It is becoming abundantly clear that universities, or at least MY university prefers insulated well aligned education patterns where one picks a trajectory and propels along that vector. Indecision, which is viewed as the desire for a broad scope of education and learning, is probably the worst attribute a student can have. Being ignorant of the world outside your domain is competitively adaptive - you’re more tightly focused on your specialization.
Obviously this is news to nobody - the very division of arts from sciences, and the subdivisions with those groups has been around for ages, and everyone knows it sucks - but everyone keeps doing it anyway.
My situation is especially frustrating I’m studying international relations and peace and conflict, or at least hope to. I’m interested in investigating the role of information and technology on the decision making processes in conflict situations - essentially asking “Does conflict arise from a certain kind of information blindness?”
Optimally I would study cognitive science to look at individuals and how they use information to make decisions. I would look at communications studies and linguistics to see how communication of information can affect people’s cognition and distort the conclusions they make. I would study psychology to see how information forms biases, how language forms biases and how bias influences both decisions and the decision making process.
I would look at organizational behaviour, social pyschology and sociology to see how individual decision making and information sharing processes affect groups and how groups interact with each other.
I would probably want to look at cybernetic theory to investigate decision systems, organizational systems and judicial systems for analysis of formal decision making processes and as a method of modelling information processes.
I would look at the economics of information valuation, and the affects of valuation on decision making. The influences of information completeness on the economics of choice, for example.
That’s just the positive aspects of the study. The normative aspects would entail software design and programming, interaction design, computational linguistics, artificial intelligence, bayesian statistics, game theory.
All of these subjects contribute to the frame work of analysis, all of these subjects are taught in courses at various levels at U of T. I will study maybe 3 of them, for no reason other than departmental boundaries and the necessity for “crisp” curriculum coherence.
I have a lot of skills and knowledge which SHOULD be useful to my studies but unless I inject them into my studies artificially, there is no impetus to bring them to the table - in fact they could be considered a liability if they aren’t shared by the professor or TA grading my work. There is a critical weakness in universities assuming undergraduate students know nothing - because they inevitably feel the obligation to live up to expectations.
I doubt I am unique in my quandry, which makes me wonder what expertise is floating around my class rooms that I will never see or know about.