I agree about the usefulness of a basic technical understanding of as many fields as possible.
As for the push to specialize in academia- well, it’s complicated. I’m not a professor, I’m a grad student, but here’s my experience. If you’re in one of the relatively “pure” discipline- physics, computer science, and so on- the push to specialize is very real, as is the push to focus on what everyone else (including granting agencies) thinks is “hot.”
But there is a lot of multi-disciplinary work going on, an increasing amount really. Trouble is, that quickly becomes a new discipline in its own right. My alma mater now has 5 different biology majors, each of them interdisciplinary in interesting ways. My own field- materials science- encompasses the study of solids and liquids. Metals, alloys, ceramics, oxides, semiconductors, polymers, and even biological materials. It can’t be done unless you understand organic and inorganic chemistry, crystallography (applied group theory, really), physics (classical- strain fields, shearing forces; and quantum- bloch waves, electronic band structure), and enough computer science to right some basic simulations.
You end up with professors working in fields that didn’t exist when they started out. So they keep taking classes and reading each other’s books.
I agree about the usefulness of a basic technical understanding of as many fields as possible. As for the push to specialize in academia- well, it’s complicated. I’m not a professor, I’m a grad student, but here’s my experience. If you’re in one of the relatively “pure” discipline- physics, computer science, and so on- the push to specialize is very real, as is the push to focus on what everyone else (including granting agencies) thinks is “hot.” But there is a lot of multi-disciplinary work going on, an increasing amount really. Trouble is, that quickly becomes a new discipline in its own right. My alma mater now has 5 different biology majors, each of them interdisciplinary in interesting ways. My own field- materials science- encompasses the study of solids and liquids. Metals, alloys, ceramics, oxides, semiconductors, polymers, and even biological materials. It can’t be done unless you understand organic and inorganic chemistry, crystallography (applied group theory, really), physics (classical- strain fields, shearing forces; and quantum- bloch waves, electronic band structure), and enough computer science to right some basic simulations. You end up with professors working in fields that didn’t exist when they started out. So they keep taking classes and reading each other’s books.