I’ve written in the past about opportunities to advance knowledge and serve the world through interdisciplinary work within universities.
At Georgetown, much of this is led by faculty who want to seize the opportunity to advance their own scholarship by combining knowledge from multiple fields. It is they who are giving energy to the creation of new graduate programs stimulated by unsolved global problems. There are, for example, proposals approved or being forwarded by faculty interested in the environment, a coalition from the natural and social sciences; one on aging, a coalition from psychology, demography, and the biomedical sciences; and one on global business and international affairs.
Other efforts have allowed faculty who wish to collaborate in their research across multiple fields – the Georgetown Environment Initiative (GEI) has supported work with natural scientists, social scientists, and humanists. The McCourt Massive Data Institute has supported work by social scientists and computer scientists. The senior vice president for research has supported work on forced migration involving historians, anthropologists, and computer scientists.
Further, major foundations that fund faculty scholarship have signaled the importance of interdisciplinary work, most notably the National Science Foundation in its “big ideas” initiative. Similar efforts can be found in many private foundations and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
The perceived push for interdisciplinarity most likely arises partly because the typical organization of intellectual activity is disciplinary or field-centric. Universities organize themselves into domains defined by a identifiable set of theories, a set of enduring questions to be addressed, a set of methods espoused as productive of sound evidence, a culture defining what dissemination media are valued, and a set of professional associations that help to preserve all of the above. These domains have gaps among them; some of the gaps can be filled with unexploited combinations of the domains. Hence, the call for interdisciplinarity as an attempt to fill gaps.
While interdisciplinarity is demonstrating its value across a whole set of problems, it’s important to note that interdisciplinarity itself is dependent on disciplines. The promise of interdisciplinarity to make progress on unsolved problems depends on the promise of mixing methods and theories form existing disciplines. Several of my colleagues have made the observation that good interdisciplinarity requires strong disciplines. I couldn’t agree more.
The need to initiate interdisciplinary thrusts have come from faculty who see the value of combining fields. An increasing number of new faculty have generated such aspirations in their graduate programs. They and their colleagues have forwarded exciting new ideas for blends of knowledge from multiple domains. We have supplemented our faculty search process procedures to permit such joint hires; we are supporting such scholarship. This attention is necessary to nurture such activity.
In doing so, however, we must simultaneously assure that the core strength of the disciplines is similarly nurtured. The best interdisciplinary work contributes to the advancement of multiple fields. The best disciplinary work can catalyze new interdisciplinary solutions. Getting the right mixture is the challenge of all universities at this time.
As a faculty member trained in an “interdiscipline” (American Studies), appointed in a traditional “discipline” (English), and serving on the steering committees of several interdisciplinary programs on campus (AMST, FMST), I find the Provost’s commitment to strengthening interdisciplinary research and teaching at Georgetown heartening. I can only speak for myself, but I suspect that the vast majority of my colleagues feel much the same way. Georgetown’s interdisciplinary programs, both new and old, are hubs of intellectual vitality that powerfully shape my own research and teaching. They play an important role in the lives of my students, too.
The initiative to increase joint hires across the university is a worthy first step in the direction of “unbridling” interdisciplinarity at Georgetown. But I also wonder if it might be worth considering some of the structural barriers to the future success of interdisciplinary work on campus. The existing interdisciplinary programs at GU with which I am most closely affiliated–the results of ongoing partnerships between students, faculty, and the administration–mostly operate on “soft” money. As I understand it, this means that these programs owe much of their success to the generosity of external donors. Indeed, their very existence depends on it.
This seems like a major impediment to the long-term stability of interdisciplinary research and teaching at Georgetown. As long as the university’s financial commitment to interdisciplinarity remains “soft,” the growth of interdisciplinary units on campus will remain vulnerable both to the vagaries of the market and to the whims of individual donors, generous though they are. If we truly want to unbridle interdisciplinarity at Georgetown, it seems to me that securing its structural stability is imperative.
The Department of Spanish and Portuguese has a number of faculty who work in interdisciplinary research and teaching projects. Some of these research projects are born from interdisciplinary teaching, e.g. our faculty teach in Film Studies, Comparative Literature, Performance Studies, Latin American Studies, and interdisciplinary clusters in issues of linguistics and cognition. Not all the time, not every semester. These interdisciplinary projects have resulted in outstanding research activities and publications, from partnerships with DC schools to international transatlantic and transpacific publications and activities. Nonetheless, because we are a department with a small faculty who teach over 1000 students semester, we have been advised to be very careful about teaching in other units or working internationally until we have more faculty resources. Given the timelines we have been shown for hiring more TL faculty, it looks like we will be not be able to undertake new teaching initiatives or “stretch” ourselves for quite a number of years.
Interdisciplinarity is indeed built on strong disciplinary work. Our disciplines (we have both humanities and social science faculty in our department) have robust representation in our department. We are disappointed that the much vaunted interdisciplinarity is restricted to departments with greater resources. “Unbridled” is not the term I would use for our interdisciplinary projects. We will effectively become a “stalled interdisciplinary” unit if there are no moves made to allow certain sectors to work to the fullest of their intellectual, creative, and teaching capacities. Conflicting messages from the administration make faculty uneasy and insecure about what they should be doing. This is where our department now finds itself.
Very good discussion. Sorta summarizing. We need to master our field. And then think out of the box to collaborate creatively with other disciplines. Those efforts could bring transformative change to our world. Good thoughts Provost. Ps. It’s kinda “Designing the future! “