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 ;)

I blog about all these .... and that is why I am a "failure?"

As I get older, I seem to get even more amazed at how little I know.  As I joke around with students, the library building on campus serves as a physical reminder that I don't know a damn thing.  At USC, there were libraries all over the campus, and they all served me well in conveying whatever I needed to know and ensuring that I knew that I didn't know.

My innate interests in a whole variety of topics draw me into strange readings and places.  For instance, I was reading a news item at the Christian Science Monitor website, and it had a related link, which was a test on science literacy.  So, of course, I took that test and got a tad disappointed that I got only 44 out of the 50 questions correct.  It should be 45, I thought to myself, because my finger slipped over the touchpad and I clicked an incorrect answer.

My blogging also reflects this curiosity about everything around me.  It also means that sometimes the visitors to the blog are people who have searched for, ... well, like in this list of some of the search words that brought visitors to my site yesterday. 

It is neat to look at this list and think that my interests are so diverse--from half-sarees to ecuador to the armenian genocide! 

There is a serious downside to such a diverse intellectual interest: the half-wit that I am, this means that I "lose out" in the professional world of specialization.  After all, I am not a Freeman Dyson, for instance, to be a specialist in a gazillion things. 

Thus, choosing not to be a specialist in any one topic means that I am not the expert on the productivity of left-handed female labor in farming in Timbuktu.  While this is an exaggerated example, intellectual specialization has become so reductionist that talking to academics has become boring anymore, given that most want to talk about is only a topic or two in which they are "experts."  Intellectual insecurity also seems to preclude most academics from getting out of their comfort zones; it ain't easy, I suppose to say "I don't know" when we have PhDs :)

I am very happy to tell students I don't know a damn thing.  Strangely enough, my admission of ignorance makes most of them convinced that I am putting on a show that I don't know.  One student remarked in class a couple of years ago, "oh, false modesty!  we better be careful with you then."  Students have also told me that this attitude of mine is such a contrast to most faculty they have experienced, who, apparently are so convinced that they know it all that they freely bullshit on topics that are far outside their "expertise." 

I would rather be a failure in the twilight of a mediocre career than pretend to be an expert bullshitter in a medicore career :)

And my blogging on all things that interest me shall continue as well!