Once again you speak to my condition. I take up your invitation to share my case at length, in case if is of interest to you and other younger scholars. I'm the older generation— the oldest generation to experience these issues. In the early 1960s I majored in both History and Math at UC Berkeley. In those days a double major was a rarity, let alone in two such opposite disciplines. In my application to Harvard Graduate School I then described in detail the dissertation I wanted to write: blending medieval history with literary criticism and depth psychology via a case history of Alfred the Great and his Welsh hagiographer, Asser. Since I was the first person to be awarded a humongous Graduate Prize Five-Year Fellowship by the Harvard History Department, I naturally — but as it turned out quite erroneously — assumed this was to support my project. When Erik Erikson invited me (although only a first-year graduate student) to join his illustrious seminar on History and Life History, I was thrilled — but the Harvard History Department was appalled and tried to punish me for not having asked its permission. Young Man Luther was, to them, an abomination, not a contribution to history. I was fresh from the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, and dismayed to discover how much misery and insult and injury graduate students at Harvard accepted (for fear of being drafted as well as for the reasons you and others have now articulated so well, fifty years later.) The next year, Walter Love wanted me to publish my work as the inaugural volume of his new series "Studies in British History and Culture". The History Department forbad me to do so, on the grounds that I had not yet passed my orals. I gave up on Harvard. I resolved to figure out what had gone wrong with American education. I dropped out of academia to teach in a public high school.
It took me decades to understand that no one in the History Department except for Giles Constable had actually read my application letter, let alone blessed my hopes with such an award. That huge Graduate Prize Blah Blah Blah was created by the HGSAS Admissions people to try and bring some life to Harvard's moribund history department...
In the years since then, I have blended the active and the contemplative life, active as a community organizer and 'revolutionary educator', while going in and out of academia in Mexico, Australia, and the USA. Now the dissertation I was forbidden to write is forthcoming from Amsterdam University Press, now that I am 80, I look back and ask myself exactly the questions you are pondering. I've only known you a few years but I've followed with deep interest and sympathy your quest for whatever it is you're questing for. What if I had devoted my life to just ONE of my 'disciplines'? What if I had blissfully sat in the Bodleian reading medieval manuscripts year after year for decades? Or what if I had followed all the way through on my research on biliteracy in the Mexican Revolution? or ... or ...
I always awake from such reveries realizing that then I would not have known such intimate friendships with Mexican illegal aliens in the heart of the USA, or with archbishops and aborigines in Australia or ...
This is already too long for this medium, and I've barely got started sharing what I really think about your work and all these issues! I thank you from the bottom of my heart for giving me this opportunity to "free write" so frankly — at last — about the topics you open up in this essay, and in all your work.
There's a whole essay to be written here about experience vs authority I think.... because what the specialist has is authority, but you have enjoyed a breadth of experience. (And I'd pay to see the conversation between Alisoun of Bath and Tomás Kalmar!)
Um... about how MUCH would you pay, Irina? "Asking for a friend."
Seriously, though, the first move would have to be distinguishing false from true sources of authority. From a Quaker or just an existential point of view, testifying to your experience is what empowers you to speak with authority. What's gone wrong with academia is that decisions are made by people who don't have the necessary experience and thus abuse their power: those who are to be affected by the decision are prevented from participating in the collective decision, even though their experience would be what legitimizes their voice.
How's that for starters? What would Our Alisoun say?
Or am I missing the point of what you mean by the specialist's authority? Professional mathematicians, for example, claim the authority to shape the reform of mathematics education in public schools, but they lack the experience to warrant their claim. I do wonder if I'm missing your main point about specialised work.
As a very self critical generalist and slow finisher, this resonated with me. I worry about the passing of time and wish I was better at getting my thoughts and work out. Often I suffer the “not another person writing about the things I started working on ten years ago but did not publish yet.” I think also that having parenting responsibilities makes publishing quickly that much harder; I always notice the “thanks so much to my wife for holding the fort while I was researching and writing / away in archives etc etc” in acknowledgments. Some good finishers are those who have a lot of help (whether home help, research assistants, or simply more money to fast track research). But I realise your post was more about types of writer, and perhaps all the help in the world might not stop me from being this way!
Actually, I want to thank you for reminding me of that necessary truth -- that it's often hard to finish if we have a lot of duties and various people pulling at us, and much easier if you have support and resources and time and rest. It's a necessary corrective to everything I've written here.
