Listening to the Professoriate

academic profession has long been a gathering of disparate fields. Even in the beginning, some eight centuries ago in Bologna, Paris, and Oxford, the universities were composites of law and medicine and theology and administrative training for state and church. Now within the academic estate there are molecular biology and high-energy physics and Renaissance literature and childhood learning and computer science, in a never-ending stream of specialties within a wide array of disciplines and professional areas of study. Beginning in the last half of the nineteenth century, the American system of higher education moved rapidly into a luxuriant garden of subjects, as Walter Metzger has pointed out, generous to a fault in admitting to the curriculum even the arts of the home and the bat-