Creating Interdisciplinary Campus Cultures E-Book

Julie Thompson Klein

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 327

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2009

Beschreibung

Praise for Creating Interdisciplinary Campus Cultures "Klein's analysis shows convincingly that from research in the sciences to new graduate-level programs and departments, to new designs for general education, interdisciplinarity is now prevalent throughout American colleges and universities. . . . Klein documents trends, traces historical patterns and precedents, and provides practical advice. Going directly to the heart of our institutional realities, she focuses attention on some of the more challenging aspects of bringing together ambitious goals for interdisciplinary vitality with institutional, budgetary, and governance systems. A singular strength of this book, then, is the practical advice it provides about such nitty-gritty issues as program review, faculty development, tenure and promotion, hiring, and the political economy of interdisciplinarity. . . . We know that readers everywhere will find [this book] simultaneously richly illuminating and intensively useful." --from the foreword by Carol Geary Schneider, president, Association of American Colleges and Universities "Klein reveals how universities can move beyond glib rhetoric about being interdisciplinary toward pervasive full interdisciplinarity. Institutions that heed her call for restructured intellectual environments are most likely to thrive in the new millennium." --William H. Newell, professor, Interdisciplinary Studies, Miami University, and executive director, Association for Integrative Studies "In true interdisciplinary fashion, Julie Klein integrates a tremendous amount of material into this book to tell the story of interdisciplinarity across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. And she does so both from the theoretical perspective of 'understanding' interdisciplinarity and from the practical vantage of 'doing' interdisciplinarity. This book is a must-read for faculty and administrators thinking about how to maximize the opportunities and minimize the challenges of interdisciplinary programming on their campuses." --Diana Rhoten, director, Knowledge Institutions Program, and director, Digital Media and Learning Project, Social Science Research Counsel

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

THE AUTHOR

Foreword

Acknowledgements

Introduction

THE BOOK

CHAPTER ONE - MAPPING NATIONAL DRIVERS OF INTERDISCIPLINARY CHANGE

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

SOCIAL SCIENCES

HUMANITIES

TRANSITION TOWARD LOCAL CHANGE

CHAPTER TWO - BRIDGING NATIONAL AND LOCAL MAPS

INTERDISCIPLINARY MODES AND FORMS OF WORKS

AN EMPIRICAL PICTURE

TAXONOMY

VARIABLES OF CHANGE

CHAPTER THREE - PLATFORMING INTERDISCIPLINARITY

STRATEGIES FOR CHANGE

CENTRAL OVERSIGHT

A CENTRAL INTERDISCIPLINARY WEBSITE

LEADERSHIP

AN INTERDISCIPLINARY ENDOWMENT

SEEDING CHANGE

CHAPTER FOUR - FOSTERING PROGRAMMATIC STRENGTH AND SUSTAINABILITY

INSTITUTIONALIZATION

CRITICAL MASS

PROGRAM REVIEW

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF IDS

CHAPTER FIVE - MONITORING THE INTERDISCIPLINARY CAREER LIFE CYCLE

HIRING

TENURE AND PROMOTION

FACULTY DEVELOPMENT

CONCLUSION: COUNTERING MYTHS AND SITUATING PRACTICES

RESPONDING TO MYTHS ABOUT INTERDISCIPLINARITY

(RE) SITUATING INTERDISCIPLINARITY

RESOURCES

GLOSSARY FOR A CORE VOCABULARY

REFERENCES

INDEX

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Klein, Julie Thompson.

Creating interdisciplinary campus cultures : a model for strength and sustainability / Julie Thompson Klein.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

eISBN : 978-0-470-57315-0

1. Interdisciplinary approach in education—United States. 2. Universities and colleges—United States. I. Title.

LB2361.5.K54 2010 378.1’99—dc22

2009036748

HB Printing

The Jossey-Bass

Higher and Adult Education Series

To my colleagues and students who fought with strength and integrity against closure of the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies at Wayne State University

