In an op-ed in yesterday’s Washington Post, James E. McWilliams, an assistant professor of history at Texas State University at San Marcos, lays into the academic enterprise. He writes,

“The few history PhDs who manage to land full-time academic jobs quickly learn that the easiest way to become distinguished in the profession is through a lifetime of scholarly dedication to a single, defining and often very small idea — one that usually has no bearing on contemporary events. That’s precisely how to “make a contribution” — the be-all and end-all for a serious academic. More often than not, though, that contribution is to our own job security and status within a small club rather than to a public debate badly in need of a broader historical perspective.”

Although I empathize with his frustrations, I don’t think that all of academia is as bleak an enterprise as McWilliams suggests. In particular, academia diverges from McWilliams’ characterization with the growth of interdisciplinary, policy-focused graduate programs that are educating a new cadre of graduate students on how to be a specialist in the integration of knowledge as a contribution to real-world concerns. One such program is the University of Colorado’s now-3-year-old experiemnt in its interdisciplinary graduate Environmental Studies Program. But there many others as well.