Mythology of Expertise

In "The Unpromising Future of Writing Centers," Terrance Riley brings up an interesting dilemma: Make yourself too expert and you might eventually climb into an ivory tower and become unknowable to the population you originally intended to serve. That failure to serve a purpose would be "success," but he prefers a "happy amateurism" that "preserve[s] the energy and purpose" (151) of the Writing Center. I tend to think he might be right. The success of creating another discipline would last only until enough people no longer understand what you do or why you're relevant, resent your exclusivity, and again begin to question your funding. Scholarship may be great for its own sake or to maintain membership in the group, but if a discipline can't connect its scholarship to anything outside of itself, then the outsiders that fund it might start to question it. But then that seems to be what has happened with the humanities in general. How do you make a discipline relevant and respected? Why are there so many disciplines? If composition as a discipline is questioned, then why divide it further?