Michael Cain - At one of those, one of the people who did have a doctorate made the observation that yes, Mike had done multiple projects that would easily qualify for a PhD in terms of originality and impact, but all cut across multiple disciplines so no department would ever accept them.
I was in a similar situation with my dissertation, which spanned informatics, film and media studies, and rhetoric. I had people from each of those three disciplines on my committee (two of whom had appointments in English, which is what made my project possible).
I earned the degree, but there were no journals that felt my work was in the pocket for what they covered, and no programs or departments that were looking to hire someone with an oddball set of research interests.
So I teach rhetoric and composition, and transmedial rhetoric sits and gathers dust.
2025-10-30 00:56:40
I think this is a particular problem for academics specializing in East Asia because of the problem I faced: Getting fluent in one language/culture is tough, in two is exponentially tougher and three requires something on the level of cosmic coincidence.
I'm not discounting the specific language challenges that you identify here. I suspect the same can be said of linguists that are attempting to do comparative study between geographically distant and isolated branches of Indo-European - leaning too hard on the common ground of shared language and not doing enough to understand the divergent histories, local influences, and historical contexts of the moments they are comparing. These complexities are difficult to work through and require multiple bridging assumptions.
On a more general level, though, I think that the disciplinary specialization of university departments and the specialist communities that form around these disciplinary homes may also lead to another form of overestimation of individual expertise and critical perspective. Scholars submit their work to specialist journals, and the editors on those journals share methodological approaches and disciplinary identities with most of the people submitting papers for publication. And even if the paper does get submitted to an outside expert to verify parts that are outside of the author's expertise, those outside experts often find themselves in unfamiliar methodologies and contexts that limit how much they are able to interact with the wider implications of what is being asserted in the article.
If we had more cross-disciplinary appointments and more interdisciplinary collaboration, we'd probably have better structures in place for working through these sorts of blind spots and assumptions.
Alas, that is not the model on which academia currently runs.
Michael Cain - At one of those, one of the people who did have a doctorate made the observation that yes, Mike had done multiple projects that would easily qualify for a PhD in terms of originality and impact, but all cut across multiple disciplines so no department would ever accept them.
I was in a similar situation with my dissertation, which spanned informatics, film and media studies, and rhetoric. I had people from each of those three disciplines on my committee (two of whom had appointments in English, which is what made my project possible).
I earned the degree, but there were no journals that felt my work was in the pocket for what they covered, and no programs or departments that were looking to hire someone with an oddball set of research interests.
So I teach rhetoric and composition, and transmedial rhetoric sits and gathers dust.
I'm not discounting the specific language challenges that you identify here. I suspect the same can be said of linguists that are attempting to do comparative study between geographically distant and isolated branches of Indo-European - leaning too hard on the common ground of shared language and not doing enough to understand the divergent histories, local influences, and historical contexts of the moments they are comparing. These complexities are difficult to work through and require multiple bridging assumptions.
On a more general level, though, I think that the disciplinary specialization of university departments and the specialist communities that form around these disciplinary homes may also lead to another form of overestimation of individual expertise and critical perspective. Scholars submit their work to specialist journals, and the editors on those journals share methodological approaches and disciplinary identities with most of the people submitting papers for publication. And even if the paper does get submitted to an outside expert to verify parts that are outside of the author's expertise, those outside experts often find themselves in unfamiliar methodologies and contexts that limit how much they are able to interact with the wider implications of what is being asserted in the article.
If we had more cross-disciplinary appointments and more interdisciplinary collaboration, we'd probably have better structures in place for working through these sorts of blind spots and assumptions.
Alas, that is not the model on which academia currently runs.