But how well suited are today’s academic institutions to addressing the world’s grand challenges? The modern graduate degree has become the realm of the ultraspecialized. A typical doctoral thesis focuses on a topic so insanely obscure that few can decipher its title, forget about content. While such extreme narrowness is important to specialization—which, as Ridley pointed out, has a huge upside—it has also created a world where the best universities rarely produce integrative, macroscopic thinkers.
