"In my own religion department, for example, we have 10 faculty members, working in eight subfields, with little overlap. And as departments fragment, research and publication become more and more about less and less. Each academic becomes the trustee not of a branch of the sciences, but of limited knowledge that all too often is irrelevant for genuinely important problems. A colleague recently boasted to me that his best student was doing his dissertation on how the medieval theologian Duns Scotus used citations."
Sounds like left-brained overload, but there may actually be a point to studying the sources of Duns Scotus. Particularly if it involves a comparison with the sources of Aquinas and Anselm. Although, hopefully Eliade, William James, Rudolf Otto , and van der Leeuw, will figure in here somewhere. They might want to add Newman's Idea of a University to the departmental discussions at Columbia. Read as a group in a seminar for the whole department. Just try to get ten eggheads to agree on anything.
The internet is making wasting time listening to liberal professors somewhat irrelevant and outdated now. I'd be more worried about the Columbia graduate following Richard Hofstadter, Fanon, Gramsci, Alinsky, Adorno, and the Fabians in the White House. Along with the model UN Dag Hammarskjöld/Hans Kelsen neo-Kantian theories of international cooperation.
Robert Pirsig/Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Alert