








































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

[Expo. 3.2 (2009) 159–164] Expositions (print) ISSN 1747-5368  
doi:10.1558/expo.v3i2.159 Expositions (online) ISSN 1747-5376 

What’s the Matter with Footnotes?

JOHN-PAUL SPIRO

Center for Liberal Education, Villanova University

Should graduate studentsand even many professorsreally be trying to 
solve the world’s problems before they know enough about their own disci-
pline? Mark C. Taylor disparages academic specialization as “more and more 
about less and less,” as if specialization requires small-mindedness and lack 
of intellectual ambition. But specialization is not always-already narrowness; 
if it were, then the academic collaboration that Taylor extols would entail 
locking several blinkered professors in a room and hoping they come up with 
answers to global problems. Could they even communicate with one another 
in mutually comprehensible terms? If they could, then they would not be 
what Taylor says they are. If scholars are to band together and use their vari-
ous forms of expertise to fight, for example, climate change and international 
conflict, those individual scholars need expertise in their fields in the first 
place. It is the very nature of “expertise in their fields” that requires further 
attention.  

Disciplinary boundaries are problematic and, perhaps increasingly, restrict-
ing, but they also serve purposes. Disciplinary norms exist for reasons: they 
tell us what questions to ask, what methods to use, and what counts as evi-
dence. In Stanley Fish’s characterization, “I am professionally correct, not out 
of a sense of moral obligation or choice of values … but out of a sense that 
the structure of a fully articulated profession, be it negligence law or literary 
criticism, is such that those who enter its precincts will find that the basic 
decisions, about where to look, what to do, and how to do it, have already 
been made” (Fish 1995, 44). The average academic professional is not—and 
should not be—interested in revolutionizing the profession but in simply 
practicing it, doing what Thomas Kuhn called “normal science,” which “does 
not aim at novelties of fact or theory and, when successful, finds none” (Kuhn 
1996, 52). Scholars within disciplines apply the latest techniques and theo-
ries to the extant data. But it is not clear what will constitute “normal science” 
under Taylor’s new academic regime. 

Taylor’s own work is innovative and multidisciplinary in the best ways. His 
work is distinguished by its range, depth, and its embrace of past, present, 
and future. He knows this of himself: “As I move from theology to philoso-



160 Overheard in the Academy

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2009

phy, to literary criticism, to art, to architecture, to technology, to economic 
systems, and now to biological systems, it is all interconnected. But the very 
structure of education in America—not only in America, but America is 
where I live—people don’t know enough about enough to be able to put the 
pieces together. It is a culture of expertise, which is,” as he says again in his 
New York Times op-ed, “more and more about less and less” (Taylor 2008).  
He cites the example of “a meeting of political scientists who had gathered 
to discuss why international relations theory had never considered the role 
of religion in society. Given the state of the world today, this is a significant 
oversight” (Taylor 2009). He is too kind; such an “oversight” could only be 
willful, an expression of preference; there is nothing inherent to the study of 
political science that precludes the study of religion. For all too long, many 
social scientists avoided religion with the same intensity that, for example, 
many humanities scholars avoid mathematics and many scientists avoid poli-
tics. Not everybody can be good at everything, and most of us thrive by play-
ing to our strengths, but our disciplinary boundaries represent the world as 
we want to see it: departmentalized, supposedly guaranteeing we will all leave 
one another alone. Taylor is right to want to rock this boat.

At the same time, the existence of blind spots in a discipline’s practitioners 
is not an argument for the abolition of the discipline itself. In order to do 
good work in one’s own field, as Taylor does, one must have some knowledge 
of other fields—one must have, in short, a good liberal arts education, in 
the full sense of that education continuing throughout one’s life and career. 
A scholar of religion who only studies religion (and not philosophy or art or 
economics or sociology) will produce very limited work. But this is not the 
narrowness of which Taylor complains. “In my own religion department,” he 
writes, “for example, we have 10 faculty members, working in eight subfields, 
with little overlap” (Taylor 2009). However, a quick perusal of the Faculty 
Directory for Columbia University Department of Religion reveals several 
excellent scholars, many of whom write popular works as well as scholarly 
tomes, all of whom have the necessary familiarity with various disciplines 
that enables them to do quality academic research. What makes them differ-
ent from their chair, Mark C. Taylor? They each study a specific religion, not 
“Religion” itself. Therefore, they also incorporate history into their research, a 
field curiously absent from Taylor’s description of his own multidisciplinary 
work. Taylor’s work is, increasingly, preoccupied with the future; the past, it 
seems cannot justify itself on its own terms. This may be why Taylor bemoans 
the gifted graduate student who studies Duns Scotus’ use of footnotes.

