Against Majors
Re-drawing the boundaries of academia
When the topic of college sports comes up— which, as you may imagine, is a fairly common occurrence in higher ed circles—a pretty common line of argument is “That’s a stupid way to organize things.” And it’s true, there are many, many things about the way we in the US have bundled semi-pro sports leagues together with colleges and universities that are… sub-optimal.
There’s absolutely some truth to the observation, in that if one were to set out to design an educational system from the ground up, a tenuous affiliation with a multi-million dollar sports franchise would not be high on the list of priorities. At the same time, though, it’s also a fundamentally useless sort of comment, in that we’re not designing an educational system from the ground up. We’ve inherited a system that evolved in a messy way over a period of many decades, and by now it’s thoroughly entrenched. There isn’t a realistic path to severing the tie between colleges and universities and athletics in a way that isn’t massively traumatic for the individual institutions.
Of course, athletics isn’t the only sub-optimal feature of US higher education that we’re basically stuck with because of historical contingency. The whole system is a mass of compromises and kludges that just kind of… happened1.
I was thinking about this because I got around to reading a couple of tabs I opened a little while back from the Chronicle of Higher Education. One of these is a collection of short statements from various luminaries about “Higher Ed at a Turning Point.” These things are usually kind of frustrating to me, because they tend to either be written from such a lofty overview that they’re meaningless piffle, or so narrowly targeted at a particular individual’s Pet Peeve that they’re hard to take seriously.
The other piece is a bit more specific and substantive: it’s A Left-Wing Case for Great Books, by Daniel Walden, which offers pretty much what it says on the tin. It’s a pitch for reading Homer and Dante and all that, bolstered with regular citations of some Marxist scholarship I haven’t read.
Reading these things in close succession, though, what jumped out at me was a brief reference very early on:
The movement’s contemporary shape and name can be traced back to Susan Wise Bauer’s 1999 book The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home. Bauer’s book views the medieval trivium — grammar, logic, and rhetoric — as a framework for moving cyclically through subjects as a child matures: first learning a subject’s basic elements and how they fit together (grammar), then learning argumentation and causality and abstract thinking across various domains (logic), and finally how to make arguments that are elegant and persuasive in addition to being valid (rhetoric). The various practitioners of and advocates for classical education share a commitment to teaching accepted canonical texts (drawing largely on the “Great Books”), to education as inseparable from character formation, and to the thesis that the abandonment of the two prior commitments by K-12 schools and universities has hollowed out their ability to effectively educate students. Many proponents of classical ed draw on the ancient distinction between liberal education, suitable for free persons who are to govern themselves and others, and servile education, suitable for those who are to be useful to others, noting that education in a democratic society ought to prepare all people to lead meaningful lives in pursuit of a vision of the good, not merely to work as someone else’s employee or to serve a particular social function.
I hadn’t previously heard the trivium-based framing before, but I kind of like it as a generalized structure. More importantly, it triggered a brief vision of a system that was actually organized explicitly along those lines, which seemed sort of fun. It doesn’t map perfectly to the sciences— this is in the C. of H. E., after all2—but it doesn’t completely fail, either. And I definitely think it would make a more interesting proposal than the vague platitudes or narrow obsessions found in the first piece.
That combination led to a thought that is somewhere between a “Thank you for coming to my TED talk” provocation and “The academic opinion that would get you like [Disney character in a ring of swords].” Which makes it perfect to throw on the blog on a Friday afternoon3… Anyway, that thought is:
It might be good for higher education to refocus on a significantly smaller number of broader majors.
This is in reaction to not just the pieces linked above, but to two trends within higher education: one is the years-long proliferation of ever more fine-grained majors, the other the more recent rise of stories about this or that school cancelling umpteen programs for low enrollment. In both cases, my initial reaction to many of the programs described is “Why is this a major in its own right, rather than a concentration within some other program?”
The answer to that is generally in the same form as the answer to the question of “Why is a university sponsoring a semi-pro baseball team?” Namely, it just sort of happened that way, for reasons that have more to do with bureaucracy and politics than scholarly practice. College and university faculties are large enough that they need to be subdivided somehow lest they become too unwieldy to manage, so we get departments for administrative convenience. Those departments become power centers for some of the faculty within them, and one way for faculty who don’t have power in the existing structure is to create an entirely new power center— a new program, or major, or personal Institute. And once created, majors and programs are very hard to get rid of, precisely because they are power centers.
