The Uncertain Future of Academia in the Era of the Internet

Last week I discovered that the directors of MIT’s Comparative Media Studies master’s degree program had frozen admissions for the 2009-2010 academic year.

The repercussions of the decision have induced a number of reflections, mainly: Now that I have a year to think about it, is CMS the correct path? Over the past year and a half (since I discovered the CMS program’s website in October 2007), I’ve started my own blog, become interested in Internet culture, met really awesome people, and navigated onto a course toward cultural and media studies, mainly subcultural studies (ie. anime fandom) and criticism of contemporary popular culture (both Japanese and American), all alongside literary, social, and anthropological theory. Over the past six months, I’ve specifically been looking into otaku theory and anime fandom in the United States (surprisingly there’s a lot of critical information already published), which is, albeit extremely interdisciplinary, a very specific field of study.

The crucial question: is my focus too narrow? The convergence of disciplines seems to be the endpoint of the contemporary flow of academia, but such tendencies appear to lead scholars to concentrate on points in academic space, rather than spectrums. Not that this is new: it seems that every doctoral dissertation in the history of verbose and meticulous penned theses focuses intensely on the minutiae of subject XYZ. But how can I avoid cornering myself into one expertise without abandoning common knowledge of everything that lies beyond? After I heard that danah boyd pretty much received her PhD, I decided to explore her old blog posts and came across “identity crisis: the curse/joy of being interdisciplinary and the future of academia”. In 2005, she wrote, “So, i’ve attended 10 job talks this semester in two purportedly interdisciplinary departments. I have to say, i’ve been utterly disappointed. Each scholar talked about a very very niche body of research that, at best, simply didn’t fit into other disciplines. None were revolutionarily [sic] new ways of thinking, not even close,” and I believe she’s still correct: the higher you climb in higher education, the higher you reach in the hierarchy, but the lower you tumble in various other spaces of knowledge, so low that in the long run it seems you’ve gotten nowhere at all.

With such niche specialization, I wonder what higher education will resemble in the future. At the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century (that’s 2007-2009), colleges across America already offer a multitude of specific classes that seem to evade a necessary emphasis on the fundamentals (although I would prefer to call them “interesting”). I remember one of my previous English professors complaining about the lack of knowledge in basic poetics by those students (juniors and seniors) attending his Modern American Poetry seminar. Perhaps blame might be placed on poor instruction in high school. Yet I might also peg it on professors’ intellectual base shrinking in area (through growing, of course, in depth). Also on the apparent influence of students looking for novel classes (novel here might be defined as, in the classes’ course descriptions, rhetorically biased toward unconventional topics rather than fundamental theories and methodologies).

To diverge a bit from my personal anxiety… I append “in the era of the Internet” because we are already too familiar with the Web’s superabundance of the new, which I believe puts contemporary students in the mindset that the original and the unexplored hold the true value. Translated from the Internet to the classroom, students barraged with ever-fresh blog posts expect a similar novelty from their classes. To pull an example from my own situation: “Masterpieces of Japanese Literature (in English translation)” will not win my heart when competing against “Sound Worlds in Japanese Popular Culture” (note: both classes are taught by the same professor of Japanese).

What I mean to say, then, is that students are growing up in an academic space inhabited by specialization. They thence look to a future in which they too must fulfill an invisible mandate culminating in a pigeonholed expertise. As the pupils grow to become educators, they bring specialization back into the classroom to renew the cycle.

The debate: do I pursue the distinct yet passion-relevant Comparative Media Studies program, or should I submit to applying to a PhD program in English literature? Eventually, I wish to teach; however, I do not want to find myself stuck in a field of proficiency that excludes the potential for additional inspection on my own part, without essentially having to start over from the beginning. Will an interdisciplinary degree provide me with absolute foundational principles, when it inherently draws from multiple foundations?

Makes sense? Sense not it makes? Would appreciate feedback. Comment below.