By Michael De Land
In Max Weber’s classic lecture “Science as a Vocation,” he discusses the ways in which modern American universities are becoming hyper-rationalized intellectual factories.
Part of the problem, he says, is that the professional academics are being forced to become increasingly specialized.
They must “put on blinders” to perspectives that don’t fall under their particular area of expertise and can only be widely considered a success if they are “strict specialists.”
While this academic division of labor is great for producing increasingly efficient technology, it pigeonholes the minds of aspiring academics who seek real intellectual inspiration.
This process seems to be increasingly true at UCLA.
Picking a major, for many people, is one of the most stressful decisions of their undergraduate career. I know from my own experience that by the end of my second year I was not ready to commit to just one or two academic perspectives.
Additionally, if I really aspire to be a professional academic, picking a field of study isn’t enough.
I am forced to choose a subfield, a theoretical orientation, and whether I want to do quantitative and qualitative research.
The new URSA policy that limits non-major students from enrolling in classes during first pass is absolutely contributing to the hyper-rationalization of the education system.
It forces more students to become specialized thinkers and limits their ability to have a holistic education in which they learn to think on their own.
Part of the problem is that these academic “fields” of study are entirely socially constructed.
Science has been divided by the capitalistic academic machine into a limited number of somewhat arbitrary categories.
For example, I am interested in studying interpersonal interaction, language use, conversation structures, informal social routines and social order.
These ideas are touched on in a number of humanities concentrations. Anthropology, communication studies, English, sociology, economics, political science, philosophy and possibly other areas of study incorporate some aspects of the social processes and theories that I’m inspired by.
The reality is that human knowledge does not exist in fixed “major” categories, but on a vast spectrum with many shades of grey.
By making it more difficult to enroll in classes outside of one’s major, URSA has limited students’ ability to obtain a truly holistic and varied education.
De Land is a fourth-year sociology student.