Thanks for the comment! Indeed, the employment of graduates is something universities should take a good, hard look at.

As for the article you linked to:

I agree with some of the points Suburb Dad makes… Though I can’t help that think that his encouragement to consider all the administrative/bureaucratic implications of Taylor’s proposal seem like a bit of a cop-out. University administrations are gigantic and complex to be sure, but there have been pedagogical/scholarly revolutions in the past, so what’s stopping them now?
Indeed, Taylor failed to consider some very important questions in his article regarding the employability of students with doctoral work in “water”, “networks” etc., or the problem of having ever-dissolving areas of study that require an administrative re-hashing every 7 years.

However the most thought-proving concept (for me) came from the “Comments” on the article — one reader noted that you simply can’t have “interdisciplinary” without “disciplinary”… and how true it is. Our own faculty is a coming-together of academics from very diverse backgrounds study the social implications of Information. However they all started out in deeply-rooted academic traditions — Political Science, History, Library Science, Philosophy, Computer Science, etc., which is reflected in their work today. Without those established canons, methodologies and frameworks to guide faculty work, its hard to say whether they could perform their research at all.
Thanks for the posting though; certainly an interesting discussion!

I would certainly agree that encouraging graduates to look at a variety of sectors is a great idea. Presuming that “tenured professor” is the only socially valuable to contribute to society after doing graduate work is no good. I also wonder if it is wise to expand graduate level enrollment figures across the board given empoyment opportunities. I’ve met quite a few people who completed humanities PhDs only to essentially abandon it and then skill up for an entirely different career.

I’m less clear about the merits of abholishing departments. Obviously this is something of a liberal arts dream. Engineers, lawyers, physicians and other professionals need to have a defined body to knowledge to work (and, often, to pass mandatory exams to work in their field). There’s also a collective action problem in launching a reform like this. Let’s say a student graduates from a new institution (call it Project University) and has no “major”; how does he explain that to others? How would transfers (between Project U and Traditional U) work?

The greatest potential gain for this work might be at the first year of undergraduate study.