Yet, as a solution to the problem of employment, specialization is misconceived. Parents don’t want their children living in their basement five years after graduation. Especially in the wake of the Great Recession of 2008, families have been reluctant to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a university degree unless students attain marketable skills. In a college setting, the rationale for early specialization hinges on jobs. It is not encouraging that the best time to be admitted to the ER with a heart condition is during a national convention of cardiologists-when, that is, the conference is in another city (12 266). Learning environments in the real world tend to be “wicked” - so narrow specialization does not lead to mastery and can even lead us astray. The dogged pursuit of a single enterprise, the 10,000 hours principle, works only in a thin band of the skills spectrum. Most sports, however-indeed most skills-are nothing like golf and chess. It turns out that golf, chess, and even, counterintuitively, firefighting, provide “kind learning environments”: patterns emerge in these domains that a single-minded dedication helps to master. Despite the different paths they took, Woods and Federer both conquered their fields.

For his part, Roger Federer “dabbled” in a dozen different sports, cultivating his “athleticism and hand-eye coordination” in diverse arenas before concentrating on tennis, while many of his friends focused on tennis much earlier (3). Tiger Woods played golf on national television at age two, impressing (among others) Bob Hope he won a ten-and-under tournament later the same year. Epstein, a former Sports Illustrated writer, starts his book with deceptively simple stories about golf and tennis. In his most recent book, Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, David Epstein explains lucidly and with voluminous research why generalists thrive in an era of increasing specialization. Indeed, for all the handwaving at cross-disciplinary projects, universities continue to fetishize specialization. The god-term “interdisciplinarity” serves as a cloak for provincialism. Seldom do we meet practitioners in other fields as equals. In practice, however, crossing disciplinary boundaries too often amounts to invasion rather than collaboration: we use or critique other disciplines to our own ends. I have never met anyone who said that she opposes interdisciplinary scholarship in principle, and plaudits generally await those who cross-pollinate their research with research in other fields. University faculty and administrators make considerable noise about “interdisciplinary” work.

The range david epstein