








































© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2009, Unit 6, The Village, 101 Amies Street, London SW11 2JW

[Expo. 3.2 (2009) 155–158] Expositions (print) ISSN 1747-5368  
doi:10.1558/expo.v3i2.155 Expositions (online) ISSN 1747-5376 

The Rage for Originality and the Curse of Prestige

MARK SHIFFMAN

Department of Humanities, Villanova University

As a scholar, I am the product of an alternative academic universe to the one 
described by Mark Taylor. Formed under a steady regimen of great books 
at St. John’s College, and serving my apprenticeship in the scholarly guild 
through the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought (designed 
explicitly as an antidote to excessive specialization), I now teach in a depart-
ment devoted (according to its mission statement) to “an integrated, interdis-
ciplinary approach to human questions.” I am the exception to the rule in my 
department, however. Most of my colleagues (like most of my best teachers) 
have been thoroughly trained in a discipline, but bring to bear on their prac-
tice of that discipline a broader range of interests, and a passion for a deeper 
learning than can be contained within conventional disciplinary limits. As I 
look from this vantage point, Taylor’s vision of the interdisciplinary academy 
strikes me as pure folly.

Taylor quotes Kant’s prescription for division of labor in the academy, that 
“for every branch of the sciences there would be a public teacher or professor 
appointed as its trustee.” He rightly notes that, as the German research model 
has become dominant in the U.S. and large parts of the world, this prescrip-
tion has led, over time, to utter fragmentation. But Taylor fails to reflect on 
what is implicit and indispensable in the notion of trusteeship evoked by 
Kant. The trustee is entrusted with a tradition of achievement; he or she is 
responsible for the past, and it is through this responsibility for the past that 
he or she has something to offer the future. Kant’s prescription is based, it 
should be noted, upon an unstated cultural premise, namely that university-
trained scholars will have already come to their specialized studies (as they 
typically would in the Europe of his day) with a rigorous classical education.  
They would thus understand that their trusteeship for a disciplinary tradi-
tion has its place within a larger shared trusteeship for an entire civilizational 
tradition.

The failure to take the notion of trusteeship seriously is evident in the  
incoherence of Taylor’s proposals. He would do away with discipline-specific 
departments, and group scholars together into “problem-focused programs.”  
He then imagines the exciting synergy that would result when such a pro-



156 Overheard in the Academy

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2009

gram “would bring together people in the humanities, arts, social and natural 
sciences with representatives from professional schools like medicine, law, 
business, engineering, social work, theology and architecture.” (What does 
it tell us about Taylor’s assumptions or his experience that he groups theol-
ogy among the professional schools?). The obvious problem is that this ar-
rangement would last only for one or two generations. Then the thread of 
the disciplinary traditions would be broken. This would be utterly disastrous 
for the humanities: they would become superficially appropriated adjuncts 
to business and engineering. In this sense, Taylor is simply calling for the 
completion of a trend that is already visible at many smaller colleges and 
universities.

If the trustees of the disciplines are to serve as trustees for a larger civiliza-
tional heritage, then the cure for narrowness is not subjecting scholars to a 
merry-go-round career of task forces, but rather requiring research projects 
to demonstrate that their focussed attention to detail also opens onto broader 
perspectives and deeper questions that link the project to the foundations 
of the broader discipline, and the discipline to the larger family of disci-
plines. From this point of view, Taylor’s example of narrow research, though 
no doubt rhetorically effective for most readers of the New York Times, seems 
to show a lack of imagination on his part. He remarks: “A colleague recently 
boasted to me that his best student was doing his dissertation on how the 
medieval theologian Duns Scotus used citations.” As a student of postmod-
ernism, Taylor ought to know that Scotus plays a central role in the critique 
of modern reason developed by scholars of the Radical Orthodoxy school, 
like John Milbank and Katherine Pickstock. He is a figure around whom 
deep questions of philosophy, theology and political theory cohere. While I 
do not know the colleague, the student, or the project referred to by Taylor, 
I can well imagine that an investigation of Scotus’ use of citations could shed 
light on his relationship to the whole philosophical and theological tradition 
as a tradition, and could give some insight into how radical his intentions 
were as a “founder” of modern thought. Such a project could also, if rightly 
guided, provide the budding scholar with a profound direct encounter with a 
great thinker, which might lay foundations for an independent position from 
which to engage significant contemporary thinkers both sympathetically and 
critically.

