"Incendiary Does Not Mean True"

"Taylor has tried to draw on so much, however, that he has ended up mastering very little of it. Consider a subject he ought to know well: higher education in late twentieth-century America. 'As the fields of expertise became more restricted,' Taylor writes, 'the research of scholars working in them became more homogeneous, and communication among scholars with different concerns became less common.' But is this really true? Much research has certainly grown narrower and more specialized, but that is different than saying that subfields and disciplines have become closed off from each other. In my own field of history, the late twentieth-century saw one wave after another of outreach to other disciplines: to sociology and economics in the heyday of the 'new social history,' then to anthropology and literary criticism when the 'new cultural history' arose. In the same period, literary studies turned to continental philosophy (post-structuralism) and to history (the new historicism). Art history and classics saw similar movements. In fact, a common—and not unfounded—complaint about the humanities today is that too much of it has become an indistinguishable mass of 'cultural studies.' Where are Taylor’s walls?"

In The New Republic, David A. Bell reviews Mark C. Taylor's Crisis on Campus: A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities.