The young academic has now left the nest.
It has learned to hunt.
It has acquired a territory.
It has survived the attentions of reviewers.
And, after several years of increasingly independent behaviour, it has finally become an adult.
The next stage is inevitable.
It must migrate.
The First Migration
Migration begins innocently enough.
The young academic attends a conference.
It visits another university.
It takes a postdoctoral position.
It joins a research project.
Perhaps it spends six months in another department.
Perhaps it moves to another country.
The stated reason is usually professional.
The ecological significance is greater.
The animal has entered a new habitat.
Here it encounters unfamiliar specimens.
They use different words.
They cite different ancestors.
They consider different questions important.
And, most disturbingly, they appear to have perfectly good reasons for doing so.
Habitat Shock
The first response is often defensive.
The migrating animal observes that the new population has misunderstood several things.
Its terminology is peculiar.
Its categories are unnecessarily complicated.
Its methods are questionable.
Its literature is incomplete.
Its assumptions are obvious.
The animal may spend several months explaining these deficiencies to colleagues.
Then something happens.
It begins to understand them.
This is known as habitat acquisition.
The migrant has discovered that what initially appeared to be an eccentric local adaptation may actually be a response to a different intellectual environment.
The Second Vocabulary
The most visible sign of successful migration is linguistic.
The animal begins to acquire a new vocabulary.
At first, it uses the new terms ironically.
Then cautiously.
Then fluently.
Eventually, it finds itself using them in its own work.
This can be unsettling.
The animal has not abandoned its original population.
It has acquired a second academic accent.
Researchers call this lexical hybridisation.
The phenomenon is common among interdisciplinary animals.
It can also cause considerable confusion at dinner parties.
The Mixed Population
Eventually, some animals become capable of moving between habitats without fully belonging to either.
They speak one population's language to another population.
They translate.
They compare.
They notice that two groups have been asking related questions using entirely different vocabularies.
These animals are often described as boundary organisms.
They occupy the spaces between established territories.
The established populations are uncertain what to do with them.
They may be regarded as:
innovative,
confused,
interdisciplinary,
undisciplined,
visionary,
or “interesting.”
The classification depends largely on who is speaking.
The Hybrid
Sometimes the migrant brings something back.
A method.
A distinction.
A concept.
A way of asking questions.
The imported trait is combined with an inherited one.
Something new emerges.
The animal itself may not immediately recognise what has happened.
It may simply report:
“I was interested in whether these two approaches might be brought into dialogue.”
Researchers call this hybridisation.
The resulting offspring can be unstable.
It may not fit comfortably into any existing disciplinary territory.
But instability is not necessarily a disadvantage.
It can create new ecological niches.
The New Territory
Eventually, the hybrid begins to attract other animals.
They share its interests.
They learn its vocabulary.
They cite its papers.
They attend its conferences.
A small population forms.
At first, it is described as a perspective.
Then an approach.
Then a framework.
Eventually, someone proposes that it is a field.
This is a critical evolutionary moment.
For once a population has a field, it can have journals.
Once it has journals, it can have conferences.
Once it has conferences, it can have keynote speakers.
And once it has keynote speakers, it is officially alive.
Disciplinary Speciation
Researchers call the process disciplinary speciation.
It occurs when a population becomes sufficiently differentiated from its ancestral population that members of the two groups no longer participate in intellectual life in quite the same way.
They may continue to read one another.
They may continue to disagree.
They may even continue to attend the same conferences.
But they now possess different maps of relevance.
They ask different questions.
They notice different anomalies.
They have different standards of evidence.
And, increasingly, they find one another's work difficult to understand.
The species has diverged.
The Journal Barrier
One of the clearest signs of speciation is the appearance of a new journal.
At first, the journal has difficulty attracting submissions.
Then a few papers appear.
Then more.
The journal develops a readership.
A citation pattern emerges.
Soon the animals begin saying:
“This is really a question for our field.”
The phrase is highly diagnostic.
A new species has probably formed.
The Conference Lek
The new population also develops a characteristic gathering place.
It may be a conference.
The animals migrate from their various habitats and gather in large numbers.
There they display their plumage.
They exchange calls.
They compare territories.
They inspect potential mates and collaborators.
They announce conceptual innovations.
They remember who has cited whom.
The event may last several days.
At its conclusion, most animals return home exhausted but strangely reassured that their population still exists.
Speciation by Distinction
Sometimes the new species is created by a single distinction.
One animal observes:
“Perhaps we need to distinguish between A and B.”
The distinction initially seems modest.
But it reorganises the conceptual habitat.
Others adopt it.
A literature grows around it.
The distinction becomes foundational.
Eventually, an entire population is organised around something that, a generation earlier, nobody had thought required distinguishing.
This is one of the most powerful mechanisms in academic evolution.
A distinction does not merely describe a territory.
It can create one.
The Naming Event
Every new species requires a name.
The naming process can take considerable time.
Candidates include:
Critical X Studies.
The New X.
Post-X.
Neo-X.
X and Beyond.
