I am teaching Psychology of Gender this semester.  In my program at D.U., graduate students get full teaching responsibilities after a year of school.  We design our courses, write our syllabi, teach our classes alone and unaided, and assign grades.  We are queens and kings of pedagogy.  Our stipend amount implies that we must take our jobs seriously but also find a non-monetary reward in teaching, generally, the opportunity to corrupt the “youth” (plus or minus eight years my age, generally) as we see fit.  My corruption, which I’m afraid has only been marginally successful thus far, consists in urging my students to accept the midwife model of learning, see themselves as produces rather than consumers of knowledge and that seeming-substance we term “society”, take seriously and as valid objects of contemplation their own opinions and the pop-culture they live amidst and continuously reproduce, feel capable of reading primary sources and recognize that all secondary sources (including textbooks and their professor’s rhetoric, even and especially my rhetoric) are interpretations, and generally to think about what they’re doing in the world.  I really like it when they express a sense that a lot of things about their educations haven’t served them well, because it’s true and shows some emerging enlightenment to be able to say so.  Giving my students as much practice as I can with articulating things in speech and writing is the major way I try to get all of this to come about.

After inadvertently (but unabashedly) revealing my pro-choice leanings to my class at this Catholic institution in the second week of the semester, I’ve posted the following note for my students.
“Over the semester, you will get an idea about my various opinions, biases, theoretical orientations, political leanings, etc. (not necessarily because these are things I want to share with you, but because they’re very difficult to hide, particularly in a class like ours that involves so much discussion and includes content that tends to have personal relevance for many people).
The goal of the class, however, is not for you to figure out what I believe and then agree with me (or pretend to agree with me)!  This class is meant to provide means for you to think about your own ideas and opinions.  Therefore, please know that I will never punish you for disagreeing with me.  Your grades, my expectations for your class participation, my general interest in your development as a student and scholar, etc. will not be affected by whether our opinions about whatever are the same or whether they differ.”

I hope they believe me!

This is a brief presentation I wrote for Duquesne’s Interdisciplinary Symposium. I read it to kick off the conference.

The liberal arts are seven branches of knowledge: the trivium of arts pertaining to the mind– logic, grammar, and rhetoric (or, reckoning, reading, and writing), and the quadrivium of arts pertaining to matter (or, quantity and number)– arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy. Bachelor of Arts is the degree awarded to those demonstrating proficiency in these arts, Master of Arts to those with greater proficiency. The liberal arts are “liberal” in the sense of free; they constitute the education proper to a free person. They are prerequisite for any number of more particular arts or disciplines since they are tools for any number of other disciplines and because proficiency with them means one has developed her own capabilities in preparation for all sorts of tasks. Though these arts are foundational to our educations and historically to our educational programs and institutions, the liberal arts have stopped being central to our educations– even our so-called liberal arts educations. Rather, much of the liberal arts are left by the wayside while what we study becomes more specialized. No one expects that a “liberal arts” education will involve arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy. Similarly, those in the so-called “hard sciences” may regard studies derived from the trivium as mere intellectual luxuries. The trivium and quadrivium have been pulled apart and are then subdivided even farther into specific disciplines.

Here I’ll say a little about the problems that come with the increase of academic specialization, and how this process breaks up the whole formed by the liberal arts. I’ll also discuss how interdisciplinary studies help to rebuild the liberal arts and show that the trivium is not trivial, but that it provides a basis for original ideas. In other words, interdisciplinary studies do not break boundaries of “traditionally defined disciplines,” but rather reveal that these boundaries broke up a prior unity.

***

The development of academic specialties mirrors, and sometimes overlaps with, the development of jobs– not only of particular jobs, but of the idea of a “job” at all. Beginning in the fifteenth century, “there is a steady progress of fragmentation of the stages of work” (McLuhan, p. 20). These stages of work are mechanized– a certain set of rules govern them, and the tasks of the job are specific. The person carrying out the job becomes more and more of a specialist; eventually she is an “expert” at her particular task. She is a part of a system (as Pink Floyd puts it, a “brick in the wall”). David Schwartz references this process when he describes his experience as a psychologist attempting to help those who have been institutionalized or labeled developmentally disabled. He explains that professionals each have “a box in the organization chart” (p. 21) in which they are forced to stay and relate in a prescribed role with particular tasks as well as a particular way of doing them. They get in trouble when they stray from their role since this inevitably means invading someone else’s box in the organizational chart. So, she fits herself to the task. As our technology develops the capability to do more and as we become more specialized in our tasks (or in a sense, to do less), we have to consider the possibility of some strange results. Marshall McLuhan presents these possible results in the form of a joke: “’Come into my parlor,’ says the computer to the specialist.” The secret is, human beings are not very good specialists (not like computers), and the more precise we become, the less suited we are to our tasks. We don’t fit into boxes on organizational charts.

Another approach to work, thought, academia, and living– one represented by interdisciplinary studies and which existed outside of gradual developments in specialization– is to fit one’s task to oneself. Think, for example, of Blaise Pascal, whose activities ranged from composing philosophical and theological writings to making contributions to the geometry of conic sections to inventing a calculator. Or perhaps think of Gottfried Leibniz, an inventor of calculus, a theory of motion, and a series of metaphysical ideas; or Goethe, whose many activities made him a playwright, poet, and theorist on colors and plant morphology. What is truly amazing about these thinkers and the many like them is not the breadth of ideas into which they delved– that’s missing the point. Rather, what is amazing is the way their ideas fit together into a whole, and they inadvertently reveal that these “disciplines” are not so disparate, at all. Each of these thinkers has a way to see the world. They don’t think of their activities as belonging to different disciplines per se– rather, their various ideas have been divided their views up into categories from without. To see what I mean, read Pascal’s Pensees while thinking of his interest in mathematics (many of the pensees have an intricate mathematical structure– it’s like reading a proof), or Leibniz’s calculus while keeping his “monadology” in mind. It is not only in the minds of individual thinkers that these various aspects of thinking about the world come together.

