Respuesta de Phillip R. Shaver, Distinguished Professor of Psychology . Past President, Int. Assoc. for Relationship Research, Department of Psychology, University of California, Davis, al artículo transcrito aquí hace unos días sobre el fin de la universidad que conocemos, del Director del Departamento de Religión de la Universidad de Columbia, en que plantea una serie de consideraciones críticas sobre las universidades norteamericanas.
Notice that the author of the op-ed piece is a member of a 10-person religion department at Columbia. The sociology and politics of humanities departments like his are quite different from those of psychology or biology or economics departments, which have many more students, larger faculties, more extramural grant support, etc. The chances that large universities will abolish departments so that people in, say, psychology, English literature, economics, and religion can work together on projects like the “water” project suggested by the op-ed writer are nil. There are many interdisciplinary projects already, and there are many interdisciplinary centers, but they do not and will not replace major departments. The departments are the pillars from which different constellations of interdisciplinary research teams can be composed, disbanded, and recomposed as the constellation of topics and sources of funding change. (I’m on a university committee right now that evaluates research centers every few years to see if they deserve to stay in business. When they don’t, they are disbanded).
The op-ed guy also talked about the uselessness of traditional dissertations, by which he means dissertations in humanities disciplines such as religion. Psychology dissertations long ago became much briefer and more efficiently aimed at quick publication in professional journals. I don’t know about psychology departments in general, but graduates of our department have not found it impossible to get academic jobs or good postdoctoral research positions, and I notice that postdoc positions are regularly being advertised on this very listserv. At Columbia University, the op-ed writer’s institution, there are many interdisciplinary research teams (in neuroscience, for example), and they are not hindered by the fact that there is a psychology department, a biology department, and so on. The op-ed writer should look carefully at his own university before declaring the structure of such places outdated. (Interestingly, when I was on the faculty at Columbia I published a paper with a member of that writer’s religion department, and the fact that we coauthors were in different departments did not hinder our collaboration in the least.) At the moment I am working on a big study of meditation with a group of people who span departments, centers, and universities. Near us in the same Center for Mind and Brain is a research project that combines neuroscience with expertise in religious music (the study deals with the effects of religious music on the brain). The Co-PIs on that project are from two very different departments. Many of us are working across universities and nations, something that the op-ed writer seems to think he needs to propose and advocate.
In short, I thought the editorial was awful, and yet it may influence policy makers and university donors simply because it sounds creative and appeared in the New York Times.