"[...] There are of course different ways in which such a curriculum might be implemented. And it would be important for it to focus on a limited number of problem areas or texts or historical episodes in the contributing disciplines, so that each problem, each text, each episode could be studied in some depth. Superficiality should be as unacceptable to the educated generalist as it is to the specialist. And a sense of complexity is perhaps even more important for generalists than for specialists, if generalists are to understand the difficulty of formulating and confronting the questions to which this curriculum will introduce them. But why is it important that someone with a higher education should engage with these questions?
Ours is a culture in which there is the sharpest of contrasts between the rigor and integrity with which issues of detail are discussed within each specialized discipline and the self-indulgent shoddiness of so much of public debate on large and general issues of great import (compare Lawrence Summers on economics with Lawrence Summers on gender issues, Cardinal Schönborn on theology with Cardinal Schönborn on evolution). One reason for this contrast is the absence of a large educated public, a public with shared standards of argument and inquiry and some shared conception of the central questions that we need to address. Such a public would be a good deal less willing to allow issues that need to be debated to be defined by those who are so wedded in advance to their own particular partisan answers that they have never found out what the questions are. And it would be unwilling to tolerate the straitjacketing of debate, so characteristic of television, within two- to five-minute periods, during which each participant interrupts and talks down the others. [...]"
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