Admittedly, if our best scholars are studying the history of scholarship, 



What’s the Matter with Footnotes? 161

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2009

then perhaps higher education has entered its decadent phase. But the study 
of footnotes can also be a form of useful self-consciousness and reflexivity, 
just the kind Taylor calls for when he invites us “to examine the conditions 
necessary for [religions’] formation and to consider the many functions they 
serve,” in order to “develop responsible analyses of religion’s diversity and 
complexity” (Taylor 2008). The traditions of commentary are a crucial part 
of the world’s religions, and if someone has brilliant insight into Duns Sco-
tus’ habits of citation, then what is Taylor’s problem, exactly? I do not know 
if Taylor would express the same derision for, say, a study of footnotes in 
U.S. Supreme Court opinions or U.N. Statements on Climate Change.1 Tay-
lor’s dismissal of such research places him a bit closer to the religion-phobic  
political scientists he himself criticizes. He implies that there is nothing about 
religion in itself worth studying on its own terms.

If good disciplinary work is, by definition, multidisciplinary— if a good 
historian also knows political science and/or literature and/or psychology, 
just as a good sociologist knows economics and/or architecture and/or math-
ematics—then each scholar working in a particular discipline is going to need 
other scholars to be working in other disciplines. For undergraduates in the 
humanities and social sciences, we can encourage more breadth: just as eve-
ry young chemist is required to study mathematics, biology, and physics as 
well as chemistry, we can require every young aspirant to the humanities and  
social studies to study a broad curriculum, not just as distribution require-
ments but as a necessary qualification for the more specialized studies that 
lie ahead. At the graduate and professional level, instead of abolishing  
departments, it might be better advised to create and maintain more cross-
disciplinary forums, and to encourage departments to reward their members 
for stretching themselves and their fields.  

Taylor has a fine idea when he calls for academic collaboration for the 
purpose of engaging pressing global concerns. But we already have founda-
tions, conferences and committees wherein major academics make recom-
mendations to policymakers.2 American higher education is already given 
to fads and trends of fashion, and, I fear, Taylor’s suggestion that we create 
“problem-focused programs” would mean even more wild swings of attention 
to whatever grabs our—or our sponsors’—passing fancies. Who decides what 
is or is not a “problem”? What if a particular field—such as art history, literary 
criticism, or philosophy—does not demonstrate its usefulness when academe 
becomes a source of public-advice-giving and little else? If academic study 
must be useful, then to what and for whom?  

Taylor’s suggestion that we abolish traditional academic departments and 



162 Overheard in the Academy

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2009

form ad-hoc committees on big issues could lead to the same problems 
that accompanied the emergence of Cultural Studies:  professors with some 
knowledge of literature, history, philosophy, sociology, etc., started to write 
about billboards and television shows and supermarkets, and their students 
followed suit, but many of those students did not first learn much about 
literature, history, philosophy, or sociology in the first place. Cultural Studies 
offers, in place of knowledge or expertise, a set of methodological tools and 
political preferences. The same fate could befall the Interdisciplinary Ad Hoc 
Renewable Program on Water or the Conditionally Temporary Committee 
for the Study of Time. If we are to abolish traditional academic departments 
and replace them with multi- and inter-disciplinary committees, and those 
committees consist of scholars from various disciplines, we must be clear then 
about what kinds of students such committees will produce. Perhaps a few 
polymaths may emerge, but probably also a few dilettantes and factotums.  

