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I think a big problem is that universities now have entirely separated departments from the others. Something that can be taken as an axiomatic truth in one department can be seen as completely false in another. Peer review has become review by your small subfield. Papers should have to have a randomly select a peer reviewer from another department. It would be interesting to see a neuroscientist, pediatrician, psychologist or psychiatrist review education papers. Just taking zoologists who are used to studying how animals behave and function in an ecosystem and toss them into sociology or education would be intriguing. Academia has become too specialized for ideas to propagate or for there to be effective cross-breeding of ideas.
The academia works on layers of abstraction. On the bottom there are mathematicians and physicists who describe the fundamental truths of the world, a bit higher up we have chemists, biologists and neuroscientists, in the middle there are psychologists, engineers, and doctors and on top we have economists and sociologists and historians. Generally, peer review should include people from a lower level of abstraction.
Economists and sociologists should be be put on small islands together, neuroscientists and educators would be another high priority combo.
How would this work for anything non-trivial in practise?
I have a masters degree in electrical engineering, have published a bunch of peer reviewed papers in a subfield of that and it wouldn't be at all hard to find papers I'd be unqualified to review even in that subfield. Back when I was working in university, it was hard enough to come up with responses to supposedly qualified reviewers in the same subfield who clearly hadn't at all understood what the paper was about.
Maybe you could find a small handful of superhumans who could understand both 3D electromagnetic field simulations as well as quantization noise in multi-bit sigma-delta-converters, but those are just two narrow sections of electrical engineering. You certainly won't find anyone who understands all the thousands of slices of just electrical engineering, nevermind all of science.
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100%. And it's particularly bad in humanities where over-subdivision is ridiculous. I think the British University's still have PPE as a sort of default humanities major - that's politics, philosophy, and economics. Which, when you stop to think about it, are all intrinsically related and, therefore, necessary to be taught together. In a sort of dark hilarity "intersectionality" is a weird bottom-up recreation of ... sociology (which, to be clear, is anthropology without the field work and economics without the math).
Part of this has to do with the relentless credentialism. I went to a fancy kid college and there were classmates I had who wanted to take STEM courses from genuine interest but worried they would struggle and their GPA would fall. The idea of college GPA is absurd to me because it can be hacked and demonstrates ZERO proficiency at anything. Take the courses you want, attend however you feel. Senior year should be an independent project that you publish publicly ... employers can make their determination based on that.
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