A Plea to End Over-Specialization

My son has forwarded a column by David Brooks to me. In it, Brooks discusses Charles Hill, one-time aide to Secretary of State George Schultz, and a class that Hill co-teaches at Yale.

But, inspired by Hill, the column ends as a plea for a different approach to post-high school education and it's one I endorse.

I have always felt that the primary goal of undergraduate education isn't to produce specialists, but people who know how to think. It's fine for people to have major courses of study during their undergraduate years. But during those years, they should also receive what we once called a "liberal" education, one that liberally exposes students to a range of human knowledge---be it in the Arts, the sciences, social studies and theory, theology, whatever.

It is partcularly important today that our colleges and universities produce generalists rather than specialists. For one thing, the accelerated rate of change is such in today's world, that people who become overly-dependent on a speciality can quickly be rendered obsolete.

For another, the issues with which we wrestle in today's world are insusceptible to single areas of specialtization. Creative multidisciplinary approaches are needed for us to deal with matters as disparate as finding a cure for cancer, defeating terrorists, feeding the world's hungry, or promoting compassion.

Confession time: As an undergraduate at The Ohio State University, I chafed under the requirements that I take classes in fields in which I had no interest. But like the inoculations I got as a youngster to ensure that I didn't contract things like polio or small pox, I know now how good it was for me to have taken classes in statistics, economics, and biology. (Even though I hated taking them at the time.)

More than that, I know now how good it is for societies that undergraduates emerge from their college or university experiences as well-rounded people with a broad sensitivity to what the human race does and doesn't know at the moment they graduate, to have a strong foundation of broad-based knowledge with which to face life, and at the very least, to be able to vote and participate in society responsibly.

One of the books I've been reading lately is Stephen Ambrose's one-volume version of his biography of Dwight Eisenhower. An often-overlooked period of Eisenhower's life is his brief and frustrating tenure as president of Columbia University. Ambrose records an incident from that period:

Columbia was an outstanding university with a brilliant faculty composed of highly sophisticated specialists who were dedicated to their research. They regarded Eisenhower as hopelessly naive. When one scholar told Eisenhower that "we have some of America's most exceptional physicists, mathematicians, chemists, and engineers," Eisenhower asked if they were also "exceptional Americans." The scholar, confused, mumbled that Eisenhower did not understand--they were research scholars. "Dammit," Eisenhower shot back, "what good are exceptional physicists...exceptional anything, unless they exceptional Americans." He added that every student who came to Columbia must leave it first a better citizen and only secondarily a better scholar.

Anybody familiar with the life of Dwight Eisenhower will know that when he spoke of being "exceptional Americans," he wasn't upholding a jingoistic, shallow patriotism. Ike was an internationalist and a small-d democrat. For democracy to function, he was saying, every citizen and especially every leader, must know how to think and have an appreciation for how the world and how democracy works.

At the very least, colleges and universities need to break up the musty air of specialization from time to time by bringing in people like Eisenhower at Columbia or, in the case of Yale University cited by Brooks in his New York Times column, somebody like Charles Hill. They can help students move away from the navel-gazing that inheres in so much scholastic specialization and introduce them to the essential life-skills needed for solid citizenship and effective, sensitive leadership in whatever field of life.

My Bible text for this coming Sunday is Matthew 5:9, in which Jesus says, "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God." Of course, this is a complicated text. As a Christian, I believe that real peace begins when we accept the peace between God and we human sinners that God offers to us through Jesus Christ. When that wall of enmity is erased, we have peace inside and we can be creative--even daring and bold--in sharing that peace with others.

But it also seems to me that we ill-equip our children to be peacemakers---whether in their families, communities, careers, or in the international community---when we consign them to specializations that render them insensitive to the thoughts, feelings, experiences, or knowledge of people engaged in other pursuits in life.

So much hangs on the question of how our colleges and universities will train our young. I hope that people like Charles Hill of Yale University are the harbingers of good things to come!