Graff, Gerald. "It's Time to End 'Courseocentrism.'" INSIDE HIGHER ED January 13, 2009.

At a time when amazing new forms of connectivity are made possible by new digital technologies and when much of the best recent work in the humanities has made us more aware of the social and collective nature of intellectual work, we still think of teaching in ways that are narrowly private and individualistic, as something we do in isolated classrooms with little or no knowledge of what our colleagues are doing in the next classroom or the next building and little chance for each other’s courses to become reference points in our own. Indeed, we betray our assumption that teaching is by nature a solo act in our unreflecting use of “the classroom” as a synecdoche or shorthand for all teaching and learning, as if “the way we teach now” were reducible to “the way I teach now.” The isolated, privatized classroom is itself a product of a more affluent era for American universities, a luxury made possible by the generous economic support they enjoyed during the first two-thirds of the 20th century. In this heady economic climate, a university could grow by expanding its playing field, proliferating new courses, fields, subfields, and scholarly perspectives while giving each enough separate space to ward off unproductive turf wars. To make a long story short, we became terrific at adding exciting new theories, fields, texts, cultures, and courses to the mix, but we’ve been challenged, to say the least, when it comes to connecting what we’ve added. Interdisciplinary programs have helped make some connections, but ultimately they have reproduced fragmentation rather than lessened it, since interdisciplinary programs tend to be disconnected from each other as well as from the disciplines. And now that we don’t have the financial luxury to keep adding on — as is seen in our alarming overdependence on underpaid and overworked adjuncts — we need to get a lot better at putting the components into dialogue, which means getting on the same page in our teaching in ways we lack practice at and may find uncomfortable. . . . Read the rest here: http://insidehighered.com/views/2009/01/13/graff.