Chapter 4: College Curriculum As Counter Discourse: The California Immigration Semester at Occidental College

Over- and hyperspecialization in higher education produces disciplinary narrowness, so much so that the same social problem becomes unrecognizable in different fields through the use of specialized disciplinary discourse and canonical works. Our collective ability to perceive and examine social problems and contested spaces clearly, then, is limited by “the deep-dyed empiricism of Anglo-American culture, and an education system geared to knowledge silos rather than genuinely cross-disciplinary work” (Ermarth, 2007, p. 2). The epistemological practices of the academy, publishers, and libraries lead to the reification of fields and disciplinary boundaries, rather than the opening of scholarly parameters. Disciplinary specificity reinforces and reifies divisions across fields such that economists, sociologists, and educators who study immigration, for example, do not necessarily have to acknowledge one another in their scholarly work, even if they examine similar phenomena and postulate the same questions on a topic. However, as Ermarth (2007) explains, “life does not submit to these [disciplinary] divisions” (p. 18).