Interdisciplinarity

• 1. Introduction

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  Interdisciplinarity names something that has been happening in human thought for a very long time, even if we only coined the modern word for it in the twentieth century. Picture the builders of Roman roads. They needed men who understood surveying, material science, and logistics all at once. No single specialty was enough. That ancient problem, how to bring together what different fields know in order to solve what no single field can, sits at the heart of interdisciplinary thinking. What drives scholars and institutions toward this approach? And why, given all the enthusiasm for it, does it remain so difficult to sustain?

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• 2. Deep Roots

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  Julie Thompson Klein traces the foundational ideas of interdisciplinarity to ancient Greek philosophy, identifying them as ideas about unified science, general knowledge, synthesis, and the integration of knowledge. Greek historians and dramatists, Giles Gunn notes, freely drew on medicine and philosophy to illuminate their own material. The seventeenth-century philosopher Leibniz pursued a system of universal justice that demanded linguistics, economics, management, ethics, law, philosophy, politics, and even sinology all at once.

  Marshall McLuhan identified a striking pattern in more recent history: a shift from focusing on specialized segments of attention to an awareness of the total field, a sense of form and function as a unity. This same shift appeared nearly simultaneously in cubist painting, in physics, in poetry, and in communication theory. McLuhan attributed it to the transition from an era shaped by mechanization, with its sequentiality, to an era shaped by the instant speed of electricity, which brought simultaneity.

  By the twentieth century, entirely new research areas had emerged that could not be housed in any single discipline. Nanotechnology is one example. Quantum information processing, which fuses quantum physics and computer science, is another. Bioinformatics combines molecular biology with computer science. Each of these arose because existing disciplinary boundaries simply could not contain the questions being asked.

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• 3. Why It Matters

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  Epidemics and climate change offer two of the clearest arguments for combining disciplines. Understanding the spread of HIV/AIDS or the mechanisms of global warming requires drawing from fields that rarely talk to each other. Neither problem yields to a single methodology.

  An article in the Social Science Journal offered a direct way to rank the value of any interdisciplinary effort by weighing four variables: the number of disciplines involved, the distance between them, the novelty of the combination, and how thoroughly the approaches are integrated. The greater each of these, the richer the result.

  The case for working across fields extends beyond solving immediate problems. The article argued that creativity often requires interdisciplinary knowledge. Researchers who cross into a new field, described there as immigrants, frequently make important contributions. And specialists working within a single tradition sometimes commit errors that only someone familiar with two or more disciplines can detect. The same argument holds for what are called the interstices: valuable topics of inquiry that fall between established disciplines and go unexamined precisely because no single field claims them.

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• 4. Institutional Barriers

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  Peer reviewers drawn from established disciplines often evaluate interdisciplinary grant applications. That structural fact alone creates a built-in disadvantage, since the reviewers may lack commitment to work that crosses the boundaries of their own training. Funding difficulties are compounded by promotion and tenure systems: untenured researchers know that some evaluators will be skeptical of interdisciplinary work, raising the real risk of being denied tenure for pursuing it.

  Joint appointments expose another pressure point. A faculty member with responsibilities in both an interdisciplinary program such as women's studies and a traditional discipline such as history may find that the tenure decision rests with the traditional department. Under those conditions, full commitment to the interdisciplinary side of the work carries a professional penalty.

  Budgets reinforce all of this. At most universities, resources flow through the disciplines. During periods of contraction, departments prioritize their own majors and their own core teaching. Interdisciplinary programs sit at the edges of those budgets, and new proposals for such programs are often read as competition for funds that are already scarce. As a result, some programs that had operated for thirty or more years with healthy enrollment were closed anyway.

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• 5. Programs Closed, Fields Born

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  Arizona International, formerly part of the University of Arizona, was shut down. So was the School of Interdisciplinary Studies at Miami University and the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies at Wayne State University. George Mason University's New Century College and the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies at Appalachian State University were cut back. Stuart Henry described this as an expression of disciplinary hegemony, an attempt to recolonize experimental knowledge production from otherwise marginalized fields.

  At the same time, the number of interdisciplinary bachelor's degrees awarded each year in the United States rose from 7,000 in 1973 to 30,000 by 2005, according to data from the National Center of Educational Statistics. Since 1998, educational leaders including Vartan Gregorian of Carnegie, Alan I. Leshner of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and Elias Zerhouni at the National Institutes of Health have each advocated for interdisciplinary approaches in their respective spheres.

  Paradoxically, one escape from institutional pressure is to stop being interdisciplinary and become a discipline. Neuroscience, cybernetics, biochemistry, and biomedical engineering all began as interdisciplinary ventures. Once they established their own funding streams and their own promotion criteria, they could lower the risk of entry for researchers who joined them. These are sometimes called interdisciplines, fields named for the parent disciplines they once bridged.

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• 6. The Synthesis Problem

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  Critics of interdisciplinary programs, including many supporters, point to a persistent weakness: students receive multiple disciplinary perspectives but rarely receive effective guidance in resolving the conflicts between them. Achieving a coherent view of a subject that draws on biology, chemistry, economics, geography, and politics, to take land use as one example the source gives, requires more than exposure to each. It requires a method for integration that most programs struggle to provide.

  Some defenders concede the difficulty but hold that cultivating interdisciplinarity as a habit of mind is both possible and essential. The goal, they argue, is to produce citizens and leaders capable of analyzing, evaluating, and synthesizing information from multiple sources before making decisions. Others go further and question whether the very aspiration to synthesize disciplines rests on assumptions about knowledge that deserve scrutiny.

  Researchers at the Center for the Study of Interdisciplinarity at the University of North Texas, founded in 2008 and closed on the 1st of September 2014 following administrative decisions at the university, drew a sharp distinction between philosophy of interdisciplinarity and philosophy as interdisciplinarity. The first treats interdisciplinary thinking as a new area within philosophy, raising questions about its epistemological status. The second treats philosophical practice itself as a form of field philosophy, working within and between existing fields rather than above them. That distinction remained unresolved when the center closed.

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