Human knowledge and study is a huge interconnected web. In universities, we split this web up into specific categories: specific fields of study, research interests, majors to study in. The particular categories of study we have now have, in part, been inherited from history, and in part, shaped to fit the job opportunities available in a liberal-capitalist political economy. How might we categorize human knowledge and practice differently, in a world where universities instead existed in a broader environment of socialist values and leftist political economics?
The way that academic institutions are set up—particularly in how academia categorizes the world into such-and-such particular subjects—seems to align well with what is necessary to study to support the existing establishment institutions. There is an upstream market pressure—starting largely in the sorts of jobs available in established institutions—which encourages universities to define disciplines and research topics to match the needs of existing institutions. In the particular case of my experience in a Sociology of Organizations class, this was also evident in the choice of topics that my libertarian/conservative professor considered personally interesting and most relevant to teach. But it appears elsewhere, for example, in the way that politics and economics get divided as subjects, or philosophy and sciences. The push towards interdisciplinary projects as a way of eking out further advancements in knowledge is evidence of the failures of the bourgeois-style of categorizing the world into bourgeois-institution-supporting fields.
This sort of selective teaching [in my Sociology 141: Organizations course] is just one example—and a particularly intentional and salient example—of the broader way that society generally doesn’t expose people to possible new ways of living. The ideas we are structurally, selectively exposed to end up restricting people’s understanding of what is possible. And when people don’t think that liberatory forms of living are possible, they often end up justifying the existing social structures, and accommodating themselves to these less-desirable ways of living.
— from my post ‘A Tale of Conservative University Sociology’
My intention is not to say that categories/fields of research are wholesale junk. Reductionism in research is important and useful, and can help break down complex problems into smaller ones which are easier to take on. While I support more interdisciplinary and holistic/systematic work, that is not my point here. My point is that the complex problems that are of interest to establishment actors—who are interested in maintaining capitalism and increasing profits; are very different from the complex problems which capture the interest of people like myself—people who want to establish alternative, more egalitarian, more communal, more liberated ways of life.
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A leftist university would, in my view, categorize the world into fields of research which more closely reflect our socially-oriented research interests. Physics, the rest of the hard sciences, and Humanities would likely stay mostly untouched—they are near the extreme ends of the knowledge-seeking spectrum that spans from ‘rigorous objective research’ to ‘inventive subjective interpretation’. Perhaps there would be a closer tie between what is presently theoretical science and philosophy; and closer ties among what is presently humanities, anthropology, and archaeology.
As for the subjects conceptually between the extremes of hard sciences and humanities—that is, things like Social Sciences, Engineering, Biology, Medicine—they would likely undergo a lot of mixing and matching to blend socially-informing research with learning the practical methods of building the infrastructure within which we live our lives. It would be expected of those computer scientists who are writing influential algorithms that exert influence over people’s attention and lives, that they would need to be more fluent about the secondary effects of these algorithms on broader society. City planning and engineering in general would need to be better designed around things like inclusivity, accessibility, and building robust community.
In a leftist society, new fields of study would arise, likely divided into categories characterized by the specific purposes/institutions that the socially-informed person is building infrastructure to fulfill/support. Socially-interested engineering jobs would generate a demand for socially-interested fields of study for the particular corresponding engineering problems.
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Of course, I can still see the necessity for pure social sciences and pure engineering—they would specialize in advancing general social-scientific research and engineering practices. For example, we want to encourage developments in rigorous, effective social scientific research practices; and we would want things like generally-applicable engineering research into material sciences. However, these would likely be considered mostly as publicly-serving academic fields, and less-so as non-academic, career-oriented subjects.
As it is now, the academic/non-academic orientations are reversed: the pure fields are considered non-academically career-oriented, while interdisciplinary things like research into the social effects of engineering projects get viewed as a mostly academic problem. We can see why capitalist societies care less about the sorts of connections between being socially-conscious and being practically effective—capitalist engineering projects are guided by top-down profit-motivated hierarchies, so there’s not much room for socially-conscious design unless the bourgeois institution is pressured into it.
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The interests of the majority are not reflected in our institutions. The rot spreads as wide as to include our institutions of higher education. It spreads as deep as to define the fields of study which get presented to us as natural, practical ways of categorizing our relationships to the world. It is difficult to be a leftist without multidisciplinary study—but for us, we can see how our “multidisciplinary” studies are all unified into one: the study of building revolution, of building a structurally better world.