What happened career wise to the person with the perfect graduation letter?
When I moved to McGill for my MA, I signed up for a French class on top of the regular workload; I got disapproval from the grad director. Then, in my PhD, I took the summer out to go to Medieval Latin at, you guessed it, UoT; that got me dire warnings of suspension. The pipeline system just is not geared up for this, if extra learning is a threat to it. Obviously I was supposed to be in Canlit and talk about toasters in Alice Munro or something, if I wanted to get out in 4 years and get a tenure job. Still failing, 25 years later, unfortunately.
Thank you for your probing and candid essay, it brought me some measure of comfort. I'm 25, and I've studied music composition, though I took a sharp left off the conservatory track three years ago and am currently studying classics at Humboldt (Berlin). I would love to have a career doing research and teaching classics as well as performing early music. Neither one is easy, getting both off the ground will be all the more difficult, but I'm determined!
That does sound possible (if challenging)! I think one possible strategy is to keep one pursuit as a passionate hobby for a while, and let it grow organically without the pressure to make it a career.
What a great reflection on being a generalist or a specialist — and feeling like the other side has it better.
I'm a generalist as well and struggle to with thinking of myself as flighty (despite my many long-term, decidedly committed facets). Re-framing it as being multi-dimensional or, as you point out, more likely to see connections between disparate things, is reassuring — but I'm not entirely convinced.
It's genuinely hard. I have pursuits I've also abandoned or put on a back burner -- and that fits even less smoothly into a neat little life narrative. But why should it be a problem, if those activities bring us joy for a good chunk of our lives?
This is true for me too! It's difficult to decide what is following my genuine path - because let's face it, there's a lot of winding on the path and often a lot of things coalesce and then diverge again and there's so much beauty in it, like a collage - and what is possibly distraction from the thing I don't really want to do. A lot to think about, thank you.
Once again you speak to my condition. I take up your invitation to share my case at length, in case if is of interest to you and other younger scholars. I'm the older generation— the oldest generation to experience these issues. In the early 1960s I majored in both History and Math at UC Berkeley. In those days a double major was a rarity, let alone in two such opposite disciplines. In my application to Harvard Graduate School I then described in detail the dissertation I wanted to write: blending medieval history with literary criticism and depth psychology via a case history of Alfred the Great and his Welsh hagiographer, Asser. Since I was the first person to be awarded a humongous Graduate Prize Five-Year Fellowship by the Harvard History Department, I naturally — but as it turned out quite erroneously — assumed this was to support my project. When Erik Erikson invited me (although only a first-year graduate student) to join his illustrious seminar on History and Life History, I was thrilled — but the Harvard History Department was appalled and tried to punish me for not having asked its permission. Young Man Luther was, to them, an abomination, not a contribution to history. I was fresh from the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, and dismayed to discover how much misery and insult and injury graduate students at Harvard accepted (for fear of being drafted as well as for the reasons you and others have now articulated so well, fifty years later.) The next year, Walter Love wanted me to publish my work as the inaugural volume of his new series "Studies in British History and Culture". The History Department forbad me to do so, on the grounds that I had not yet passed my orals. I gave up on Harvard. I resolved to figure out what had gone wrong with American education. I dropped out of academia to teach in a public high school.
It took me decades to understand that no one in the History Department except for Giles Constable had actually read my application letter, let alone blessed my hopes with such an award. That huge Graduate Prize Blah Blah Blah was created by the HGSAS Admissions people to try and bring some life to Harvard's moribund history department...
In the years since then, I have blended the active and the contemplative life, active as a community organizer and 'revolutionary educator', while going in and out of academia in Mexico, Australia, and the USA. Now the dissertation I was forbidden to write is forthcoming from Amsterdam University Press, now that I am 80, I look back and ask myself exactly the questions you are pondering. I've only known you a few years but I've followed with deep interest and sympathy your quest for whatever it is you're questing for. What if I had devoted my life to just ONE of my 'disciplines'? What if I had blissfully sat in the Bodleian reading medieval manuscripts year after year for decades? Or what if I had followed all the way through on my research on biliteracy in the Mexican Revolution? or ... or ...
I always awake from such reveries realizing that then I would not have known such intimate friendships with Mexican illegal aliens in the heart of the USA, or with archbishops and aborigines in Australia or ...
