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While the world has been moving toward greater interconnection and interdependence, universities have become increasingly fragmented internally. There are many reasons why. In the arts and humanities, political correctness and identity politics have created deep fissures and serious tensions, which have been exacerbated by the growing diversity of both faculties and student bodies. No less important, however, has been the mounting pressure for faculty members to produce and publish original research. The pressure is, of course, greatest at research universities, but it has, for reasons I will consider in a later chapter, trickled down to all universities and colleges. As the demands for publication have increased, areas of research have become more and more specialized. This has led to the identification of specialization with expertise. What often gets overlooked in today’s intellectual climate is that expertise does not always have to be defined in terms of a specific subfield but also can be cultivated by examining the ways in which fields usually kept apart are also interrelated. For example, expertise in economics that is limited to mathematics is inadequate and needs to be supplemented with expertise in the relationship between economics and psychology, sociology and even religion.

The narrowing of research focus leads to a restriction of interest that makes communication among different departments and disciplines more and more difficult. The situation in the modern university is reminiscent of the late eighteenth-century German poet Friedrich Schiller’s description of modern humanity’s alienation. “Everlastingly chained1 to a single little fragment of the whole, modern man himself develops into nothing but a fragment; everlastingly in his ear the monotonous sound of the wheel that he turns, he never develops the harmony of his being, and instead of putting the stamp of humanity upon his own nature, becomes nothing more than the imprint of his occupation or his specialized knowledge.” The problem has become far worse than the gulf between the sciences and the humanities that C. P. Snow described in his influential 1959 book The Two Cultures. Not only do humanists and scientists speak different languages, but many humanists are actually unable or unwilling to communicate with one another. Territorial disputes and methodological arguments divide faculties in ways that often make cooperation and collaboration all but impossible. As competition for limited resources increases, these tensions are likely to deepen.

Because the basic structure of the university still conforms to the blueprint Kant drew in 1798, there remains a division between professional schools, which prepare people for specific careers (law, medicine, nursing, journalism, architecture, social work, teaching, public health and engineering), and the faculty of arts and sciences. Most faculties of arts and sciences are organized in three divisions (natural sciences, social sciences and arts and humanities), which sometimes are divided even further. All individual departments are distributed among these three divisions. The division in which a department is located shapes the approach to the subject matter. In some schools, for example, the study of religion is included in the social sciences, and in other schools it is in the arts and humanities. The work done by people in these respective departments is substantially different. When religion is in the division of arts and humanities, literary, philosophical and theological approaches are more common, and when it is in the division of social sciences, psychological, sociological and anthropological approaches, which often are highly empirical and quantitative, are much more common. While many colleges and universities have developed interdepartmental programs, the real locus of power and influence is still the individual department. There has been virtually no effort to rethink the basic departmental structure or to explore other alternatives that might be