In the Op-ed section of yesterday's Times, Mark Taylor - chair of Columbia's Religion Department - broke from the rank-and-file optimism of Ivy League academics on academia by asserting that "Graduate education is the Detroit of higher learning." (For those who have been living under a rock for the past fifty years, in 2008, Forbes gave Detroit - a city saddled with crime and unemployment - the dubious distinction of being America's most miserable city).

We're guessing that this Benedict Arnold of a professor has tenure because his ideas, which include retrenching both doctoral-level education and academia as a whole, are unlikely to popular to many colleagues and administrators at Columbia, a place dredged in the virtues of a classical education. (Columbia College, as one example, continues to yoke its students to a stringent core curriculum).

The problem, Taylor explains, stretches back to Kant, who wrote in the late 18th century that to "handle the entire content of learning" professors should teach different subjects. This, he argues,

has led to separation where there ought to be collaboration and to ever-increasing specialization. In my own religion department, for example, we have 10 faculty members, working in eight subfields, with little overlap. And as departments fragment, research and publication become more and more about less and less. Each academic becomes the trustee not of a branch of the sciences, but of limited knowledge that all too often is irrelevant for genuinely important problems. A colleague recently boasted to me that his best student was doing his dissertation on how the medieval theologian Duns Scotus used citations.

More after the jump.

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