Cinnabar and Alabaster

passages:
5. "every argument about the material scholars should study, and every argument about the methods to be used, is at the same time an argument about the nature of the community that is to do the studying"; "the growing dominance of specialization in modern times has contributed to a process of homogenization on college and university campuses alike, where support for certain modes of scholarship often leads to the devaluation of most other kinds of academic work."
7. "social science articles that are written by multiple authors are certainly collaborative, but often this collaboration is of a circumscribed sort. the authors are frequently based within a single field, each doing part of the interviewing or statistical analysis for what is fundamentally a project developed from a single perspective by one or two primary authors. as a result, often in the social sciences and almost always in the humanities, interdisiciplinary work ends up being folded within the values of individual production"; also, "identity politics is...a sort of social corollary of academic specialization"--it offers great areas of examination but also "carries with it the danger of a new kind of conformity"
8. specialization isn't all bad; it allows "the american academy" to be "in a real sense 'the home of the free,' and this freedom offers exceptional choices and opportunities for students and faculty alike. at the same time, it must be said that we do freedom better than we do home, and indeed the persistent weakness of community in our country leads to pronounced limitations on the freedom of the less powerful members of our society and its institutions."
10. "'oh, yes,' a colleague once remarked when i raised this point, 'i went to graduate school because i flunked sandbox.' over the years, we have built up a system that gives high marks to people who flunk sandbox; professors who are themselves more comfortable when working alone have come to assume that their students should adopt a similar mode of work. the very structuring of our graduate training emphasizes an increasing isolation.... [and] we make no direct effort to assist [students] in this change; still less, in many fields, do we provide for more collaborative modes of advanced work that might better suit our more intellectually sociable students"
14. goals of the study: "to convert people away from the wish to convert people; to envision disciplines as not primarily engaged in the production of disciples; to talk against the almost universal tendency of scholars to talk across one another rather than with one another; to propose a scholarship and teaching practices that can be simultaneously generalizing and specialized; to recover the breadth of the great generalists" that he also calls "synthetic thinkers": durkheim, freud, dewey.
77. "it is the individual scholar who most directly embodies the alienation and aggression endemic in the system as a whole, and it is those individuals who in turn reinforce the system through their hiring decisions, their treatment of students, their departmental activity or inactivity, and their modes of work in teaching and research."
107. an increasing number of academic topics "would benefit from sustained discussion among people with different expertise and perspectives, while relatively fewer topics are best worked through by single scholars meditating on their favorite authors. we should not remain content with a state of affairs that leads sociologists to compare universities as a matter of course to prisons and mental asylums; we will do better to improve relations with our soulmates--or cellmates--in our own institutions."
148. "when people acculturate themselves to academic life by enhancing their tolerance for solitary work and diminishing their intellectual sociability, they reduce their ability to address problems that require collaborative solutions, or even that require close attention to the perspectives offered by approaches or disciplines other than one's own. the structuring of graduate education quietly but pervasively discourages such close attention, fostering instead a culture in which people work alone or within the perspectives and expectations of a small group of like-minded peers."
158. w/respect to change at the local level, "requirements are as much a glass ceiling as a safety net: they establish the range within which good and bad work alike will be done....[but] merely tinkering with requirements in the absence of a larger vision and a sustained commitment to change will have little effect. the general tenor of an organizational culture exists in an intimate synergy with the seemingly neutral particulars of the ways in which business is transacted. if we really press the question of what would be entailed in fostering collaborative learning at the graduate level, we are likely to be led to alter every aspect of our programs"
162. b/c students (required-to-be) specific interests are less & less likely to precicely match up with faculty's, perhaps rather than one mentor they should have an array; perhaps rather than a book-length diss they should produce collections of articles touching on these different specificities.
188. "the myth of the scholar as isolated individual has harmful consequences in two opposite ways: first, it inhibits people from working directly together; equally, it conceals the extent to which individuals do bear the marks of the disciplines and departments in which we live. a herd of individuals is still a herd....individual and pseudo-collaborative work alike...reinforce the circulation of tendentious trusims that too often set the tone and the terms for the work being done" that isn't collaborative/interdisciplinary in ways it could/purports to be.
193-4. "too often, present-day collaboration has one of only two bases: authoritarianism or close personal friendship"; in the first "the director...often sets the research agenda for the entire department" and the second, while good in each instance of its enactment, "is a very selective basis for work: the requirement that the collaborators be friends eliminates most of the potential combinations that can be found on a typical campus."
197. compilations & conferences don't cut it, either--they're "sad parodies of collaborative work" wherein individuals speak to dubious audiences & little to no interaction takes place, partially b/c institutions only compensate participants for going if they speak, so everybody has to speak, even if nobody's listening & they have little to say. if we went to 2 or 3 conferences a year & listened & talked together, rather than going to 5, talking at all of them, & listening to nothing--and if our departments paid our way for listening too--we'd have more chances for genuinely collaborative exchange.