Science Quote by William Kirby

Kirby’s sentence has the polite, committee-room cadence of someone asking for an institutional rearrangement without sounding like he’s picking a fight. “I would hope” is a strategic softener: it frames a demand for resources and cooperation as a shared aspiration, letting resistance look petty. The real action is in “begin a series of projects.” He’s not advocating a single symposium or a symbolic gesture; he’s nudging the university toward an ongoing apparatus - cross-department programs, joint appointments, shared funding lines - the infrastructure of interdisciplinarity.

Asia functions here less as a geographic topic than as a stress test for the university itself. By proposing “the study of Asia” as an example, Kirby smuggles in a larger critique: universities fracture knowledge into siloed departments, then struggle when confronted with subjects that don’t respect those borders. Asia, in a Western academic setting especially, demands languages, history, politics, economics, religion, and science at once. It forces the institution to admit that expertise is often produced by collaboration, not territorial ownership.

The most revealing phrase is “the professions in Asia.” That isn’t purely antiquarian curiosity; it hints at applied knowledge and the pipeline between scholarship and practice - medicine, law, engineering, administration. For a scientist, this emphasis makes sense: he’s gesturing toward comparative systems of training and authority, and toward the practical stakes of understanding other societies on their own terms. The subtext is quietly modern: if the university wants to claim global competence, it can’t just add “Asia” as content; it has to rewire how it organizes knowledge.