Years ago, I attended a college graduation ceremony in Missouri. The graduates and faculty wore black gowns. During the procession, the university chorus sang “Guadeamus Igitur” (Latin for “Therefore let us rejoice”). The degrees—bachelor of arts, master of arts, and doctorates—were the same as those awarded centuries ago at Oxford and the Sorbonne. Thus, I thought, did the European Middle Ages survive in the plains of the Middle West.

　　In the form of seventeenth-century thinker René Descartes’s philosophy, the Old World exerts an even greater influence on American higher education. Descartes’s mind-body dualism informs the basic structure of the American university: the division between the sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities.

　　There are many ways to divide up a university. For example, one might draw a line between the “theoretical” and the “practical.” The “theoretical” division would house the departments of theology, math, and physics, as those fields involve matters somewhat distant from everyday private life, while the “practical” division would house economics and literature—for what is more relevant to everyday private life than money and love? For over a century, we have chosen Cartesian mind-body dualism as our organizing principle.

　　The science division houses biology, chemistry, physics, engineering, and computer science. It corresponds to Descartes’s view of the physical world as something best understood through mathematics and fundamentally different in substance from the world of the mind.

　　Whereas science studies things that move, social science and the humanities study things that think—in other words, human minds, with the mind itself subdivided into “mind” and “spirit.” Like science, social science studies minds using rational methods, such as logic, observation, analysis, and induction. The humanities focus more on the irrational “spirit” that prods people to seek uplift, connection, and meaning, causing truth to be more subjective.

　　Turf wars have sometimes threatened the integrity of the tripartite division, as one division’s intellectual creations encroached upon the other two. In the past, science trespassed on social science under the guise of phrenology, social Darwinism, and eugenics. Social science trespassed on the humanities by threatening to replace religion with Marxism. The humanities trespassed on social science by pushing the ideologies of Christian socialism and Catholic liberation theology, then trespassed on science by policing language with political correctness. Despite these flare-ups, the tripartite division has endured.

　　Yet that division may no longer be relevant, a point that my own career path has shown me.

　　I have terminal degrees in two of the three divisions, science (medicine) and social science, and have probably read enough literature and philosophy to merit a master’s degree in the third. When I earned the second degree, during the 1990s, in political science, the tripartite division still made sense. The country’s division of labor was not set up for those seeking multiple or cross-disciplinary careers. On the contrary, to excel and prosper, one specialized. Whether in science, technology, social science, or the humanities, one narrowed one’s focus to master a small bit of intellectual or professional terrain, thereby becoming the “go-to” person on that subject. The emphasis on specialization continued into one’s professional life. 

　　The university’s tripartite division worked analogously to how the grade school bell worked during the early industrial age. Grade school prepared students for factory work, which was scheduled around arriving at the plant, a morning break, lunch, an afternoon break, then leaving, with each event heralded by the ringing of a bell. In the same vein, the tripartite division prepared college students for careers in an economy where field mastery—and, better yet, subfield mastery—was essential.

　　I stretched matters by getting more than one terminal degree. Nevertheless, I expected my professional life to mirror the university’s tripartite division: anesthesiology would make possible an interesting career and a decent livelihood; political science would be the keener interest; literature, especially the classic novels, would be an enjoyable avocation. None of the fields would mix. Instead, I would drop two separate anchors in two separate fields.

　　Education must include the kinds of experiences that defy easy categorization or may even be one-off events, but which allow for a more complete picture of the human condition.

　　But things didn’t work out as planned. I wanted to write essays on political science, but the commercial magazine editors told me they didn’t want to hear my theories on politics. “Boring,” they said. Instead, they wanted me to tell stories from my anesthesiology practice and connect them to politics and culture. Worse, I sometimes found the discourse in political science too jargony to understand. I also noticed a tendency in the field to look at life through the lens of theory rather than to approach life in the way most people know it and live it. Professional political science grew less interesting to me as a result. Therefore, I extracted the parts from the social sciences and the humanities that focused on how people are in reality rather than in the abstract—where the truth about people is rugged and unkempt instead of seemingly smooth and polished, as found in a concept—mixed them together with medical practice, and wrote.

　　Those parts not only helped me gain the interest of publishers, but they also helped me become a better doctor, which is probably more important. I cannot easily give form to the truth of how they helped me; that truth lies beyond my ability to grasp it clearly, let alone to express it. Sometimes I can make a direct connection. For example, my understanding of ideology helped me to discern and resist movements within medicine that later proved to be nothing more than risky fads. My understanding of a certain character type—the person obsessed with status—taught me to name-drop prestigious university medical studies whenever such a patient wavered over whether to proceed with an operation, thereby putting him or her at ease. Along with life experience, the social sciences and humanities taught me about specific patterns in human behavior. But most valuable were those parts that portrayed human beings in their greatest complexity—for instance, baffled, ordinary people, passionate people of flesh and bone, living in a particular time in history, in a particular tempest of the world—rather than concepts and ideological constructs that made people unreal and two-dimensional.

