What’s the Deal?
First published: November 24, 2025. Posted here for archival purposes.
“Everything in Between” is about the systems, institutions, and practices that people build, “things” of a sort that sit in between us, between groups of us, between “us” and “them,” and between us and other systems and institutions that seem terribly far away: “the market,” “the state,” the universe, and so on.
In addition to my posts here, I co-host a podcast titled “Your Leadership Podcast,” which is available on Spotify and wherever fine podcasts are available. I write about law and legal education at TaxProf Blog and for several years co-hosted a podcast about technology and law titled “Your Future Law Podcast.“ My older blog about Pittsburgh and renewing cities, Pittsblog, is still available online, as is my original blog about law, technology, and governance.
Montclair State University, a large public university in New Jersey, made headlines in the academic world recently by announcing a plan to restructure academic departments in its College of Humanities and Social Sciences into multidisciplinary “schools,” “to create synergy, promote resource sharing, and build capacity for innovation.” The quotation is from the plan that the current Dean of the College sent to the faculty of the College.
Mostly, here I want to capture some of the reporting that responded to the announcement.
Partly, I want to echo the commentary that notes the complicated and not at all natural connections between scholarly disciplines (which usually suppose a commonality of research focus and/or research method(s)) and the departments of a college or university (which are partly mechanisms of contemporary bureaucratic governance and control, linked to budgets, the power to recruit and retain faculty members, the power to award degrees, and partly a legacy of early 19th century moves – at Harvard, and at the University of Virginia – to organize fields in American universities more or less along the lines of German universities).
There is a tendency in modern higher education to equate disciplines and departments, but that’s too quick. To take only one example: universities (specifically) and society (generally) can have history and historians (and should, and for generations, have), but a university does not necessarily need a “Department of History,” even if having a Department of History is in many practical respects a good idea, even a great one. Perhaps the most important thing that a Department of History produces is not history (which is to say, scholarship that uses historical methods) but credentialed historians – experts – who teach and practice history.
“What are departments for, and have the current departments outlived their historical usefulness?” are questions that have percolated around higher education for decades. I did just a few minutes of research and came up with Richard Edwards, “The Academic Department: How Does It Fit Into the University Reform Agenda?,” Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning 31:5 (1999) (DOI:10.1080/00091389909604219); Hershey H. Friedman, “The Obsolescence of Academic Departments,” in Radical Pedagogy 3.2 (2001). Imagining and then proposing a reorganization of academic units at the departmental level is not, in a broad sense, out of step with the history of higher education.
The proposal seems to grate in a couple of more specific senses.
First, much of the reaction to the Montclair State University proposal focuses on how students will or should react, particularly undergraduate students. I have no way to know whether that concern is justified or overblown, but reading the proposal itself, at least the version that appears online, I read less about students and more about faculty, about faculty recruitment and faculty research, and about creating an environment that enables that sorts of boundary-crossing conversations and research that almost everyone in the academy recognizes are desirable but often difficult to execute given, among other things, universities’ legacy departmental structures. It is undoubtedly possible that beneath the comparatively serene faculty-centered surface of the proposal lie roiling currents of money, power, politics, and battles for control over near-term and longer-term interests.
Second, one worries about replacing one set of disciplinary silos that feature a well-known blend of benefits and costs, intellectually and financially speaking, with a new set of borders and lane-lines that come with speculative benefits and unknowable costs. (That hyperlink goes to Hollis Robbins’s essay explaining the power of disciplinary silos.) I’m usually all-in on colleges and universities trying new things, especially if faculty are put in positions of responsibility for coming up with and executing them. (In this instance, faculty seem to be on the receiving end rather than the initiating end.) But “Innovation 101” teaches that you should not lock in something new, organizationally speaking, until and unless you’ve tried it out and figured out whether it’s working. Maybe it needs to be tweaked? Withdrawn entirely? Limited in scale? Allowed to ferment on its own? If boundary-crossing (and boundary-spanning) faculty connections are worthwhile and productive, especially for research but also, in all likelihood for both undergraduates and graduate students, then there are other and perhaps less dramatic ways to help make that happen. Faculty, like other professionals, traffic in time and traffic in money. Make faculty time more flexible, administratively, while preserving courses and course sequences for students. Offer research and teaching support that rewards cross-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary collaboration with additive funding. Too often, “supplemental” support for that activity isn’t “supplemental” at all; at best, it arrives as a substitute for existing financial resources.
