When I registered for “Law, Innovation and Entrepreneurship,” my first (and only) sociology course at Brown, I assumed that my lack of prerequisites would pose no serious problem. The very term “prerequisite” seemed pale and distant, at least based on my memories of blissful, pre-Banner days. After the first meeting of the seminar, my self-assured assumption that I could easily trade my English concentrator’s perspective for a sociological one was profoundly deflated. In trying to communicate with the other students, I realized that the discourse in which I have been trained is almost entirely incompatible with the one this course utilizes, which revolves around things like “firms,” “actors,” “networks” and “embeddedness.” When a discussion arises about a topic that could clearly benefit from multiple perspectives, conversation screeches to a halt. The topic of intellectual property, for instance, leaves me ranting about artistic production and cultural value, while the blank stares across the table let me know that I should be talking about technology patents and firm innovation. My speech is rooted in the disciplines I have chosen to study, and simply put, I can’t speak the other students’ language. Nor, for that matter, can they speak mine. 

Misunderstood and mistranslated

This is not a phenomenon that is limited to the classroom, as frustrating discussions with my own friends demonstrate. There are frequently moments when our words and our desire to understand each other are not enough to mitigate the disparity between the concepts and theories  in which our ideas are grounded. I can only conclude that I, like many of my fellow Brown students, have overspecialized myself to such a degree that true exchange has sometimes become impossible.

It is important—if obvious—to note that there is a difference between specialization and overspecialization. Though many students at Brown choose to take courses in a variety of departments, it is our right to specialize in one field if we so choose. Absorbing the foundations of a given discipline and mastering the details of current research in that discipline does not necessarily make a student overspecialized, just well-educated. By overspecialization, I mean an inability or unwillingness to engage in a mode of thinking other than the one typically employed in one’s primary discipline. The mode of thinking tied to a given field does not involve only the use of that field’s substantive concepts. It also demands and utilizes a specific kind of analysis.

As an English concentrator, I have been trained to gravitate not just toward explication and logical argument, but toward ambiguity, subtlety and metaphor. My department trains its students to pay attention to the particularities of language and the multiplicity of interpretations inherent in its usage. This, as I’ve learned, does not necessarily hold in my sociology seminar. Based on my very limited experience with the discipline, sociology trades in classification, the logical patterns between unambiguous concepts and the application of these concepts to broader ideas of social structure. Without ever having taken a class, attended a lecture, read a text or even had a conversation that required this kind of analysis (or, if I’m honest, without having had any desire to do so) I am ill-equipped to think in this way. Although this may not always present a problem, there are certain issues that invite and even demand the use of multiple modes of thought. How can a discussion of politics ignore the language of economics, for instance? Film or literature divorced from its cultural, historical or political sources can offer us aesthetic pleasure; but shouldn’t a conversation about aesthetics be able to draw on those other elements?

From overspecialization to condescension

Overspecialization is not unique to Brown and doubtless arises in more restrictive academic communities as well. Only at Brown, however, is this intellectual narrow-mindedness the paradoxical result of the complete intellectual freedom so touted by our students and faculty. Rather than promote an expansion of our intellectual abilities, the total freedom we are afforded frequently seems to limit us. The problem is not that we have an open curriculum, but that we abuse that openness and appropriate it as permission to ignore other disciplines besides our own. We have the opportunity to engage with, if not to assimilate, various modes of thinking that could allow us to communicate with each other regardless of the topic at hand. This opportunity presents itself at Brown not only in our course offerings, but in the lectures, forums and publications that complement our academic life. We often neglect these, however, moving beyond academic specialization to overspecialization, isolating ourselves from other groups within the academic community. Though Brown allows us to become specialists in our fields, there should be no accompanying assumption that we are to close ourselves off to other modes of thinking.

The danger inherent in intellectual overspecialization is that it goes hand in hand with potentially problematic evaluations about which type of discourse is not simply “more relevant” to a situation, but “better.” To a certain extent, hierarchical evaluations of this kind are intrinsic to the process of choosing a concentration, pursuing a career and generally making sense of academia. However, overspecialization often goes beyond playing the “what’s my favorite subject” game. It begins to promote a willful and pervasive ignorance of other disciplines, fostering an intellectual condescension that is ostensibly at odds with the values of education. There is a difference between honing intellectual ability in our respective disciplines and using the jargon of those disciplines to isolate ourselves while simultaneously condescending to others. Intellectual elitism and one-upmanship, which seems to pervade academic scholarship, does not have to manifest itself at the undergraduate level, yet it does. Intellectual condescension is not impossible to avoid. We have the potential to train ourselves to think in more than one way, constantly keeping the risk of overspecialization in mind, and yet we often choose not to.

Ms. Fix-it

Students should be engaging in a mode of thought that is active rather than passive, that embraces the risk of setting aside our own jargon, that seeks to balance the danger of limiting oneself to a single field with the intellectual rewards latent in doing so. There are questions that we should be asking ourselves about the nature of our education and the ways in which we will have to use it to communicate with others. Should we be able to translate our own discourse into language that others not trained in it can understand? Or should a college education provide us with fluency in multiple disciplines? Though all college students should be asking themselves questions of this kind, the openness of the Brown curriculum affords us the unique opportunity to come up with definitive answers and to ensure that our choices reflect those answers.

The future is now

There are also concrete possibilities for academic change at Brown that could work to remedy the problem or at least diminish its pervasiveness. For instance, Brown could require an additional essay from all of its applicants, asking them to speculate as to how they would design a Brown education. Rather than ask for a laundry list of courses that prospective students plan to take in college, this essay would demand that they try to show a mode of thinking that acknowledges the interdisciplinary potential at Brown without relinquishing their academic freedom. Or the University could institute one required seminar during the first semester that focuses on methodologies of interdisciplinary study. As Brown is already increasing the number of freshman seminars it offers, a well-designed course of this kind might not be too difficult to implement. An improved advising system—an endeavor that Brown seems to be undertaking—might facilitate students’ ability to specialize without cutting themselves off from interdisciplinary modes of thought. These proposed changes could work to alleviate the problem of intellectual overspecialization, but only when coupled with students’ own initiative. It should be up to Brown students to desire and obtain the kind of education of which interdisciplinary communication is a natural result.

Whatever the solutions to this problem may be, any definition of an education could do worse than to consider the derivation of the word itself. From educere (to lead out) and educare (to nourish), the word “education” implies a drawing out, a growth of ideas. It should not, in any way, close off the possibility of engaging with multiple disciplines. At a school where we should be fostering the outward multiplication of ideas, we are turning inward and away from each other more and more. And it shows.

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CLAIRE LEONARD B’08 is special.