The ongoing fragmentation of knowledge and resulting chaos in philosophy are not reflections of the real world, but artifacts of scholarship. . . . Consilience is key to unification. . . . William Whewell, in his 1840 synthesis The Philosophy of Inductive Sciences, was the first to speak of consilience, literally a “jumping together” of knowledge by linking the facts and fact-based theories across disciplines to create a common groundwork of explanation.
— EDWARD O. WILSON, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge

I recently rediscovered a set of notes I took seven years ago at one of the most enlightening talks I’ve ever attended, a career advice seminar given by energy efficiency expert Amory Lovins while he was a guest lecturer at Stanford. His educational journey is quite intriguing. Like me, Amory had access to the best schooling, attending Harvard University. There he studied physics, law, linguistics, and chemistry, along with anything else he found interesting. When he was told in his junior year that he would have to pick a major to complete, he dropped out of Harvard and enrolled at Oxford. There again the administration refused to let him study what he wanted, so he dropped out of Oxford too.

Having left formal education behind and chosen to follow his own path to success, educating himself, consulting, and writing, Lovins now has ten honorary doctorates, and we energy folks know he’s the best in the business.

Similarly, I studied renewable energy and drama, along with anything else I found interesting, and attempted to design my own double major. Fortunately, a new Atmosphere/Energy major was created at Stanford in time for me to declare it, but I dropped out of Drama when they refused to let me study Shakespeare, rather than their proposed esoteric modern literature. My Masters program in Earth Systems was thankfully somewhat more flexible. But while I was able to find two agreeable degrees to pursue at Stanford, my credentials represent perhaps one-hundredth of the knowledge I’ve obtained in the past five years by reading hundreds of books, and by having hundreds of extracurricular conversations. While I’ve definitely learned a lot in class, and have two degrees to prove it to the world, I don’t feel like they mean very much, compared to my overall education.

Amory also spoke of the need for connection, consilience, the unification of knowledge, noting that even better than new ideas in a field are a bunch of old ideas assembled in new ways. Get as many ideas as possible inside one head, and the pieces will begin to fit together. It reminds me of the title of a recent article I read: “Innovation Occurs When Ideas Have Sex.” What the world needs is integration of knowledge, rather than further specialization. If your advisor asks you why you are studying something different, Lovins said, that’s when you know you’re on the right track, as we need people to make new, unheard-of connections.

Several years ago, I had the chance to observe what was to be a ground-breaking “interdisciplinary” meeting between faculty members from different departments, all coming together to discuss the essential question of how human behavior interacts with the environment, and how we might work to harmonize this relationship. Given the breadth and depth of this question, I expected great things, but as far as I can tell, precisely nothing was achieved. Translating the meeting into its essential terms, every faculty member was saying the same thing: “this is what my department is doing, and this is why my department’s approach is the best.” That’s all that anyone said.

As Lovins noted in his seminar, interdisciplinary work is a good first step, but what we really need is transdisciplinary work. (Inter is Latin for “among, between,” trans is Latin for “across, through, beyond.”)

Among my many dreams is one day founding a university:

Consilience University

Consilience University will be the first of many new universities founded with ultimate goals of consilience, of unifying the search for knowledge and bridging gaps between the ivory towers. Rather than producing disciplined specialists, Consilience University will produce polymath scientists, ready to overcome any challenge they face by applying the transdisciplinary method of science to shed new light on pressing questions.

Following a basic review of the methods and findings of science, every student at Consilience will design their own major, taking all of the classes they want, having all of the discussions they want, and reading all of the books that they want. Rather than receiving a discrete degree, students will leave Consilience with a diverse resume illustrating what they studied and why. Each student will stay for as long as they want, studying until they are satisfied with their knowledge, taking occasional breaks to travel and work or play. Students like me, who want nothing more than to generate knowledge, will be able to support themselves by teaching, staying at Consilience for the rest of their lives.

Graduate students at Consilience University will have the same goal as graduate students at other universities, “to create new knowledge,” but they will be encouraged to go about it in an entirely different way. As a Stanford graduate considering PhD study, I want nothing more than to “create new knowledge,” but I find the way we go about it very strange. PhD candidates today are required to spend five years in their intellectual prime studying something so specific that nobody cares except their advisors, who often choose exactly what their students study. It is often the case that PhD dissertations are read by no one other than the faculty who approve it. I don’t want to spend five years of my life this way.

The goal of PhD study at Consilience will be just the opposite: rather than digging deeper into one field, students will work to synthesize multiple. Students will take up any question that they find interesting which has not been adequately answered, and look at it from many different perspectives, with a goal of achieving consilience, creating new knowledge through synthesis. The questions and answers will also be of interest to the general population: rather than producing an esoteric dissertation which nobody will want to read, the goal of PhD study at Consilience would be to produce a potential bestseller for a general audience, so that everyone may benefit from the candidate’s new ideas.

Those concerned with the difficulty of finding a job following such a broad course of study might consider that although there may be few jobs for such people today, these are the jobs we will want done in the future. Additionally, where there aren’t such jobs, we can always create them.

Just as we can’t expect to know exactly what we want until we find it, we can’t expect potential employers to know exactly what they want either. So do as Amory suggests: find a company you want to work for, find something they are not yet doing that they need to be doing, and say to your potential employer: “You may not know it yet, but this is the job you want someone to do, and this why you want to hire me to do it.” Amory has been hired many times this way.

Consilience University faculty will be encouraged to teach classes addressing diverse questions. For example, over the course of a year I might teach a basic science class, a psychology class, an ecology class, and a social dance class. In addition, the job of the faculty will be not to fill their student’s heads with knowledge, but to lead their students to discover it for themselves.

Each year, Consilience will hold multiple “consilience conferences,” much like the popular TED events (if you haven’t yet been there, you’ll love ted.com). Faculty, students, and visiting scholars will be encouraged to give short talks presenting their research to a general audience to facilitate the making of new connections. Every student and every member of the faculty and staff will gather in a single auditorium to hear the talks, and they will be posted online for all to see.

Of course, Consilience University won’t suit everyone, but it will suit many students who are now unserved. While it is unlikely that every university will follow the Consilience model, it seems quite clear to me that we will want at least one, to bring forth the potentials of the Lovinses and Enges.

Update #1: This idea is getting more attention than I ever thought it might. Thanks to all for recommending it and sharing it on Facebook and Twitter. If you want to share ideas, or want to help make this happen (or know someone who might), send me an email at consilienceuniversity@gmail.com!

Update #2: Continuing my trend of re-imagining education, here’s a new article on continual community education, “Cathedrals for the Curious.”