1/ Have you noticed how many people are fleeing academia lately? Hoping for greener pastures at another institution (good luck!) or leaving it altogether to set up on their own. (I’ve talked to many who ring up for advice on this very topic.)

2/ It’s tempting to blame politics, budgets, or culture wars. Actually, it’s boring to blame those things. That’s part of it — but it’s not the whole story.

3/ Because 16 years ago, long before today’s attacks, the New York Times ran an op-ed called “End the University as We Know It” (https://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/27/opinion/27taylor.html)” (p.s. And just last spring there was nearly identical headline in the opinion section of the same paper: “The End of the University as We Know It.” (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/16/opinion/university-defunding-trump-rufo.html) That’s weird…not!)

4/ Different moment. Same diagnosis. The university was suffering because it had become structurally misaligned with the futures it was preparing students to participate in, inhabit, lead, etc.

5/ Over-specialization. Disciplinary silos. Bureaucratic ossification. Both said, effectively, “Hey! You! University! You’re ruining my future!”

6/ But here’s the thing: the university didn’t just become harder to work in. It became harder to think in. Harder to be interdisciplinary. Harder to explore adjacent possibilities. Harder to imagine alternative futures. BTW, when I was a professor, we were driven to become a training academy for specific specialized jobs — not a place to explore what jobs (value creation) might exist in the future. Rather, the future was a place to go so you can pay back your student loans.

7/ And this problem isn’t unique to academia.

8/ Large organizations respond to uncertainty the same way: they reach for structure and process.

9/ Ambiguity gets converted into plans and PowerPoint.
Possibility gets absorbed into process.
Relief follows — briefly.

10/ But the terrain of possibility quietly shrinks.

11/ Process matters.
Standards matter.
Structure matters.

12/ Problems arise when they expand as a reflex — not as a choice. When they crowd out the work of exploration, experimentation, and speculative prototyping that keeps organizations adaptable.

13/ Specialists keep the present running.
Generalists keep the future visible.

14/ When there’s no room to explore, connect, or reframe, the people who do that kind of work leave.

15/ Not because they lack discipline — but because there’s nowhere left to practice it meaningfully.

16/ This is why smart institutions don’t collapse overnight. They hollow out first.^† They lose their generalists. They lose that connective tissue that encourages collaboration between the specialists who know how to execute and the generalists who navigate uncertainty with a different perceptual toolkit and the kind of confident curiosity that makes exploration possible.

17/ The work that remains unowned is orientation: sensing across domains, prototyping adjacent possibilities, making futures tangible enough to think with.

18/ That work always looks indulgent.

19/ Until it suddenly becomes necessary.

† Things that came to mind when I tapped that out but would’ve been klunky to put inline are such as: rehashing Marvel Comics action spectaculars over and over again; whatever is going on over at Apple Design with this trainwreck with macOS Tahoe; and the general malaise afflicting Hollywood studios that keep churning out the same reboots, sequels, and remakes ad nauseam.

Specialists are necessary to get things done. But they are not sufficient to navigate into the future. Specialists tend to optimize for known problems within known domains. Generalists tend to optimize for unknown problems across unknown domains.

Which brings to mind the opportunities created when one recognizes this “hollowing out”. For example, the (at least speculated) ingenuity of A24 in its approach to creative filmmaking which is, as I’ve heard 2nd hand in a way that you will overhear at any café in Los Angeles: A24 allows creatives to make films (genius!) rather than trying to shoehorn them into existing studio production pipelines that are optimized for franchise milking. If marketing and money are the domain of specialists in this schema, then the generalist is the visionary film maker / showrunner. The collaboration between the two roles is what makes the whole thing work.

I may be wrong on all of these counts, and this is just opinion and feeling and wondering not based on intimate experience — I’ve never worked on any of those areas or things or whatevers. But, I did work hard for a role at Apple a few years ago only to find out recently that I was not preferred because I wasn’t specialized enough. So there’s that.