Interdisciplinarity, the Market, and Granularity

by: Edward Dickinson

Asst. Professor, History

In a "Manifesto for the Humanities in a Technological Age" published in the Chronicle of Higher Education in February of this year, Cathy Davidson and David Goldberg remark on the fact that when economist Jeffrey Sachs drew up a list of disciplines that should be part of interdisciplinary teams tasked with solving world problems, he forgot about the humanities. The omission, they suggested, was symptomatic of a broader sense in American public life that the humanities are irrelevant. They argued that we need to do a better job of making clear to university administrators, legislators, and society at large the value of the humanities. They suggested, among other things, the development of "new structures" or a "new configuration in the humanities" to generate greater institutional and public support for interdisciplinary study and teaching.

As the authors point out, however, that battle is, for the most part, already won. The work of scholars in "traditional" humanities departments is already "marked by . . . disciplinary heterogeneity." I would add that there is plenty of institutional support for interdisciplinary teaching and research. On most campuses, for example, "studies" departments are as firmly established as any others, and most institutions are more than open to joint appointments or to co-teaching across disciplinary boundaries.

I also do not believe that the humanities are widely regarded as irrelevant. That may be the view of Jeffrey Sachs and people who listen to him, but it certainly does not seem to be the view of the market. Students want to take classes in creative writing; they want to take classes in art history; they want to take dance and even history courses. The humanities as a whole are not having a problem addressing the market.

There certainly are powerful political forces at work trying to distort the market for higher education to the detriment of the humanities. But the market is a self-correcting mechanism. I don't think we need to pursue “interdisciplinarity”--or anything else--as some sort of wonder-weapon that will allow us to defeat those political forces. They will defeat themselves financially in a decade or two. Our society is just too chaotic to be effectively or lastingly sovietized in this way.

Nevertheless, I believe the authors do have a point: there are still some significant institutional barriers to important forms of collaboration across disciplinary boundaries. I would like to suggest one minor institutional step that can be taken to reduce one such barrier.

There seem at times to be two rather different conceptions of what "interdisciplinarity" (awful word!) is, and what it should do for us. One conception is more collaborative and exploratory: “interdisciplinarity” means sitting down with colleagues in other fields to discuss or study a shared field of interest and to see what happens. Fundamentally, the aim here is to broaden inquiry focused on a particular problem or set of problems--to develop a research agenda or an interpretive framework enriched by questions, methods, theoretical approaches, and interpretive traditions drawn from several disciplines. The assumption is that social reality crosses disciplinary boundaries, and that we will develop a fuller understanding of social phenomena if we examine them from many perspectives such as history, anthropology, literature, and religion.

Obviously, it seems to me that the "studies" departments and programs institutionalize this approach and make it systematic rather than exploratory. They address specific issues (for example peace and conflict), problems (the environment), institutions (the family), cultural patterns (religion), or groups (women) from multiple disciplinary starting-points in a relatively disciplined and sustained manner.

The second common conception of what "interdisciplinarity" means is more individual and limited. In this conception, “interdisciplinarity” is what happens when a scholar or teacher runs up against a specific problem in her research or teaching that requires her to reach out to other disciplines for methods, interpretive frameworks, and questions that give her the intellectual leverage she needs to solve that problem – a problem that originates in her own, discipline-bound work. Essentially the point here is to broaden by narrowing, to focus with greater precision on a particular problem by borrowing specific "tools" from other disciplines. The assumption is that we can borrow such "tools" without really questioning our own disciplinary perspective and agenda.

In most universities the former conception, particularly as it applies to teaching, is well established as an institutional priority--hence the vitality, for example, of many "studies" departments. In contrast, there are few formal mechanisms for supporting the latter conception. In part, this makes sense, given the mostly solitary nature of our scholarly work and the idiosyncratic bias of the prevailing pedagogical model. But it does mean that there are some important, though not highly visible, barriers to seeing teaching in the humanities as a collaborative and interdisciplinary enterprise.

For example, we have almost no mechanisms that make it a no-loss proposition for the individual scholar to contribute to the classroom experience in a colleague's course. If I want to ask a colleague from German Studies to contribute a session on Weimar film and literature to my course on modern German history, I have to ask her to do so out of the goodness of her heart, while I, so to speak, take the day off. At most, we can approach this on an informal, tit-for-tat basis. For departments, co-taught interdisciplinary courses – and even in some cases merely cross-listed courses – generally mean a de facto loss of FTEs. To my knowledge, there is essentially no formal institutional brokering procedure that would allow instructors and departments to "book" such contributions in such a way as to avoid a net loss of energy, time, and departmental funds. At least formally, there is no "granularity" to the way we view teaching: either one has taught a course, or one has not taught at all. On the other hand, if one has taught half a course, so to speak, one has taught a full course.

In market terms, this seems to me to be a classic case of inherited business practices limiting efficiency and constraining innovation. An economy in which the only currency was the one thousand dollar bill would be somewhat inflexible. That is more or less the situation we create by using whole courses as our accounting units in measuring our teaching contributions.

Beyond my own experience, I don’t have a measure of the extent to which this is actually a problem. Nor do I have a solution. But it might be useful to do some investigation and to perform some thought-experiments. To what degree do informal practices compensate for the formal inflexibility of the "3-2-2 teaching load"? How much pedagogical and intellectual leverage would I gain if my teaching work were assessed – say – as a "portfolio of contributions" rather than as a set of courses? And in a budgetary environment in which numbers, so to speak, matter more and more, how do we nevertheless generate room for innovation in the service of "interdisciplinarity"?