Three Cheers for the Generalists!

As a follow-up to my posts on integration and radical thinking here and here, I just wanted to note today's David Brooks' column,"Learning to Think, And Live." Brooks has a lot of interesting things to say, but here's one fine comment from his article:

[O]ur universities operate too much like a guild system, throwing plenty of people with dissertations at students, not enough with practical knowledge. Why aren't there more scholars ... who teach students to be generalists, to see the great connections? Instead, the academy encourages squirrel-like specialization. Too many universities have become professionalized information-transmission systems ...

Amen.