If it’s important that faculty collaborate and explore new worlds, bureaucratically inscribing the pathways that they might follow seems at best premature, and perhaps self-defeating. The image above is from the Billy Wilder classic “The Apartment,” rather than from “The Department.” But I am attached to the classic concluding line delivered by Shirley MacLaine: “Shut up and deal.” If that Montclair State plan is adopted, it seems that’s what the faculty will have to do.
On to the commentary:
The Montclarion, from the School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University:
A petition titled “Montclair State Is Eliminating All Humanities Departments” quickly circulated across the community, garnering over 2,600 signatures. The petition outlines students’ concerns about the dissolution of the CHSS departments, which serve more than 5,000 students.
Supporters of the petition argue that eliminating the departments could weaken academic oversight, reduce student access to specialized mentorship and diminish the university’s commitment to literacy and social sciences. Jazmin Perez, a senior English major and creator of the petition, is alarmed by how restructuring would drastically alter the way the CHSS operates.
“It’s the dissolving of the departments that is the biggest concern,” Perez told The Montclarion. “[The administration] wants to eradicate department leadership in the replacement of bloated [structures]. Do not dissolve our departments, [don’t] get rid of department leadership and keep faculty autonomy in curriculum and scheduling.”
Scott Carlson, at The Chronicle of Higher Education:
The salient question is how the structure of academic bureaucracy affects the reach and appeal of disciplines: Are academic departments a vital home base for disciplines that would otherwise get lost in bigger, more amorphous multidisciplinary schools? Or are they just another insular bureaucratic structure that isolates disciplines and, for the humanities and social sciences in particular, hampers students from better understanding how English, history, or anthropology connect to real-world jobs and “wicked” problems?
The debate at Montclair State also touches on intersecting challenges facing liberal-arts programs, says Joy Connolly, president of the American Council of Learned Societies. Declines in enrollment and an unfavorable narrative about the value of majors have contributed to a shrinking share of students majoring in the humanities, often because career trajectories are uncertain. But advocates can’t simply fall back on “telling a better story” about their disciplines, she says. Academics need to think actively about how to restructure what they offer.
The professoriate is also changing. New generations of scholars are increasingly focusing on interdisciplinarity, seeking double appointments, moving into interdisciplinary centers, or tackling research questions that cross disciplines. “So does that affect the way we should organize ourselves in departments? Maybe it should,” Connolly says. Maybe the university of the future is a series of disciplinary groupings or area studies. Maybe undergraduate programs and research initiatives are designed to tackle problems, and are not imagined to be permanent. “These questions, they’re so complicated and they bump up against questions of accreditation and new models for the distribution of faculty and graduate students, and what we think an undergraduate education looks like in an age of AI.”
With humanities studies on the decline across the country, Montclair State is not alone in proposing a reorganization that administrators hope will help attract more students. But eliminating all the academic departments in a liberal arts college that is not hemorrhaging enrollment would be a very unusual step.
Though professors’ inboxes have been flooded with concern about the intentions and impact of the restructuring, it remains unclear what it will mean. Is the move, as college administrators argue, designed to get professors to collaborate more across disciplinary lines, and share administrative burdens? Or is the end of academic departments, and elected department chairs, a way to weaken the rigor that makes areas of study distinctive, making the humanities easier to shrink and ultimately push out?
Adam Rzepka, an English professor who specializes in early modern literature, suspects the worst. The plan is “insane,” he said in an interview, and is a fundamental attack on the university’s core mission: expert-led education.
“Colleges and universities only have one thing to sell at the end of the day, and that is learning from experts,” he said. “Otherwise, it’s just more high school, but you have to go into debt for it.”
What others have to say
Selections from new-ish commentary about the institutions of higher education and institutions of expertise, shared because these folks have me thinking, not necessarily because I agree.
Steven Mintz, “AI Killed the Take-Home Essay. COVID Killed Attendance. Now What?: Reclaiming Learning in an Age of Distraction and Artificial Intelligence”:
I have always believed that college should cultivate intellectual independence, adulthood responsibility, and intrinsic motivation.
I resisted mandatory attendance because I wanted students to value learning for its own sake, not come to class out of fear of penalty.
I assigned traditional essays because I believed that serious writing required time, solitude, and the freedom to struggle privately with ideas.
I trusted students to do the reading and trusted that their essays reflected their thinking.
I no longer believe that the conditions which made these principles reasonable still exist. Something fundamental has broken. The pedagogical world I was trained for has dissolved with startling speed. And I find myself, late in my career, having to rebuild my practice from the ground up—not because I have lost faith in liberal education, but because I am trying desperately to preserve it.
