How can we reintegrate knowledge in a simple and useful way? Forty years ago, a leading designer reflects on the challenges created by divisions in higher education. From the article:

Unfortunately, universities today are becoming discontinuity headquarters, with each department avoiding communication with the others and with the rest of the world. Used as it could be, the language of vision is a real threat to this discontinuity, and so it is avoided at all costs. The film department is usually located in the drama or in the art department and caters for the most part to people’s creative idiosyncrasies rather than to the development of basic, current, working ideas of science and the humanities. The danger is that film will be prematurely contaminated by a virus of self-expression. When a scientist, engineer, or mathematician collides with a painter or sculptor, he often catches the bug to which the painter or sculptor has already developed an immunity. Instead, the scientist should recognize aesthetics as an extension of his own discipline. For instance, if a mathematician is writing a paper on mathematics, he would not particularly improve his work by hiring an essayist to do the job. On the other hand, if the mathematician were part essayist, he could make his point more accessible to his colleagues, his students, and perhaps an even wider audience. The film department can support the university’s charter for promoting intellectual inquiry only if it is able to serve all departments from a central position within the school.

“Language of Vision: The Nuts and Bolts,” Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 28, no. 1 (October, 1974): 13-25