On being a specialist… in general things

We had an interesting research seminar today on the future of social science and one of the questions asked was: “is specialization a driving force for research?”, a problematic that was supported with this oh so much eloquent quote from Geoffrey Vicker:

“Even the dogs may eat of the crumbs which fall from the rich man’s table; and in these days, when the rich in knowledge eat such specialized food at such separate tables, only the dogs have a chance of a balanced diet.”

Could have been put in nicer terms but the case is clearly made for multi-disciplinarity, a view to which I fully subscribe. Every day I get a chance to interact with people from extremely diverse backgrounds, ranging from physics to zoology, and those encounters provide me with many useful insights into my own work. So, for example, a friend of mine who is studying Law was describing to me some time ago his disillusion with ‘cyberlaw’ as a new field that required special attention, and was arguing that disputes related to Internet usage usually go back to typical real-world situations with established legal practice. Part of my DPhil job is also to demonstrate that the Internet is not that ‘virtual’ of a space, and yet I am not at all interested in looking at any legal aspects of the Internet but using other concepts to make my point.

Which besides makes me think that young people should not be black-boxed into categories such as “the maths freak”, “the good-at-writing”, “the 12yo-medic-to-be” and “the born-loser”, which is a very common feature in developing- and I am sorry to say- francophone countries. The human brain has an extraordinary potential and people should be given the option to mix and match subjects at all levels of education, and especially at university level. Perhaps this is one of the main reasons why the unemployment rate in the UK hardly exceeds 3%, why you find people who (are offered the possibility to) go on further education in the middle or end of their career, why the research base here is so huge and attractive…