What’s the Matter with Footnotes?

Abstract

Should graduate studentsand even many professorsreally be trying to solve the world’s problems before they know enough about their own discipline? Mark C. Taylor disparages academic specialization as “more and more about less and less,” as if specialization requires small-mindedness and lack of intellectual ambition. But specialization is not always-already narrowness; if it were, then the academic collaboration that Taylor extols would entail locking several blinkered professors in a room and hoping they come up with answers to global problems. Could they even communicate with one another in mutually comprehensible terms? If they could, then they would not be what Taylor says they are. If scholars are to band together and use their various forms of expertise to fight, for example, climate change and international conflict, those individual scholars need expertise in their fields in the first place. It is the very nature of “expertise in their fields” that requires further attention. Disciplinary boundaries are problematic and, perhaps increasingly, restricting, but they also serve purposes. Disciplinary norms exist for reasons: they tell us what questions to ask, what methods to use, and what counts as evidence. In Stanley Fish’s characterization, “I am professionally correct, not out of a sense of moral obligation or choice of values … but out of a sense that the structure of a fully articulated profession, be it negligence law or literary criticism, is such that those who enter its precincts will find that the basic decisions, about where to look, what to do, and how to do it, have already been made” (Fish 1995, 44). The average academic professional is not—and should not be—interested in revolutionizing the profession but in simply practicing it, doing what Thomas Kuhn called “normal science,” which “does not aim at novelties of fact or theory and, when successful, finds none” (Kuhn 1996, 52). Scholars within disciplines apply the latest techniques and theories to the extant data. But it is not clear what will constitute “normal science” under Taylor’s new academic regime. Taylor’s own work is innovative and multidisciplinary in the best ways. His work is distinguished by its range, depth, and its embrace of past, present, and future. He knows this of himself: “As I move from theology to philoso