Universities

If you attend a university, you encounter different departments and an assortment of courses that might help you understand the humans. Some departments, such as psychology, are more obvious than others. You might realize that the study of English Literature is a study of human behavior. Writers represent the human experience and sample the daily life of humans over many centuries. Universities have been book-dominated institutions and good writers have always been studied there. You might not appreciate that disciplines such as ethology, ethnology, sociology, computer science, linguistics, neuroanatomy, neurology, anthropology, zoology, palaeontology, archaeology, political science, philosophy and others are relevant to the study of the human mind.

While engineers influence every aspect of human society, engineering has always been a separate activity in universities or is pursued in technical schools that are independent of universities. The “humanities” have always claimed a special ability to describe and understand humans, but in practice, engineers are the unsung heroes of human activity. Applied physics, mechanical and electronic engineering have profound effects in the evolution of social networks. Electronics appears everywhere, extending our senses, decision making abilities and creating social networks that never existed before.

The tendency in universities has been to develop autonomous departments and to develop sub-departments that assume all the characteristics of human groups – group boundaries, isolation of specialists, competition for scarce resources, delusions of group importance and competitions for privilege and prestige. The departmentalization and fragmentation of the study of humans by humans is a study in itself. 

Cohen reviewed the old arguments in favor of teaching humanities at universities such as languages, literature, arts, history, cultural studies, philosophy and religion: ”A traditional liberal arts education is not intended to prepare students for a specific vocation. Rather, the critical thinking, civic and historical knowledge and ethical reasoning that the humanities develop have a different purpose. They are prerequisites for personal growth and participation in a free democracy, regardless of career choice…The humanities are under greater pressure than ever to justify their existence to administrators, policy makers, students and parents. .. The humanities continue to thrive in elite liberal arts schools. But the divide between these private schools and others is widening. Some large state universities routinely turn away students who want to sign up for courses in the humanities. Technology executives, researchers and business leaders argue that producing enough trained engineers and scientists is essential to America’s economic vitality, national defence and health care. This crisis of confidence has prompted a reassessment of what has long been considered the humanities’ central and sacred mission: to explore, as one scholar put it, “what it means to be a human being…. Kronman, a professor of law at Yale argues that the essence of a humanities education is reading the great literary and philosophical works and asking the question of what living is for.” 

In the midst of the great 2009 recession when all prior assumptions became obsolete or at least negotiable, Mark Taylor stated: “ If American higher education is to thrive in the 21st century, colleges and universities, like Wall Street and Detroit, must be rigorously regulated and completely restructured.” He argued the graduate education tended to produce highly specialized people who had limited or no employment opportunities: “The emphasis on narrow scholarship also encourages an educational system that has become a process of cloning. Faculty members cultivate those students whose futures they envision as identical to their own pasts, even though their tenures will stand in the way of these students having futures as full professors…If American higher education is to thrive in the 21st century, colleges and universities, like Wall Street and Detroit, must be rigorously regulated and completely restructured, a long process to make higher learning more agile, adaptive and imaginative.” He emphasized the need for curriculum reform, the elimination of competing departments to be replaced by inclusive cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural studies.  

Universities do bring science and the humanities in close proximity. Several disciplines such as anthropology, archaeology and sociology have emerged in an ill-defined middle ground. Usually, theoretical mathematicians and “pure” scientists such as physicists, astronomers, and biologists do not interact with other faculties on campus. You can argue that scientists and engineers have emerged as disconnected groups on campus with the biggest impact on how humans live today. The scientific method has become a normative standard in many disciplines. The method requires cooperative groups that can sustain rational thinking, group effort, reliable measurements, ethical standards, peer review, and the free publication of findings. In the best case, science encourages curiosity, free inquiry, playful speculation, adventure, experimentation and discovery. In practice, science faculties are constrained by limited budgets, hierarchical social orders, conservative administrators, competition and conflict among scientists and the usual mixture of group vices including anger, jealously and blame. The university is a prototype of a multilayered society with well-defined boundaries that separate specialty groups.

In the most advanced universities some smart people want to connect disciplines and integrate knowledge. Eclectic groups gather to synthesize the information that has accumulated in separate disciplines. Inter-disciplinary groups attract the smartest and most versatile people who are interested in understanding the whole truth, but these humans are not the most effective politicians and seldom are good administrators. The result is that multidisciplinary groups are often short-lived or lack the ability to sustain high levels of funding to achieve a significant and enduring voice in the politics of the organization.  A genuine and lasting understanding of human behavior requires that psychology is unified and united with biology, anthropology, sociology palaeontology, philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, computer science and all the other disciplines that reveal the underlying patterns, tendencies and problems of humans. Indeed, in university terms, separate and competing departments will have to merge in a unified “School of the Human Mind.”

The inherent limitations of an individual human mind, however limit the possibility for a large number of renaissance scholars to know everything.  In all universities, leaders are engaged in a process of diplomacy. It turns out that university faculty will attack anyone who offends and who appears to be vulnerable. University Presidents are like kings and queens who must act as role models of civility. They must simulate aristocracy to afford the university a modicum of dignity and decorum that makes it a special place. This is a façade, of course, but a necessary one. In theory, university faculty and students should feel free to express their views. In practice, competing or unpopular views are unwelcome and are suppressed by a variety of mechanisms. Human nature does not change when you reach the campus. Civility is a veneer.  

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Group Dynamics

Group Dynamics is part of the  Psychology & Philosophy series, developed by Persona Digital Books. We encourage readers to quote and paraphrase topics from Group Dynamics published online and expect proper citations to accompany all derivative writings. The author is Stephen Gislason and the publisher is Persona Digital Books. The most recent date of publication is 2010.  The URL to the book description is http://www.personadigital.net/Persona/groupdynamics/