One mark of science's influence upon the academic establishment is the institution-wide privileging of specialization. A pioneer in the revolutionary science of chaos explains the traditional scientific approach:

Other disciplines have followed suit, building the empire of knowledge incrementally through a cognitive policy of conquest through division. As has often been noted, the emergence of English departments early in this century grew out of a perceived antithesis between literary ways of seeing and communicating and scientific ones. Champions of literature observed that literature speaks figuratively, its propositions are universal, while scientific language is representational, its claims local and specific. Or sometimes the poles have been reversed, with the sensuous immediacy of literary language contradistinguished from science's abstracting tendencies – what Alfred North Whitehead called its “Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness.” In either case, literature's place in the culture has been defined through its opposition to science.

Yet literature as an institutional field of study is still for the most part structured in terms of the specialization model borrowed from the sciences.