What has forced this reckoning? A convergence of disruptions that have destabilized every assumption on which traditional college teaching depends.
The pandemic accelerated existing trends. Ubiquitous technology fractured students’ attention. Economic pressure instrumentalized learning. Therapeutic culture reshaped students’ relationship to intellectual challenge. And now artificial intelligence has rendered our primary tools for assessing learning—essays, exams, analytical writing of any kind produced outside our direct observation—functionally obsolete.
(Professor Mintz is a historian. The methods he is adopting (or reverting to), in the section of his post that follows the premises above, are suited to his field and to his teaching goals. They are not suited to everyone in education, and not to me. His comment about “analytical writing of any kind” may be broader than it needs to be. But his sense of the scale of the disruption is dead on.)
Elizabeth Van Nostrand, “The Boring Part of Bell Labs”:
It took me a long time to realize that Bell Labs was cool. You see, my dad worked at Bell Labs, and he has not done a single cool thing in his life except create me and bring a telescope to my third grade class. Nothing he was involved with could ever be cool, especially after the standard set by his grandfather who is allegedly on a patent for the television.
It turns out I was partially right. The Bell Labs everyone talks about is the research division at Murray Hill. They’re the ones that invented transistors and solar cells. My dad was in the applied division at Holmdel, where he did things like design slide rulers so salesmen could estimate costs.
(That is the set-up for a long interview with her father. Among many delightful and not boring things that she and he make clear is that intellectual and material infrastructures – infrastructure being is exactly what Bell Labs was – are important and powerful because they support all sorts of uses and purposes, many of which cannot be (and should not be) predicted in advance and many of which do not feature in headlines in history. One of the many things that I dislike about the contemporary practices of US universities, including my own, is how they celebrate the handful of researchers who happen to produce pathbreaking and transformative and money-making scientific things and tend to ignore the many researchers who go about their research and teaching with discipline and passion and who produce (and/or preserve), you know, knowledge, and who get very little attention from PR flacks or even what remains of the local media. Universities are infrastructures.)
My bookshelf
Like a lot of academics, I read a lot. Like a lot of law professors, I read a lot about law and about governance. But I also read a lot of things just for fun and a lot of other things because you never know where interesting ideas might come from.
Completed: Jimmy Wales [founder of Wikipedia], ”The Seven Rules of Trust: A Blueprint for Building Things That Last” (Penguin Random House, 2025).
From the publisher’s site:
From the beginning, people predicted Wikipedia’s demise. Instead, this global experiment in sharing knowledge and expertise online has become part of the fabric of modern, connected life. Today, every month, people view Wikipedia 11 billion times—just in the English language. The Internet’s encyclopedia has become a global utility, like water or electricity, and we rarely pause to consider the extraordinary fact of its existence.
Long before it became the biggest collection of knowledge in the history of the world, Wikipedia had to overcome its greatest challenge: getting strangers on the Internet to trust each other. They had to trust that others would not be abusive or uncivil. They had to trust that others would not unfairly change or erase their contributions. They had to trust that people had good intentions.
Trust, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales says, is a treasure. But it is not inanimate, like gold or gems. Trust is a living thing that can and must be cultivated. This book will show you how. And it will reveal how his organization, this one-time punchline, has become a global authority—in the same two decades when the public’s trust in everything else, from government to social media, has trended backwards.
Every community on earth depends on trust; it underpins our capacity to know things, and it is at an all-time low. Inspiring, approachable, and packed with candid lessons from the early days of Wikipedia, The Seven Rules of Trust is a guide to kickstarting a positive loop of accountability and creativity—and to building things that stand the test of time.
As much as I like and use Wikipedia, the book itself was a disappointment. I more or less expected it to be, given its brevity and its breathless promise, but I am fascinated by questions about trust (where does it come from? what does it do? what does “trust” conceal?). (Fortunately, the book is short, and it’s light reading.) I know enough about Wikipedia to know most of its origin story and most of how it is governed (how it governs itself) today. So I know what’s missing from Jimmy Wales’s story. (Quick answer to that story: copyright.) And I know that there is more to “trust” than “Wikipedia is weirdly successful and therefore fascinating.”
Next on my list, a bit of a departure: Helen Garner, “The Season” (Penguin Random House, 2024). I spotted this one thanks to Roger Bennett, of Men in Blazers. How Rog manages to read as much as he does is a puzzle to me, given his prodigious output of podcast and vlogs. Will I dig his taste in literature as much as I dig his taste in football?
Thanks for sticking with me.