Within a university, disciplines (like mathematics, sociology, physics, computer science, etc.) are organizations of concepts, frameworks or theories, methods, and members. The disciplines are generally organized around a set of key questions or issues, large enough in scope that they can never be fully explored. “How did the universe begin?” ask some physicists. How groups of people shape the nature of societies is the meat of sociology and anthropology. “How does an author use words to convey his/her intended meaning; what properties of text lead to multiple possible meanings,” asks the literary critic. And on and on . . .
The value of a discipline is that it maintains the focus of attention of its scholars; it tracks progress and change in the set of answers to key questions and approaches to addressing them. It creates evaluative processes of what is admired in the discipline, through rankings of journals, awards for scholarship, and professional reviews. It coordinates the curriculum of educational activities to transmit knowledge of the field from one generation to the next.
As disciplines evolve, they sometimes spawn new fields, as in physics and mathematics offering key components of engineering. In some sense, new fields arise from fissures between two separate fields, as they “rub up against one another.” When the knowledge of one field confronts the knowledge of another, explosions of human thought sometimes result.
This is especially obvious now in a simple scan of problems and progress in the world. For example, the impact of urbanization and population growth on nonhuman species is well-documented from a biological and environmental science perspective but has not motivated strong collective action. Why? Genes have import to human outcomes, but the environment appears to impact genes in complicated ways. The process that moves human thoughts to behavioral intentions to action seems to be a complex mix of brain science and psychology.
Many of these unanswered questions are not legitimized as central to the core of any one field in a traditional university. Their import for the world’s future, however, looms large.
So, one of the jobs of a modern university is to give permission for scholars to investigate issues on the edges of fields. This type of work is organized precisely the opposite way that universities are organized. Instead of questions being legitimized by an existing unit, the questions often arise from unasked questions in a field. Instead of the discipline guiding a scholar to a body of knowledge on which to base his/her original research, the researcher must ferret out research on his/her own, searching literature that is foreign to his/her home field.
In my perspective, one of the values of the traditional disciplines is their decades and centuries of honing their questions. They build great assurance of the continued relevance and importance of the key questions facing the field; they have a history of meaningful answers. In contrast, the “hit rate” of new interdisciplinary fields is lower; hence, while universities must encourage the combinations of fields, they must also know that some combinations will not be sustainable as offering broad and deep new knowledge to society. Interdisciplinary fields need questions of quasi-permanent status to justify their ongoing relevance.
What’s a provost to do? Encourage cross-disciplinary fertilization. I’ve offered to help sponsor and support a brown-bag seminar series of inter-disciplinary groups and thereby let multiple faculty assess on their own whether disparate fields’ approaches can be combined for novel answers to old questions. When multiple faculty attract students to these interchanges who want to learn these new approaches, we should support new courses to convey them, hopefully team-taught.
But more needs to be done. The university should foster an environment in which the faculty can easily collaborate on new scholarship and research. The university should support promotion review processes that fairly judge the scholarly contributions of those working in multiple fields simultaneously. When an interdisciplinary field has assembled a set of long-run accomplishments, theories, methods, and occupations, then the university should mount educational programs for the next generation in that field. (The recent reorganization of the Graduate School will catalyze new interdisciplinary programs.)
Through these actions, the university can support faculty on the cutting-edge of knowledge and educate the next generation of leaders.
Very important issue. When one of my kids was at GU trying to double major in Bio and Computers. it was almost IMPOSSIBLE .{ this was 2000-2004. } The majors were so siloed that you almost couldn’t. And that was a time when the biology world was exploding with use of computers. Took many efforts to get both majors to help each other despite the fact that biologists and medical researchers were being encouraged to learn about computers and bioinformatics. I know there is now cooperation and maybe a masters in bio-computers possibly in bioinformatics, but GU has always suffered from silos in MANY areas. I applaud your addressing this. No real ideas to foster this but getting people to talk with each other is a start. The most amazing discoveries in Medicine have come when somebody thinks outside the box and their own field and i am sure that’s true for ALL research. So good luck. Talking to each other is a start. The Board of Governors a number of years back Initiated a Campus Engagement Committee which i headed to look at cooperation among ALL areas of the university— all schools faculty alums students administrators etc The key to that effort was asking people to talk . brown bag lunches . then great ideas and programs came from those lunches and communication. Just some thoughts and good luck. important issue. Ps my son was able to double major because his advisor A JESUIT made it happen. So talk with the Jesuits about making the system work.. They might have some great insights and ways to MOVE the system so to speak. Go hoyas. The best is yet to come.