The more valuable suggestion Taylor makes toward restoring wholeness is 
that the undergraduate curriculum be restructured to be more cross-disci-
plinary. Graduate students should expect to have to teach more than the 
intro courses and narrow topics of their discipline. Broader education, and 



The Rage for Originality and the Curse of Prestige 157

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2009

correspondingly broad research, would then have the support of professional 
expectations and market incentives. This would be a small but significant 
corrective to over-specialization, one that would not require the short-sighted 
abolition of the disciplines, but would rather enrich disciplinary education.  
In Taylor’s woolly futurism, untethered from disciplinary guilds and infected 
with the catchwords of management theory, this reform takes the shape of 
“a web or complex adaptive network.” Such adaptation would probably be 
guided by whatever is fashionable and catches the passions of the moment. A 
cross-disciplinary curriculum needs some steadier guiding principles.

These are, in fact, not hard to find. Educational critics as different as Car-
dinal Newman, Allan Bloom and Jacques Derrida all recognize that philoso-
phy and theology are the fundamental and integrating disciplines. Unfortu-
nately, these studies are generally too deeply infected by the professionalized 
specialization that reigns in the academy to understand themselves in this 
role with regard to the other disciplines. Even Catholic universities that still  
require students to study philosophy and theology usually undermine the 
most compelling rationale for such a requirement by failing to charge them 
with this integrating role within the curriculum. Most institutions simply 
have no compelling or thoughtful understanding of what constitutes a real 
undergraduate education.

Part of the reason for this is that most institutions have ceased to care.  
Taylor does not mention at all the thing universities do care about, the prior-
ity that drives much of their decisions and shapes the pressures they put on 
faculty. Universities and colleges usually care most about prestige. Why do 
they want scholars to pour so much time and energy into publishing in “jour-
nals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues”? Generally, it is 
enough if such work is read by two colleagues, the ones involved in the blind 
review process that is the guarantor of respectable research and high profes-
sional standards. By opening with his industry-metaphors, and unveiling the 
economic motives that inflate the numbers of graduate students universities 
admit, Taylor gives the appearance of offering a hard-headed analysis. But 
any proposal for reforming colleges and universities that does not address 
head-on their obsession with prestige can hardly be taken seriously as a prac-
tical program.

For a scholar, prestige is bound up with the rage for originality. This seems 
to be the hidden engine by which Kant’s still slightly old-fashioned notion 
of trusteeship has been driven into increasingly narrow avenues. In Kant’s 
dispassionate enlightenment vision, research is progressive and cumulative, 
and the scholar makes his or her contribution to the progress of this vast hu-



158 Overheard in the Academy

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2009

man enterprise.  In human terms, however, the demand for novelty harnesses 
and feeds the motive of vanity. The gratification of a vanity that bases itself 
on claims to originality is best served by ignorance of the tradition; it is easier 
to overlook how derivative and unoriginal almost all our thoughts are if we 
never encounter the originals from which they derive. Thus the rage for origi-
nality undermines the responsibility and satisfaction of trusteeship.

Taylor himself seems uncritically enamored of this rage for originality; it 
is the only mark of successful teaching that he acknowledges in his edito-
rial. The rhetoric Taylor uses to make his “vision” inspiring is antithetical 
to the notion of trusteeship. He hopes that proposals such as his will “open 
academia to a future we cannot conceive.” Insofar as it opens traditional dis-
ciplines to a future of chaos, it is true that we can have no clear conception of 
what it will look like. But in broader terms, this future is not hard to conceive 
at all. It is barbarism. Any reader of Tocqueville will recognize it, moreover, 
as a provincially American program of barbarism: dominated by pragmatist 
exigencies, absorbed in the present and enamored of a vague (but undoubt-
edly better) future, with no regard for the past.


