Assistant Dean for Undergraduate Education Jeffrey Wolcowitz says he believes that undergraduates have followed the trend of Faculty members.

"Student are more like the Faculty in the move to specialize within their fields," Wolcowitz says. "What is in the water for Faculty is also in the water for students."

Outgoing Dean of Undergraduate Education David Pilbeam says that the move towards academic specialization is linked to the expansion of graduate programs in the 1960s, a time he calls "an era of expansion and segmentation."

"[Academics were concerned with] the production of new knowledge," he says. "With more people having to produce new knowledge, they had to define new niches."

Wolcowitz says the specialization of Faculty research interests led to specialization in course instruction as well.

"There's less of a sense that the pinnacle in the field is to be able to teach a broad survey course, but to teach the narrow, specialist course, to be on the cutting edge," he says.

Yet Buell says that as Faculty members focus their work in an effort to carve out an academic niche, they are becoming more cognizant of the pit-falls that come a tremendous academic division of labor.

"At the same time, another trend line that I've seen...is deparochialization--that is, an increasing awareness that you cannot do work that is considered important by your peers if you tunnel yourself into a small enclave," Buell says.

Specialization also poses a threat to the historic notion that undergraduates should study a classical canon of knowledge.

A petition signed by more than 100 English concentrators last month called in part for reforms of the general exam which many seniors, including Emily J. Wood '97, say they felt assumed "a fixed canon of text we should know, when the department all along has been telling us [otherwise]."

Buell says he believes that the classical canon is dying because scholars have differing ideas of what the canon should be.

"Professional and pedagogical life is moving away from a canonization model towards what you might call a conversational model or a model of competition within which different perspectives have play," he says.

Interdisciplinary Studies

Another curious trend is that while specialization has been on the rise, interdisciplinary studies have also been increasing.

The ESPP concentration is a combination of both trends. The focus on environmental issues encourages specialization early on in an undergraduate's academic career.