The work of historians, biologists, economists, and so on, can be helpful 
for any number of world-repairing projects, but, as Fish writes, “we become 
interested in something […] and it is usually later, under the pressure of anxi-
eties created by the demand for justification, that we tell ourselves a story in 
which the pursuit of our interest is crucial for the improvement of the human 
condition” (Fish 1995, 59). One can imagine Taylor telling himself such a 
story, after he had been studying religion professionally for several years. But 
now that he has come to a later stage of his life, he would deny the rest of us 
such personal and professional development. There are career-tracks for those 
who wish to “make a difference,” and academe is probably not one of the best-
suited for such goals. When Fish refers to “the pursuit of our interest,” he does 
not use it (strictly) in the political sense of “what we think is best for ourselves” 
but rather as “what draws us in, what intrigues us, what demands our study 
and contemplation.” When Taylor beseeches us to use our knowledge for the 
good of mankind, and nothing else, he places the useful over the interesting. It 
may dishearten some people to hear that “Some humanists rank what prom-
ises to be ‘fascinating’ above what may turn out to be ‘true’” (Lamont 2009, 
61), but I would not hesitate to add “and beneficial” as well.   

As for Taylor’s recommendation for the abolishment of tenure, he has my 
sympathy. Tenure is, too often, a license for mediocrity and atrophy, and 
tenured faculty too often act like a privileged aristocracy, assembling their 
privileges while cheap graduate students and adjuncts teach with no ben-
efits and little hope for a real academic career. It did not have to be like 
this, but it is. But universities will not change until they have to; tenure will 
not be reformed for the same reasons that the Electoral College will not be  



What’s the Matter with Footnotes? 163

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2009

reformed: everyone in a position to fix the system is the protected beneficiary 
of that very system. But that will not matter in the coming years; as banks 
and businesses fail, universities will follow, and charitable giving to higher 
education will only decrease with the expiration of the Estate Tax in 2010.  
Tenure itself may remain, but many tenured lines will fall, not due to Tay-
lor’s calls for reform, but to “financial exigency.” Elite institutions will con-
tinue as they have, perhaps combining a few departments but not abolishing 
them all. Less prominent colleges and universities, however, will very well see 
themselves replaced by online courses and professional-skills institutions like 
Strayer University, Kaplan University, and the University of Phoenix. Peda-
gogical priorities will follow technology and economics, not the other way 
around. Taylor, ever mindful of the future, is already prepared.3 

Notes

1. I was once instructedin graduate schoolto get the 2-volume Dover edition 
of John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding because it included Alex-
ander C. Fraser’s brilliant commentary, which retained its interest and usefulness 
despite being from the 19th century.  Furthermore, Anthony Grafton’s excellent 
The Footnote: a Curious History (1997) presents a fascinating cultural history via 
this much-maligned academic tool. 

2. These policy recommendations are generally ignored, if not ridiculed. Richard 
Posner notes, among many other cases, “the ‘philosophers’ brief ’ submitted by 
Ronald Dworkin, John Rawls, Thomas Nagel, and other philosophers in the  
Supreme Court’s assisted-suicide cases is not mentioned in any of the opinions in 
those cases” (Posner 2003, 361).  Posner elsewhere notes that it would be “unpro-
fessional” (Posner 2003, 363) for judges and other government officials to accept 
recommendations from professional academics.

3. Taylor, along with Coca-Cola executive Herbert A. Allen, is the founder of the 
Global Education Network. “Since 1999, Global Education Network has been 
creating and developing cutting-edge multimedia courses for students to take on 
their computers” (http://www.gen.com/aboutus/). This for-profit company will 
be in an excellent market position once universities realize that paying professors 
(or gradute students) to give standard-issue lectures is unnecessary when DVD-
ROMs provide the same conent at a fraction of the cost.

References

Fish, Stanley
1995 Professional Correctness: Literary Studies and Political Change.  Oxford: 

Clarendon Press.

http://www.gen.com/aboutus/
http://www.gen.com/aboutus/


164 Overheard in the Academy

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2009

Grafton, Anthony
1997 The Footnote:  A Curious History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University 

Press.

Kuhn, Thomas S.
1996 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.  3rd ed. Chicago, IL: University of 

Chicago Press.

Lamont, Michèle
2009 How Professors Think:  Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment.  

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Posner, Richard
2003 Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline.  Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-

sity Press.

Taylor, Mark C.
2008 RD Book: Apocalypse Without God. Interview by Nathan Schneider.  

Religion Dispatches, May 8. http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/rd-
book/225/rdbook%3A_apocalypse_without_god

2009 End the University as We Know It. The New York Times, April 26. 

http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/rdbook/225/rdbook%3A_apocalypse_without_god
http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/rdbook/225/rdbook%3A_apocalypse_without_god