There’s also a demand-side piece of this, because of the sub-optimal mixing of credentialing and scholarly training that has evolved in US higher ed, with a lot of students and employers demanding fine-grained majors as credentials. The people paying the bills and the people who will hire them after graduation would like the credential to be as specific as possible, to make the job searching and hiring processes simpler. While it’s almost certainly not true that someone with a degree in, say, optical engineering will necessarily outperform someone whose degree is in physics who worked in a laser lab when it comes to doing an entry-level industry job, one of those certainly sounds like a more tailored and marketable degree. Leading both kinds of customers to demand more and narrower programs4.
I’m not actually sure anybody is all that well-served by this brand of specialization and sub-specialization. The endless proliferation of new programs each with their own sets of requirements is a headache to keep track of for both students and faculty, and creates a ton of extra bureaucratic infighting at the institutional level. If you were going to set up a system of higher education starting from nothing, I don’t think you’d create the dizzying array of majors we have now, any more than you would give a pharmaceutical research lab its own football5 team.
I hasten to add, though, that this is not just a cranky RETVRN or “We must get rid of all these bullshit Identity Studies majors” kind of thing. I’m not saying that we necessarily need to go back to just the set of departments that would’ve existed in 1920— on the contrary, the ideal organization might well be very different. The important thing isn’t hewing to traditional categories, but reducing the overall number of narrowly specified programs in favor of a smaller number of more coherent groupings.
In STEM fields, where I actually mostly know what I’m talking about, I don’t necessarily think we need to divide things into the traditional departments of Physics, Chemistry, Biology, and so on. In 2026, it would very likely make more sense to break things up more by approach: experimental vs. computational, say, with some additional subdivision by scale. There are big swathes of experimental physics that have more in common with similarly large swathes of experimental chemistry than either has in common with computational modeling (of either field), or with large-scale experiments in high energy physics and astrophysics. Other bits of physics have more in common with math and philosophy than either experimental or computational work. The tools and approaches used to study the world— are you shining lasers on things or are you proving theorems?— are in some important ways more fundamental than the specific things being studied.
If you were to start from scratch and re-draw the boundaries of the sciences around what kind of questions researchers ask and what tools they use to answer them, you’d probably end up with some major differences from what we currently have. And I think it’s at least plausible that that would be a net win for science. The proliferation of nominally interdisciplinary specializations is reaching toward that sort of reorganization in a kludge-y way because they have to navigate the existing collection of disciplinary divisions.
I’m much less familiar with fields outside the sciences, but from what I do know, I think there might be a similar case to be made that the appropriate boundaries are less related to traditional disciplinary categories— history, English, etc.— than the approach. In some ways, the categories sometimes derided as “Identity Studies” might make more sense than traditional disciplinary divisions— interpreting things primarily through the lens of gender or race might be a more important categorization than whether the specific thing being interpreted is a work of fiction or a historical record. I’d at least be willing to entertain that as an argument.
Of course, this is very much a daydream, and no more likely to happen than Duke voluntarily cutting ties with its basketball team. It’s sort of interesting to think about, though, just as a way to pass some time on a Friday afternoon…
Kind of a weird piece, but it’s been a long week and I’m in a “fuck it” kind of mood. If you want to see more, I can’t promise I’ll write along these exact lines again but here’s a button:
And if you want to surround my neck with rhetorical cartoon swords, the comments will be open:
Note to Europeans: Don’t get smug, here, your systems are the same kind of weird patchwork. The compromises are in different places, is all.
I have sometimes semi-jokingly referred to it as “the Chronicle of Not-STEM,” because it’s really heavily slanted toward coverage of those areas.
Hit “Publish,” and leave for happy hour…
And, of course, these tendencies reinforce each other.
Either kind.
Your comment about how we aren't building a higher education system from scratch is a real pet peeve of mine. You see this desire to start from scratch all the time in discussions of big complex human systems, but most of all when people talk about healthcare. In all of these cases, we have to start from where we are and not some other place that would make things easier. This refusal to grapple with the real thing is just the thing if you want to pretend that real human systems aren't messy and complicated.
There are already schools announcing an AI major. Which certainly seems like a specialty so narrow as to be useless. I guess it's some kind of CS/Math degree? But who can know!