of 1873 -- it was the same with great inventors – as evidence).  Moreover, staying on top of a field is harder now than it once was, especially in the sciences. Simply keeping up with the reading in any given specialty is a full time job. 

And thus we come to the source of the polymath’s death: specialization.  Both the vast amounts of knowledge, and the vast increase in the number of specialists in every field puts the polymath at a disadvantage.

If you have a multitude who give their lives to a specialism, their combined knowledge will drown out even a gifted generalist. And while the polymath tries to take possession of a second expertise in some distant discipline, his or her first expertise is being colonised by someone else.

I’ll leave off there for today.  But tomorrow, I’ll be back with more on the polymath question, plus some thoughts and theories about what all of this increasing specialization means for law schools (especially in the new and more frugal economic environment that seems destined to hang around for awhile).  

For the next post in this series, see The Disappearing Academic Fox? (Part II)

Comments

[daniel]

As an aspiring law-prof-polymath, I think specialization should be a great thing for polymathy! As everyone gets more and more specialized, nobody takes the time to look at links between fields. Take, e.g., evolutionary psychology; or econophysics -- a group of economists and physicists who said 'economics basically uses the math of classical mechanics, but what would happen if we applied quantum mechanics to economics?' Within natural science, take e.g. Edward O. Wilson's "Consilience" and other books. And distinctive, overarching ideas can emerge from work across related fields over time, e.g. Martha Nussbaum's cosmopolitanism, which is far richer and more attractive than its Stoic roots precisely because it's grounded in more diverse ground, reaching across a variety of humanistic and social-scientific disciplines.

Invest yourself fully in one discipline, make some small but important contributions, then move on to 'master' another. Advancing one little bit in a field from within could take a lifetime, but the polymath arbitraging on their knowledge of different fields can be just as iconoclastic, important, and prominent as ever. Even though they may not make conventional 'X's theory of Y' contributions to multiple fields, it's the modern polymath who is best poised to reorient the discussion within various fields.

Today's polymath may not be like Galileo and Goethe, making distinct contributions to the basic or 'pure' theory of various fields. But merely being literate at a very high level in several fields, and making convincing links between them, can offer a perspective that can influence the work of those who are producing (and not just consuming) the basic or core work in multiple fields.

[Kim Krawiec]

Thanks for this very thoughtful comment, Daniel. Yours is a nice -- and counterintuitive -- theory for why there is hope for the polymath going forward. More arbitrage opportunities in the face of increased specialization, no? My post tomorrow will address this a bit, as well as the opposite: the fear that specialists will attempt to exclude polymaths as outsiders. The trick, it seems to me, is how to structure institutions to get the best of both worlds -- the expertise of the specialist and the insight of the polymath. Probably easier said than done, but worth working toward, I think.