Georgetown, as a Jesuit and Catholic institution, contains many faculty who choose their area of research as a way to solve important world problems. Their expertise may be a small component of a much larger system of solutions to the problem, but their motivation is to contribute to a better world. In a real sense, this is a merger of the university’s goal of advancing knowledge and its goal of service to the larger society.
As research and scholarship evolves, the problems of import increasingly require complicated mixes of knowledge domains. So, many of our colleagues choose to work across disciplines with others who share a passion for a problem area, but bring different perspectives, complementary to their own. Cross-discipline seminars allow faculty to share current work and to breed collaborations over time. Joint teaching permits insights into effective blends of ideas for new research.
Of course, there are challenges to such scholarship. Disciplines tend to have inertial forces that define “flagship” journals and key questions that are prominent in the field. In contrast, problem-based research generates new “field” journals that become vehicles for development of new problem-oriented subfields, but their impact factors lag their likely value. In one sense, scholars using the book or monograph as an output vehicle may have an advantage, with many publishers who are less discipline-bound. However, some disciplines under-reward the impact on real-world problems.
At Georgetown, we face another impediment that we’re trying to act upon – lack of space devoted to such problem-solving enterprises. Most research universities have space devoted to institutes/centers/programs where faculty and students can gather for informal interactions as well as joint work. But such space is precious on the Hilltop Campus. The University’s acquisition of 500 First St NW building helps. It will house the pan-university Technology and Society Initiative, a collection of faculty and staff examining the relationship of technological change and human behaviors, as well as the problem-oriented McCourt Centers. When the McCourt School moves to the Capitol Campus, we are hopeful to build out space for a multi-disciplinary Humanities Center on the Hilltop Campus, a needed evolution of the Humanities Initiative.
Finally, for faculty who work together in areas for which external funding is available, another support mechanism can be constructed. When possible, the university can invest in these clusters to assist their garnering more external grants. Recently, the Vice Provost for Research and the Faculty Research Executive Committee designed a process to support some groups of researchers coalescing around a set of externally funded research programs. They labeled these as Research Initiatives, Centers and Institutes or RICI’s. To qualify as a RICI the unit should have affiliated tenure line or NTL-research faculty. The RICI should be acting at a level of activity to involve administrative support for original research, with at least one FTE dedicated administrative staff fully funded by external sources (including support provided to the RICI by the university). RICI affiliates should aim to publish in peer reviewed outlets, or in the RICI’s own series of policy briefs, working papers, etc.
Not all research initiatives, centers or institutes qualify. Units that are funded by a single source, consist of a single faculty member, or have little likelihood of sustainability over many years do not qualify. A unit that engages solely in advocacy and dissemination work will typically not be considered eligible. Centers that are created as part of an NSF (or other sponsor) “Center Grant” are not automatically eligible for the Incentive Policy. The university will use operating revenues to support some research administrative activities needed by RICI’s, as a function of the volume of those activities that would otherwise be provided by central university units.
While continuing to support individual scholars in their endeavors through internal funding mechanisms, we have added these new procedures to support groups of faculty who choose to work together on externally funded endeavors. And, we haven’t given up on getting more space for scholarly activities that increase Georgetown’s contribution to solving important world problems.
A very important issue, and congratulations to the McCourt and the Humanities Center on the progress with plans for their new homes. Of course, for some prominent cross disciplinary or interdisciplinary research efforts at GU we already have possibilities that can make use of space we already have. Particularly in the natural sciences, it is doubtful that research infrastructure (centrifuges, spectrometers and the like) needed for interdisciplinary scientific teaching and research done on the hilltop can be duplicated on First St or anywhere else, so those of us that do such things have always invented other approaches. Thankfully, alternatively, these approaches already exist at GU. Yet, we have struggled for decades to facilitate collaboration across our main and medical campuses that enable our progress. Some of us figure things out, ad hoc, but most of the knowledge required to do such things remains hidden in the experiences of the people that do it. Although some initiatives have been started at the institutional level, in large part, we remain very far below our potential. For example, things that are academically as simple and natural as a cross campus undergraduate major in Biochemistry, or a cross campus Ph.D. program in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology don’t exist at GU. They do elsewhere, at Universities with < 1/2 our advantages. All the idealistic research that would accompany such things, catalyzed by some of the top interdisciplinary Ph.D., M.S., and undergraduates in the country, currently involves only ad hoc cross campus participation by a handful of idealistic colleagues in Chemistry on the main campus or the Dept of Biochemistry & Cellular & Molecular Biology ("BCMB") at GUMC. Numerous administrative and cultural hurdles hold anything more than that back. Without administrative leadership that clears the path, they always will hold us back. And in the natural sciences, "Biochemistry" is just one of the more obvious examples, it once was the youngest of the truly interdisciplinary fields emerging in the natural sciences, now it is firmly entrenched in middle age, with dozens of much younger fields, many facilitated by "omics" in all its luscious categories, blossoming everywhere. But not necessarily at GU. The list of additional things that MC & GUMC could do together across teaching, research, and service (to the entire globe) is a mile long, and we don't even need another campus to do it. Why don't we ?
Cheers
Paul