I prefer to be a fox. My goal is to be a fox!

Tomorrow will the first day of classes in a new academic year, which is all the more the reason why I have been thinking about the kind of a teacher and a scholar I am. 

One such chain of thought led me to recalling reading, while in graduate school, Isiah Berlin's wonderful essay on The Hedgehog and the Fox and how much I deeply resonated with his "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing".

This article takes up that same idea, and notes:

In an age of specialists, does it matter that generalists no longer thrive? The world is hardly short of knowledge. Countless books are written, canvases painted and songs recorded. A torrent of research is pouring out. A new orthodoxy, popularised by Malcolm Gladwell, sees obsessive focus as the key that unlocks genius.

Just knowing about a lot of things has never been easier. Never before have dabblers been so free to paddle along the shore and dip into the first rock pool that catches the eye. If you have an urge to take off your shoes and test the water, countless specialists are ready to hold your hand.

And yet you will never get very deep. Depth is for monomaths—which is why experts so often seem to miss what really matters. Specialisation has made the study of English so sterile that students lose much of the joy in reading great literature for its own sake. A generation of mathematically inclined economists neglected many of  Keynes’s insights about the Depression because he put them into words. For decades economists sweated over fiendish mathematical equations, only to be brought down to earth by the credit crunch: Keynes’s well-turned phrases had come back to life. Part of my regret at the scarcity of polymaths is sentimental. Polymaths were the product of a particular time, when great learning was a mark of distinction and few people had money and leisure. Their moment has passed, like great houses or the horse-drawn carriage. The world may well be a better place for the specialisation that has come along instead. The pity is that progress has to come at a price. Civilisation has put up fences that people can no longer leap across; a certain type of mind is worth less. The choices modern life imposes are duller, more cramped.

A monomath I am not, and was never keen on becoming one for the very reason articulated in that essay--I felt cramped, imprisoned, and cutoff from everything else whenever I was on that track.  I didn't want that.  It simply wasn't me.  I knew well that I have naturally been inclined to know a little bit of as much as I can.  I am excited I am not a hedgehog and, more importantly, I do not pretend to be one.
 
I know all too well that I am no polymath either--am way, way short of those intellectual abilities.  Am glad though that I am where I am, knowing I yam what I yam ;)