On University Specialization

April 28, 2015 timothywstanley@me.com

In late-18th- and early-19th-century Germany, readers troubled by the huge increase in printed material felt imperiled by a veritable 'plague' of books circulating among the reading public. Deep concerns about what counted as authoritative knowledge made writers and intellectuals anxious as they heard and read increasingly pointed critiques of universities as outmoded guilds that needed to justify their existence in an age of easily accessible information. Philosophers and thinkers like J.G. Fichte, F.W.J. Schelling, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and Wilhelm von Humboldt were the first to embrace and argue for the idea of a renewed university with specialized academic knowledge as its organizing system... Specialized academic knowledge, Wissenschaft, was not simply an ideology imposed by the vague rationalizing imperatives of modernity. It was a normative and ethical framework that valorized particular intellectual goods (the never-ending production of knowledge and the ability to perceive the relationships of various sciences) and inculcated particular virtues (rigor, collaboration, intellectual imagination, industriousness, responsibility, and a critical disposition). Academic knowledge tied epistemology to ethics. It formed people and grounded knowledge in a community that could sustain, cultivate, and evaluate it. And it gave rise to great achievements, from the first well-funded and organized laboratories to large philology projects used to this day.

Chad Wellmon, "In Defense of Specialization," - http://chronicle.com/article/In-Defense-of-Specialization/229023/

"Academic knowledge tied epistemology to ethics."