THE AUTHOR

Julie Thompson Klein is professor of humanities in interdisciplinary studies/English and Faculty Fellow in the Office for Teaching and Learning at Wayne State University. She has held visiting positions in Japan and New Zealand and was a Fulbright Professor in Nepal. Klein received the Kenneth Boulding Award for outstanding scholarship on interdisciplinarity, including the books and monographs Interdisciplinarity: History, Theory, and Practice (1990), Crossing Boundaries (1996), Mapping Interdisciplinary Studies (1999), and Humanities, Culture, and Interdisciplinarity (2005). Her edited and coedited books include Interdisciplinary Studies Today (1994), Transdisciplinarity (2001), Interdisciplinary Education in K-12 and College (2002), and Promoting Interdisciplinary Research (2005). Klein has lectured on interdisciplinarity throughout North America, Europe, South Asia, Latin America, and Australia. She was also Senior Fellow at the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) and served on national task forces of the Society for Values in Higher Education (Interdisciplinary Studies), AAC&U (Integrative Learning), and the Association for Integrative Studies (Accreditation). In addition, she has advised the National Institutes of Health, National Academy of Sciences, and National Science Foundation on interdisciplinary research. Klein is currently coeditor of the University of Michigan Press series Digital Humanities@digitalculturebooks and is working on a book mapping the field of digital humanities. She is also coeditor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity.

FOREWORD

I majored in history when I was in college and later went on to earn a doctorate in the same field. But both as an undergraduate and as a graduate student, I really thought of myself as an “early modern studies” student. Intentionally and extensively, I added numerous courses from multiple disciplines studying early modern developments in religion, philosophy, art history, literature, political science, and anthropology, always with the goal of building a fuller understanding for myself of the contours and contests of my chosen area of work.

This was, however, an entirely independent project. My mentors did not disapprove it, but neither did they at any point see it as their role to help me integrate my far-flung and multidisciplinary studies.

Early on, I began to realize that the material that really interested me—the interplay across religion, politics, and contested cultures—scarcely “belonged” at all to the “discipline” of history. Indeed, there were entire other disciplines that existed specifically to probe each of these areas of human experience: religion, political science, and anthropology, not to mention the then emerging fields of cultural studies. Where, then, should I locate myself? Should I think of myself as “interdisciplinary”? What might this mean when, across some twenty-plus years of formal education, I had never taken a single course or ventured into a single department that presented itself as interdisciplinary, cross-disciplinary, or even multidisciplinary?

My work might be cross-disciplinary, but I was a solo actor. What would it mean in practice to make some form of cross-disciplinarity a primary organizing principle for my own educational identity and institutional location—whether in scholarship or teaching?

As I struggled to make sense of all this conceptually, methodologically, and professionally, I remained, like the majority of academics in my generation, largely on my own. Some brave spirits—many, in fact—went out and founded dynamic new interdisciplinary fields, giving birth to the extraordinary intellectual fertility of the current academy, a fertility that Julie Klein maps brilliantly in this book. But this did not occur to me, and in any event, such areas as ethnic, environmental, and women’s studies seemed to have a considerably greater urgency about them than my own particular interest in post-Reformation religious and political landscapes.

I mention my personal intellectual history because I have come to believe that the disjunction I experienced—the tension between my actual work and the academy’s dominant organizational and educational structures—is not only widespread but absolutely commonplace. Julie Klein’s fine study tells us, however, that we do not need to simply live with these disjunctions. We have reached a point where we are starting to see both how to change them, and that we must.

The twentieth-century academy organized itself firmly around the concept of disciplinary conceptual structures, problems, and methods. The institutional and psychosocial legacies of that decision live on into the twenty-first-century academy. Indeed, in Europe, this legacy not only lives on but is taking on a second life in what is known as “the Bologna process.” Through the Bologna process, dozens of countries have agreed not only to set clear intellectual standards for what undergraduates need to achieve in their studies, but to do so by “tuning” specific academic disciplines. Tuning is a term meant to ensure that there will be a shared understanding, across institutions and countries, of what it means in terms of knowledge, methodological skills, and applied work to earn a degree in a particular subject area—whether history, biology, or business.

One could almost say that since the academy failed to clarify the meaning and standards for disciplines in the twentieth century, European scholars are working now to tidy up that unfinished business—mapping the intended contours of “the disciplines” for the twenty-first century.

But in truth, as Julie Klein makes clear in this rich and enormously useful analysis of the academy’s actual scholarly terrain, we have already entered a different world. The boundaries have blurred, and the creative energy of our age is decidedly cross-disciplinary. Undone by tens of thousands of scholars whose interests were as unfounded as my own, the entire concept of “the discipline” has increasingly taken on the stance of fiction, and an inconvenient fiction at that.

For dozens of different but intersecting reasons—developments and tensions within established fields, creative work that cuts across fields, the deepening connections between the academy and the communities it serves, and the actual interests of contemporary scholars—both intellectual work and undergraduate teaching and learning move restlessly across the so-called disciplinary boundaries. Across all the major domains of academic work, with established fields as well as in new fields, we have broken free of anything we might think of as a disciplinary framework for pathbreaking intellectual work.

