Thoughts

Deep and Broad Scholarship

Read against the machine The all-administrative university 15% of my brain

AI-generated mixed-media study where books descend into a mine shaft on one side and spread into a canopy of pages and field notes on the other.
Illustration generated with ChatGPT by OpenAI, prompted and selected by Greg Conrad Smith, 2026.

The craft of research seems to be taking away from deep thinking and real scholarship. I would like to know what I am really good at. I would like to restrict myself in some way so that I can actually have time to go deep.

But then sometimes it seems like I am really wanting to be broader. Isn’t that what I am doing when I read about language evolution, even though that is never going to be my field? I suppose there is a perceived conflict between deep and broad scholarship that might only be a perceived conflict.

Deep scholarship, real research, genuine expertise, focus.

Versus breadth, reading, teaching, my heart and soul.

In “a room,” one of the issues can certainly be this: there is no time to think, even for a professor.