There’s a lot of talk these days—as there’s always been—about reforming higher education. One of the more popular ideas getting a lot of play is that doing away with the disciplines will fix what’s wrong with the system. The disciplines are maligned for being overly narrow, out of touch, and unable to solve the pressing issues of the day—all of which, it’s insisted, transcend individual disciplinary boundaries. Better to junk them and focus on the problems directly. It’s a seductive idea. But implementing it would be a big mistake.
I’m no enemy of interdisciplinarity. Indeed, I spent the happiest seven years of my teaching career in a program that was doubly interdisciplinary (both within and across courses). And I have published multiple interdisciplinary works, including a couple of books. But let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water.
Let’s start with a seemingly obvious point: you can’t have “interdisciplinary” teaching or research without first having “disciplines” to interrelate. No disciplines; no interdisciplinarity. I couldn’t have taught those interdisciplinary courses or done the research I did without relying on “the disciplines” (in my case, institutional political economy, philosophy, history, sociology, and psychology).
No discipline is a complete intellectual toolkit. But a toolkit equipped with disciplinary tools is superior to one without them, just as a set of “Snap-On” brand tools is superior to a set of tools bought at the Dollar Store. Want to solve global warming? You’re far better off with cutting-edge climatology, ecology, engineering, and policy analysis than without them.
The most vehement critics of the disciplines paint them as prisons of the mind. This is neither historically nor currently accurate. The disciplines were originally fed by numerous currents, but among the most important was a desire to escape the bounds of the traditional university by establishing new lines of inquiry and new methods by which to follow them.
Nor is it true that modern disciplines are as monolithic or impermeable as their critics make them out to be. Borrowing across disciplines—especially (but not only) in the humanities and social sciences—is commonplace. (In my own discipline of political science, no one questions the legitimacy of historical, institutional, sociological, economic, or philosophical analysis.) Meanwhile, the degree to which interdisciplinary study and teaching already goes on should not be underestimated. Many college and university schools and departments are interdisciplinary by nature (e.g., public health). In addition, most institutions have numerous cross-disciplinary departments, institutes, centers, and programs.
All of this is as it should be. Universities and colleges should be places where both disciplinary and interdisciplinary work can not only co-exist—but interact. That’s why I say “Two cheers for the disciplines.”
Okay, so Adolf you’re cheating.
Look, you’re by training and temperament a political theorist. Political theorists have always been interdisciplinary, which means we have stolen widely from other fields and subfields, just as you confess that you did. You know the adage: To steal from one scholar is plagiarism; to steal from many is research. We theorists steal from everyone. All the IF fellows and faculty would see this clearly if they, and you, looked at how much I’ve stolen from each of them and you.
Anyway, I know it’s not stealing when everyone I mentioned above gives freely. It’s like the guy who is found stuffing his pockets with food from the buffet. He’s approached by the host who says to him: “You don’t have to steal the food. It’s free.” To which the guy responds: “Then I’m not stealing.”
We scholars all stuff our pockets from the interdisciplinary buffet. You are right: There can be no interdisciplinarity without disciplines. It’s called inter-disciplinarity or, where I am in the “New American University,” multi-disciplinarity for a reason, and it’s the reason that you point out.
In my own world, the problems with this approach to scholarship are caused by two kinds: 1) the “silo-mentals” who fear to stick their heads out of their own narrowly confined research specialties and who are thus peremptorily territorial and 2) those who pursue “trans-disciplinarity,” where “trans” means BEYOND and not across. These “trannies” (in the scholarly sense) are most often those who have not steeped themselves in the rigor of disciplines, but have moved only in the land smoothed over for them by those who work WITHIN disciplines and now explore, even pioneer, work across disciplines.
I find both of these camps dismissive. The “silo-mentals” assume interdisciplinarians to be incompetent in every field because they think that we have no field; the “trannies” sniff at disciplinarians because they think we are blinkered and close-minded. Ironically, for me, each group is talking about the other group for the very reasons that I criticize both.
Where does this leave me? With great respect for people truly doing interdisciplinary work. Because as you know it’s HARD. You have to be convincing (grounded and thorough and persuasive) in EACH discipline; you have to be competent in multiple fields. The greatest compliment I was paid as a doctoral student is when a developmental psychologist, after reading a couple of my chapters, mistook me for one of them! Interdisciplinarity combines disciplines. Otherwise, it’s, well, something else, and here onanism comes to mind.
So “two cheers” for Adolf! Now give me reason to raise that to “three cheers”!
I was just talking of such things last evening with a psychologist friend of mine. She is a social psychologist trained on the psychology side, whereas I am a social psychologist trained by the sociology side. As my husband was asking her about her dissertation, in which she tried to apply more of a field methodology within a disciplinary framework that emphasizes the experimental method, I was struck at how her field work was, in fact, very structural (in a top-down, planned sense) in its nature. As a sociologist, field work generally implies a more observational approach (driven by hypotheses and supplemented by interviews, often– but much less formally structured in advance). We proceeded to talk about the different approaches but could not have had any of this discussion had we not both known our own disciplines very well.Many times, when I see the sort of publications that come out of some of the gender and other area studies (+ “cultural” studies), I am struck by how pel-mel such studies tend to be. Compendiums are common, as are new (and often penta-syllabic) terms. Rigor and depth, however, are often lacking. It is easy to offer erudite comment on the events of the day, but it is quite another matter to think carefully about such things. What, specifically, are the elements involved? How do they compare and contrast (i.e., per a method of assessing such thing such as Tilly)? For instance: this case of the professor who opened fire on her colleagues in Huntsville, Alabama. On first glance, when you hear that she shot and killed her brother in ‘86 and may have been involved with a bombing (or planned bombing?– emergent details in these sorts of cases are often scattered) years ago, one might be tempted to assert this case as an illustration of how a white, upper middle-class, female has to do a lot of bad things before being identified as a criminal and incarcerated. When thinking through male comparisons and contrasts, however, I can think of many, many cases of male criminals who killed a childhood playmate but were overlooked as adults rationalized that the dead child had died accidentally and/or who were eventually found to be responsible for a series of crimes once identified for some later event. Without the rigor I gained by being trained in the methodologies of sociology, I could easily make pop comparisons of this case with others and completely misrepresent what might really be interesting here. Instead, I’ll let the pop culture folks do that. Meantime, I’ll think some more before letting out a third cheer.
By the way– how do you put paragraphs into these comments?? I tried using the H1 key but that obviously didn’t do anything.