Trans-X.
Or, increasingly:
X Ecologies.
The final choice is important.
A good name must distinguish the population from its ancestors without making the relationship to them entirely incomprehensible.
The animal must be new.
But not so new that nobody knows what funding category to put it in.
Reproductive Isolation
Once a field becomes established, something curious occurs.
The population begins to reproduce itself.
Students are trained within the new vocabulary.
Supervisors introduce them to the canonical literature.
Journals publish work using the characteristic distinctions.
Conferences reinforce the shared map.
The new species now has its own reproductive system.
At this point, the original mutation has become inheritance.
The Paradox of Innovation
This creates one of the great paradoxes of academic evolution.
A field often begins by challenging established ways of seeing.
But once successful, it develops its own established ways of seeing.
The rebellious population acquires traditions.
The radical distinction becomes canonical.
The critique becomes methodology.
The innovation becomes curriculum.
The outsider becomes an authority.
Eventually, young animals are taught that the field was once revolutionary.
This is usually true.
It is simply no longer revolutionary.
The Return Migration
Not all migration is permanent.
Some animals return to their original habitat.
But they do not return unchanged.
They carry foreign conceptual material with them.
Their colleagues notice.
“That’s not how we usually think about it.”
The returning animal smiles.
It has heard this before.
The new distinction is explained.
At first, resistance is strong.
Then someone realises that the imported idea is useful.
Another animal adopts it.
A paper is written.
A seminar is organised.
The distinction spreads.
The original habitat has changed.
Migration has become ecological exchange.
Extinction
Speciation also carries risks.
Some populations fail.
Their journals disappear.
Their conferences shrink.
Their terminology ceases to circulate.
Their students move elsewhere.
Eventually, the field becomes a historical curiosity.
This is disciplinary extinction.
It is not necessarily caused by the ideas being false.
A population may simply lose its reproductive capacity.
No students.
No journals.
No funding.
No institutional habitat.
Without reproduction, even a perfectly good idea can disappear.
The Fossil Record
Extinct academic species do, however, leave traces.
Old books.
Forgotten terminology.
Footnotes.
Department names.
Archived journals.
Occasionally, a young academic discovers one.
The old idea is examined.
Something in it appears strangely familiar.
The young animal begins to use it again.
The extinct species has not quite returned.
But one of its characteristics has.
Researchers call this conceptual re-emergence.
The academic habitat is full of such fossils.
Some have been waiting decades to become useful again.
The Great Migration
From the perspective of the entire university, the movement of individuals between habitats produces a continual exchange of conceptual material.
Animals migrate.
Ideas migrate with them.
Distinctions cross boundaries.
Methods hybridise.
New populations form.
Old ones adapt.
Some disappear.
Others become dominant.
The academic ecosystem is therefore never still.
Its apparent stability conceals constant movement.
What Actually Migrates?
Yet the most interesting thing that migrates is not a theory.
It is not even a concept.
It is a way of noticing.
An animal trained in one habitat carries its habits of attention into another.
There, those habits encounter unfamiliar possibilities.
Some are discarded.
Some survive.
Some combine with foreign ones.
And occasionally, a new pattern of attention emerges.
The animal now sees something that neither population had seen before.
The Speciation Principle
Field researchers have therefore proposed a further principle:
When a population acquires a sufficiently different way of noticing, it may eventually require a different map of the world.
The map then acquires institutions.
The institutions acquire territories.
The territories acquire inhabitants.
The inhabitants train juveniles.
The juveniles inherit the map.
And what began as a small variation in attention becomes a discipline.
The sun is setting over the university.
Across the campus, animals are returning from their various migrations.
Some head back to established nests.
Some cross invisible territorial boundaries.
Some carry unfamiliar vocabulary.
Some are founding new populations.
And somewhere, in a seminar room, a young academic has just made a distinction that nobody had thought to make before.
There is a silence.
An older animal leans forward.
“That’s interesting.”
The juvenile waits.
The adult continues:
“Has anyone done that before?”
The hunt begins again.
A new territory is opening.
And, somewhere in the distance, the first calls of a new species can already be heard.
The Academic Animal — Series Conclusion
But the story is not quite over.
For the university does not merely contain academic animals.
It is itself the environment that shapes them.
The habitat determines what can flourish.
The adults determine what the young learn to notice.
The territories determine what counts as relevant.
The hunt determines what is worth finding.
The nest determines what is reproduced.
And migration determines what can become different.
Perhaps, then, the strangest discovery in this natural history is not that academics behave like animals.
It is that animals behave like academics.
They inhabit worlds structured by inherited distinctions.
They learn what matters from one another.
They reproduce ways of seeing.
They establish territories.
They compete.
They cooperate.
They migrate.
And sometimes, quite accidentally, they change the world they have learned to inhabit.
The academic animal is therefore not merely a creature that lives in a university.
It is a creature that reproduces a university wherever it goes.
Field researchers are currently investigating whether this process can ever be stopped.
Early results are inconclusive.
Several committees have been formed.
Further research is required.