These developments notwithstanding, however, our institutional structures for both faculty and undergraduate learning remain firmly rooted in an earlier set of understandings. Disciplines, as Klein notes in Chapter Four, are “systems of power with control over resources, identities, and patterns of research and education. Disciplines constitute economies of value . . . encoded in canons of work and the professional apparatus of publication.”

Faced with this deeply rooted contradiction and the resultant tensions between generative academic work and the structures of actual power, American higher education has enormous work before it. One priority is that of understanding the scope and reach of the many emerging forms of cross-disciplinary work. We need to understand the world we actually inherit.

A second priority is that of providing new forms of institutional support, recognition, and reward for those who do this work, whether as scholars or in their curricular leadership and teaching. The third priority—an arena in which the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) has joined hands with interdisciplinary scholars and teachers across the United States—is that of rethinking teaching and learning, and the larger project of providing a liberal or horizon-expanding education in light of this new interdisciplinary dynamism.

This book provides guidance on all of these issues. Klein’s analysis shows convincingly that from research in the sciences to new graduate-level programs and departments, to new designs for general education, interdisciplinarity is now prevalent through out American colleges and universities. She maps the drivers of interdisciplinary changes in scholarship and curricula and demon strates forcefully that developing and sustaining interdisciplinary studies is essential to providing students with complex capaci ties so important to navigating the world of work, learning, and citizenship today.

Klein documents trends, traces historical patterns and prece dents, and provides practical advice. Going directly to the heart of our institutional realities, she focuses attention on some of the more challenging aspects of bringing together ambitious goals for interdisciplinary vitality with institutional, budgetary, and governance systems. A singular strength of this book, then, is the practical advice it provides about such nitty-gritty issues as program review, faculty development, tenure and promotion, hiring, and the political economy of interdisciplinarity.

Klein’s overview of campus educational practices meshes with what we at AAC&U see in our own work with campuses on the revitalization of curriculum, teaching, and learning. Spanning every kind of college and university (two-year and four-year, public and private, large and small), AAC&U members overwhelmingly are incorporating more integrative and engaged forms of learning in both general education and major programs (AAC&U, 2009). Whether the actual course of study is described as disciplinary or interdisciplinary, American higher education is now engaging students with big questions and real problems. Almost invariably, those problems span conventional disciplinary boundaries.

As Klein describes in her comprehensive overview, the Ameri can college curriculum now prioritizes integration, cross-cultural interaction, and the development of cross-functional and inter disciplinary capacities—capacities that are precisely what today’s world demands of college graduates. Whether they proceed to graduate school and engage in complex research in nanotechnology or biomedical engineering or directly to a workplace increasingly defined by innovation and globalization, today’s college graduates will be challenged every day to integrate their knowledge and skills and apply learning to new settings and forms of complexity.

Klein also forcefully shows that trends in interdisciplinarity are driven not only by the changing nature of research or the demands of a globalized economy. To be a responsible citizen in today’s world requires a scope and depth of learning that enables individuals to understand and navigate dramatic forces—physical, cultural, economic, technological—that directly affect the quality, character, and perils of the world in which they live. With fields changing so rapidly and unscripted problems abundant on every front, we cannot hope to teach students a discipline that will work for all purposes. But we can teach them that in both their professional lives and lives as citizens and community and family members, they need to look far and wide, analyze rigorously, synthesize judiciously, and take anomalies and contradictions directly into account.

Klein’s work has been an important resource for AAC&U as this association has made integrative and interdisciplinary learning an ever more central part of our vision for twenty-first-century liberal learning and educational quality. In College Learning for the New Global Century, the signature report from AAC&U’s decade-long initiative on Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP), the authors affirm that teaching students how to integrate their learning across multiple disciplines and contexts is essential, not optional, in the campus framework for educational excellence. The LEAP report also calls for new campus leadership and action to make intentional integrative learning a defining feature for liberal education and, indeed, for American higher education. We noted in the LEAP report that “with campus experimentation already well advanced . . . it is time to move from ‘pilot efforts’ to full-scale commitments.”

Klein’s book demonstrates convincingly that the academy is indeed poised to move in precisely that direction. We are proud to partner with Jossey-Bass in publishing this important study, and we know that readers everywhere will find it simultaneously richly illuminating and intensively useful.