This is already too long for this medium, and I've barely got started sharing what I really think about your work and all these issues! I thank you from the bottom of my heart for giving me this opportunity to "free write" so frankly — at last — about the topics you open up in this essay, and in all your work.
There's a whole essay to be written here about experience vs authority I think.... because what the specialist has is authority, but you have enjoyed a breadth of experience. (And I'd pay to see the conversation between Alisoun of Bath and Tomás Kalmar!)
Um... about how MUCH would you pay, Irina? "Asking for a friend."
Seriously, though, the first move would have to be distinguishing false from true sources of authority. From a Quaker or just an existential point of view, testifying to your experience is what empowers you to speak with authority. What's gone wrong with academia is that decisions are made by people who don't have the necessary experience and thus abuse their power: those who are to be affected by the decision are prevented from participating in the collective decision, even though their experience would be what legitimizes their voice.
How's that for starters? What would Our Alisoun say?
Or am I missing the point of what you mean by the specialist's authority? Professional mathematicians, for example, claim the authority to shape the reform of mathematics education in public schools, but they lack the experience to warrant their claim. I do wonder if I'm missing your main point about specialised work.
As a very self critical generalist and slow finisher, this resonated with me. I worry about the passing of time and wish I was better at getting my thoughts and work out. Often I suffer the “not another person writing about the things I started working on ten years ago but did not publish yet.” I think also that having parenting responsibilities makes publishing quickly that much harder; I always notice the “thanks so much to my wife for holding the fort while I was researching and writing / away in archives etc etc” in acknowledgments. Some good finishers are those who have a lot of help (whether home help, research assistants, or simply more money to fast track research). But I realise your post was more about types of writer, and perhaps all the help in the world might not stop me from being this way!
Actually, I want to thank you for reminding me of that necessary truth -- that it's often hard to finish if we have a lot of duties and various people pulling at us, and much easier if you have support and resources and time and rest. It's a necessary corrective to everything I've written here.
What happened career wise to the person with the perfect graduation letter?
When I moved to McGill for my MA, I signed up for a French class on top of the regular workload; I got disapproval from the grad director. Then, in my PhD, I took the summer out to go to Medieval Latin at, you guessed it, UoT; that got me dire warnings of suspension. The pipeline system just is not geared up for this, if extra learning is a threat to it. Obviously I was supposed to be in Canlit and talk about toasters in Alice Munro or something, if I wanted to get out in 4 years and get a tenure job. Still failing, 25 years later, unfortunately.
Thank you for your probing and candid essay, it brought me some measure of comfort. I'm 25, and I've studied music composition, though I took a sharp left off the conservatory track three years ago and am currently studying classics at Humboldt (Berlin). I would love to have a career doing research and teaching classics as well as performing early music. Neither one is easy, getting both off the ground will be all the more difficult, but I'm determined!
That does sound possible (if challenging)! I think one possible strategy is to keep one pursuit as a passionate hobby for a while, and let it grow organically without the pressure to make it a career.
Definitely a generalist, however I am trying desperately to specialise because "that's how to survive in this world."
Or maybe be a specialist for a while, then branch out?
That's an option I've been trying to explore for maybe the past three months. It's been rather interesting so far.
Let me know how it goes. Sometimes the way to navigate binaries is to flip back and forth between them and try to enjoy the tension
I most definitely will.
What a great reflection on being a generalist or a specialist — and feeling like the other side has it better.
I'm a generalist as well and struggle to with thinking of myself as flighty (despite my many long-term, decidedly committed facets). Re-framing it as being multi-dimensional or, as you point out, more likely to see connections between disparate things, is reassuring — but I'm not entirely convinced.
It's genuinely hard. I have pursuits I've also abandoned or put on a back burner -- and that fits even less smoothly into a neat little life narrative. But why should it be a problem, if those activities bring us joy for a good chunk of our lives?
Absolutely a generalist, as my double major in Dance and Biology underscores...
I love this.
Absolutely a generalist, as my double major in Dance and Biology underscores...
This is true for me too! It's difficult to decide what is following my genuine path - because let's face it, there's a lot of winding on the path and often a lot of things coalesce and then diverge again and there's so much beauty in it, like a collage - and what is possibly distraction from the thing I don't really want to do. A lot to think about, thank you.