　　My career may contain lessons for what future college-educated workers might do to add value in the age of AI. Less of a premium will be placed on specialization, as the machine will perform the specialized calculating tasks or bank the specialized knowledge. Instead, workers supervising the machines will need judgment. They will need to know whether or not to follow a rule, and how to handle a particular situation that deviates from the general ideal. To develop this ability, vague as it is, they will need those parts of the liberal arts that deal in more than just concepts. Their education must include the kinds of experiences that defy easy categorization or may even be one-off events, but which allow for a more complete picture of the human condition. For example, they will need to know the concept of “love” as defined in some official dictionary, but they will also need to know how philosophers, theologians, and novelists have tried to grasp the meaning of this seemingly simple concept.

　　Imagine universities with a changed structure, meant to help prepare graduates for this role. A tripartite division will remain, only there will be different divisions. The social sciences and the humanities will be distributed more evenly across the new divisions rather than confined to their own separate spheres.

　　In this imagined university, the first division, and by far the largest, will be the Professional School. Here, students will train for what most students go to college for: a job. The school will house, for instance, business, engineering, the biomedical sciences, and the health professions, which account for almost half of all undergraduate degrees in the country. It will also house the other STEM fields, computer science, information services, homeland security, and other job-oriented programs. By placing these fields in the largest and most important division, colleges will demonstrate the importance they place on job placement. Yet this division will also include social science and humanities faculty who will teach those parts of their respective fields most relevant to everyday life, to help shape the minds of students so that later, when an unforeseen problem arises and memorized rules do not apply, they will have the prudence, insight, and judgment to navigate complex problems that lack ready-made solutions.

　　On one level, this means faculty will help students think broadly, and to see events from different angles rather than just from the politically correct angle. But these faculty, being older, better read, and with more life experience than their students, will also mix certain aspects of themselves into their curriculum, to give students a more nuanced understanding of life, which is not the same as faculty mixing in their political point of view to give students a unilinear, cartoonish view of life.

　　Faculty who teach in this style already exist within the university, but sometimes they feel like outliers in their own departments. Some have privately confessed to me in a self-deprecating way how they are “old school,” how they “don’t do theory,” and how they just want to teach the books they love without getting overly quantitative or political. In the Professional School, a literature professor teaching Tolstoy might ask students, “Is it true that all happy families are happy in the same way, while all unhappy families are unhappy in their own unique way?” to provoke thought about the limits of happiness, but not to frame the happiness debate as a matter of oppressor versus oppressed. Yet every professor will be a little different in the Professional School, unlike in the other schools, which will focus more on theory, method, and doctrine, and where faculty will be less artistic and more regimented in their approach.

　　The second division will be the Scholarship School. Here, students will search out new knowledge in the social sciences and the humanities—but not in STEM, which will remain within the Professional School, as those fields have too many relevant business and professional applications. Right now, roughly 15 percent of US undergraduates major in the social sciences, while approximately 10 percent major in the humanities. For the social sciences and the humanities to be given one whole division out of three represents an equitable slice of the pie.

　　In the Scholarship School, students in political science, sociology, economics, and psychology will apply quantitative analysis and the scientific method. They will conduct surveys and perform social experiments. The outcomes may or may not be true—in psychology, for example, reportedly only 39 percent of psychology experiments have reproducible results, while in economics, failed predictions famously abound, most recently over whether inflation will occur in response to a particular policy. Nor will the research outcomes necessarily be useful. But sometimes these fields do generate interesting and important work.

　　Meanwhile, the humanities faculty in the Scholarship School will bring candles into dark, unexplored corners—for example, tabulating the kinds of books that existed in circulating libraries during the Victorian era, or the debate over whether Vermeer used a single source of illumination to paint Girl With a Pearl Earring, or simply imagined the light. Knowledge will be pursued for its own sake, without obvious economic relevance. Much of this knowledge will be quantitative.

　　The third division will be the Social Activism School. Here, activist professors will teach future activists. It will house a variety of ideologically oriented disciplines, such as women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. Africana studies, and peace and justice studies, as well as those faculty in traditional social science and humanities departments who are already more social activists than scholars. No one knows the true percentage of social activists in the academy (one might infer 30 percent from a recent essay by ex-Harvard professor James Hankins), but in any event, the point is to separate this population of academics from the scholars, for the benefit of both faculty and students.

　　Creating a separate division for ideologically inspired activists is not meant to squeeze or belittle these people. On the contrary, social justice activism has emerged as a serious career alternative in today’s tight job market, including among street protestors, who reportedly earn a decent living while also enjoying a certain prestige in progressive circles. Indeed, the position of social activist today is comparable to the position of a sales clerk during the early twentieth century, when people left the factory for work behind the department store counter. They earned similar wages as before, but, by having the opportunity to dress fashionably and demonstrate some education, while also being able to connect with others rather than toil alone on an assembly line, they could imagine themselves solidly middle-class.

　　At the very least, a separate division devoted to social activism allows for truth in advertising. Students will know what they are getting when they take classes in this division, just as they will know what they are getting when they take humanities and social science courses in the other two divisions.

　　The Professional School will nurture the cultivated person. The Scholarship School will nurture the scholar. The Social Justice School will nurture the activist. Employers will reliably and predictably get the thoughtful, sensible, cultivated workers they want. Job placement will be given high (if not the highest) priority. Censorship will be confined to the Social Justice School. Faculty and students with different motivations will be separated so they can live on campus in order and peace. The change may not lower tuition costs, although a more efficient college geared toward job placement may result in fewer administrators. But it might be more effective at tackling some of the other big problems colleges now face.