One might also think of the whole formed by Euclid’s geometry books and Plato’s dialogues: Euclid reveals the structure of the world and making it “mathematical” (from ancient Greek “mathema,” or learnable) by reconstructing the world in steps. Plato’s dialogues discover forms, such as the Good, the Just, and the Beautiful, and through steps in argument which make them it knowable. Another example is Isaac Newton’s discovery that the same natural laws that govern the planets govern the earth, alongside Kant’s assertion that there is a single moral law which applies to all of humanity. Examples like these reveal that ideas are better thought of as aspects of a whole than as truly separate disciplines. Specialization is an attempt to know more by going deeply into a piece of the whole, but at some point these specialties or disciplines become farther from one another until we forget they make up a whole or until they truly no longer fit together and there isn’t a possibility for dialogue between specialties. Why is it that humanities students think it doesn’t matter whether or not they know any mathematics?

Interdisciplinary studies, then, are not so much about opening up paths between different disciplines but removing barriers between them. The interdisciplinarian develops abilities which transcend a particular discipline. She finds common strands among disciplines rather than becoming a jack of all trades. She develops a unique and informed perspective, as only a human being can do. This is the aim of a liberal arts education; it is what a person educated in the liberal arts should be able to do.

References

Joseph, Mariam. (2002). The Trivium: The Liberal Arts of Logic, Grammar, and Rhetoric. Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books.

“Liberal Arts.” From Encyclopedia Britannica Concise. Retrieved 2pm 2/12/2008. http://concise.britannica.com/ebc/article-9370154/liberal-arts

McLuhan, Marshall & Fiore, Quentin. (1967). The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects. New York: Bantam Books.

Schwartz, David. (1997). Who Cares?: Rediscovering Community. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Snow, C.P. (1959). The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. Cambridge University Press.

On 43 things goals (written for 43 Things now defunct”ideas” page which invited suggestions from users on how to improve the site– I wrote this entry for the most popular idea on the page: “Create a hierarchy”).

1) On goals contained by other goals: Some of the goals one may set are contained by other goals. For example, if I “feel better,” I may also “stop procrastinating” and then I might “learn German” and “find something to do next year.” Perhaps a hierarchy of goals might solve this problem. The ability to order goals implies a hierarchy of importance, but not an order of achievement. Perhaps something like freemind (http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page) might be a solution, since it would indicate which goals are contained by other goals. Tagging is sort of like this– perhaps it could be more explicitely so if there were tags like “meta-goal, primary goal, secondary goal, hopes, plans.”

2) On the appropriateness and achievability of goals: Not surprisingly (and not altogether wrongly), 43 Things presumes that people work like computers. If we program ourselves correctly, any goal may be met. This is the cognitive/behavioral model of psychology– if your life isn’t going the way you’d like, learn, practice, and habituate yourself to do better. This makes me think that only goals that can be achieved by working at the behavioral level should be allowed on 43 Things. If I want to “feel better,” and I think I can do it through practice, it’s a good goal. If, however, it’s a problem that doesn’t lend itself to a particular method, and I feel bad not because of the way I’m acting (and acting differently wouldn’t make me feel better, or I may not be able to act differenlty because of feeling bad) but more because of deep, inner conflicts involving my self-concept, early childhood impressions, etc., it means that A) this is not one goal (it might be split into various behavioral goals like “get therapy,” “sleep more”, etc.) and B) that it may not be solvable through behavior modification alone. Perhaps after achieving other goals I might find that I feel better, but I can’t simply “feel better” the way I can “learn German” or “visit Chicago.” This is probably why “stop procrastinating” is such a popular goal– it is the meta-goal, what it means is “figure out how to set achievable goals and achieve them” or simply, “achieve my goals.” Setting a time-limit to goals might help this. It will encourage people to set goals that can be achieved by acting differently according to a plan. Not being able to set infinitely many goals is a step in this direction– you must achieve something before you can add another thing to your list. To reiterate my point: all goals on 43 Things ought to be solvable directly by behavior modification as long as there is no built-in hierarchy, and one should be able to write an entry with a plan to achieve the goal. “Crochet better” is a pretty good goal, because I know exactly what I have to do to achieve it, and it’s more or less one thing. Even that, though, might be divided into “sign up for crochet class,” “buy some yarn for crocheting,” “buy a book of crochet projects,” etc. This makes 43 Things more of a “to-do” list than a set of hopes and dreams, and it would contain only lists of goals one can achieve by one’s own will. Then again, I understand the desire to list what one hopes for, and that all the tiny behavioral goals are for the sake of these greater ends. Some of those ends aren’t even goals– fall in love, for example. That’s an event that isn’t entirely dependent on one’s own will (at least not directly– although one is more likely to fall in love when one is happy, and more likely to be happy when one is secure, and more likely to be secure when one is employed, etc.– so set the goal to get a job and have a place to live on your own if your goal is love). If your goal is to “be in love,” or “have someone fall in love with me,” then adding it to your list won’t help you get it done (unless, you know, you meet some hottie on 43 Things who wants to help.) It seems that the best solution is a hierarchy.

I thought what I’d do was, I’d pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes. That way I wouldn’t have to have any goddam stupid useless conversations with anybody. If anybody wanted to tell me something, they’d have to write it on a piece of paper and shove it over to me. They’d get bored as hell doing that after a while, and then I’d be through with having conversations for the rest of my life.