Crisis on Campus_ A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities - Mark C. Taylor [51]
The problem is not only the growing number of subfields, but also the thinking behind how they are defined. In most fields of the arts, humanities and social sciences, there are three organizational principles: tradition, history and geography. In the field of religion, major traditions are obviously important, but much of what is most interesting and significant about religion takes place outside churches, temples, synagogues and mosques and thus invariably slips through disciplinary and departmental cracks. The historical organization of knowledge has become so fundamental to higher education that it is rarely questioned, but it is laden with presuppositions that are very problematic. Needless to say, everything changes over time, but how development is interpreted varies from era to era and culture to culture.
The widely accepted division of ancient, medieval and modern is actually a theological pattern; it was first defined by Christian theologians in the so-called early modern period and continues to shape the historical imagination. But it is not clear whether this scheme should be applied to other cultural traditions. As recent historians have demonstrated, history is not a three-part story that culminates in modernity; to the contrary, there are many histories that issue in multiple modernities. The way modernity is experienced and understood in Europe and the United States differs significantly from the way it is experienced and interpreted in China, India, Iraq and Nigeria.
Traditional spatial categories are no more adequate than temporal. The commonly accepted practice of dividing and subdividing regions according to the geography of nation-states is problematic in a world becoming more and more globalized, where real space is always being reconfigured and virtual space is increasingly the sphere of intellectual and cultural exchange. Geography is one of the fundamental organizing principles for the study of religion. Subfields are defined by region—North America, East Asia, South Asia, Japan, Africa, Europe and Russia—and then further subdivided along nationalist lines, as Buddhism is broken down into its Chinese, Japanese, Tibetan, Korean and American versions and Christianity into Eastern Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, Western, Latin American, Korean and African varieties. The situation is similar in other departments. Consider, for example, the study of literature, which is also organized by region or country in English, French, Italian, Japanese, Chinese and Russian departments. In this case, entire departments are devoted to a single language and culture. This organization is beginning to come under pressure. The University of Southern California, for example, recently announced the abolition of its German department. Rather than dividing the study of literature in this way, it would make more sense to eliminate separate departments and create a more comprehensive program in comparative literature. Such programs already exist in some schools, but they supplement rather than replace individual departments. From a student’s point of view, it makes no more sense to study literature by majoring in English than it does to study religion by majoring in Christianity. Comparative study in which one literary tradition or religion is examined in relation to others is preferable to more fragmentary approaches. Research and teaching would be even further enriched by the exploration of the relationship between and among different literary and religious traditions.
In order to promote collaboration across departmental and disciplinary boundaries and to create opportunities for more experimental work, I propose extending the