On Dec 17, 2008, at 2:22 PM, Thomas Dalton wrote:
Perhaps in universities where students study a wide range of subjects. In UK universities, most people never go near the English department but almost all of them will learn how to do academic research and writing (often as you go along, rather than in a specific class on it).
I am not an expert on the UK university system, but if my hazy memory is correct, the UK system is generally not as invested in the notion of general education as the US system. Thus you don't get a general class on the subject period.
We get to another fundamental bias here, but I do think that there is a regard in which Wikipedia, by being invested in being a general resource on everything, is a bit more American in flavor than British.
In any case, my point remains - inasmuch as there is a general, multi- field approach to and belief in principles of research and scholarship, as it stands such approaches are more easily located in English departments or in fields that share a large amount of theoretical figures with English departments than elsewhere.
If nothing else, the list of stuff Carcaroth provided that you wrote off is a pretty good list of fundamental debates in the question of how to read sources and what they mean - debates that have ramifications in all fields. To declare them irrelevant to our process is... problematic.
-Phil