Faculty Development

Universities rely almost entirely on specialization. This is remarkable considering that their name is explicitly UNIVERSITIES, or unity in diversity. Students learn more and more about more and more restricted parts of nature in order to attain faculty status, secure research funding, attract students, conduct hiring, and publish. For SPT, one of its promised products is very significant freeing of the intellect, and training of already specialized faculty in their understanding and potential for cross-disciplinary teaching. They have to learn a lot to deliver SPT curricula.

It is not just the thousands of academic institutions in our country and internationally that have this reductionist, silo mentality. It is also the government, libraries, publishers, and private companies. This is not all bad. We in the systems fields should respect and praise the amount of strong, rigorous work that comes out of reductionism and specialization as well as the focus of effort and productivity that comes from specialization. It is just that one of the negative results of this is the complete squeezing out of significant cross-disciplinary awareness, work, results, and training.