CAROL GEARY SCHNEIDER President Association of American Colleges and Universities

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book would not have been possible without the generous help of colleagues and friends who enriched my understanding as we worked together on a variety of projects:

• Diana Rhoten and Stanley Katz of the Social Science Research Council’s Teagle Foundation-funded study of interdisciplinary quality assessment in liberal education

• Veronica Boix-Mansilla and Howard Gardner of the Interdisciplinary Studies Project at Project Zero in the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University

• Dan Stokols of the School of Social Ecology at the University of California, Irvine, and Transdisciplinary Research Initiatives in the U.S. National Cancer Institute

• Katri Huutoniemi, Janne Hukkinen, and Henrik Bruun of the Helsinki Institute of Technology, University of Helsinki, and the Academy of Finland Interdisciplinary Research evaluation team

• Gertrude Hirsch Hadorn and Christian Pohl of the Swiss Institute of Technology in Zurich and the Network for Transdisciplinary Research, known as td-net (www.transdisciplinarity.ch/e/index.php)

• Jack Spaapen, coordinator of quality assurance and research evaluation at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences

• Gabrielle Bammer of the National University of Australia and Network for Integration and Implementation Sciences

• Robert Frodeman, Carl Mitcham, and Britt Holbrook of the editorial team for the Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity

Others supplied vital materials and insights:

• Gail Dubrow of the University of Minnesota, about the Consortium for Fostering Interdisciplinary Inquiry

• Cathy Davidson, Susan Roth, Celeste Lee, and Peter Lange of Duke University, about the Duke model for facilitating interdisciplinarity

• Kathy Woodward of the University of Washington and Bruce Burgett of the University of Washington Bothell campus, about their campus cultures

• Peyton Smith of the University of Wisconsin, about the cluster hiring model

• Lisa Lewis and Peter Mitchell of Albion College, about their campus culture

• Creso Sá of the University of Toronto, for an early copy of his dissertation, “Interdisciplinary Strategies at Research-Intensive Universities”

• Tanya Augsburg and Stuart Henry, for a prepublication copy of The Politics of Interdisciplinary Studies: Essays on Transformations in American Undergraduate Programs

• Joan Fiscella, principal bibliographer and associate professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s University Library, for advice on Web-based searching

• Marceline Weshalek of the Wayne State University Library and Information Science program, for conducting database searches referenced in the Introduction and Resources

• Sherry Tuffin of the Wayne State University Library and Information Science program, for assistance with copyediting tasks

The following institutions and forums were valuable testing grounds for ideas:

• Centre de recherche en intervention éducative, University of Sherbrooke, Quebec, with special thanks to the founder and director, Yves Lenoir

• The Australian Academy of Science Fenner Conference on Disciplinarity

• The U.S. National Academy of Sciences Task Force on Facilitating Interdisciplinary Research

• The U.S. National Academy of Sciences panel on Modernizing the Infrastructure of the National Science Foundation’s Federal Funds for R&D Survey

• SRI International Task Force on Indicators of Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering Research

• Michigan State University, Central Michigan University, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and at Dearborn, Oregon State University, the University of Washington at Seattle and at Bothell, Edgewood College, and New York City College of Technology

For permission to adapt and update previously published material, I am indebted to the following:

• The Association of American Colleges and Universities, for portions of a monograph: Klein, J. T. Mapping Interdisciplinary Studies. Academy in Transition series. Washington, D.C.: AAC&U, 1999.

• Heldref Publications, for portions of a “Resource Review” article: Klein, J. T. “Resources for Interdisciplinary Studies.” Change (2006), 58, 52-56.

• The State University of New York Press, for portions of Klein, J. T. Humanities, Culture, and Interdisciplinarity: The Changing American Academy. Albany: SUNY Press, 2005.

• Sage Publications, for portions of “Interdisciplinary Approach.” Handbook of Social Science Methodology, eds. S. Turner and W. Outhwaite. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2007.

I am also indebted to Jossey-Bass and the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) for a wonderful publishing partnership. David Brightman, senior editor of the Jossey-Bass Higher and Adult Education series, was an enthusiastic champion of this book. Carolyn Dumore was a pleasure to work with during copyediting as was Shana Harrington in the proofreading stage. Aneesa Davenport guided the overall production process, and Carrie Wright oversaw marketing with the aid of Tracy Gallagher. Carol Geary Schneider, president of AAC&U, and Debra Humphreys, vice president for communications and public affairs, were generous in welcoming copublication and have been valued colleagues on other projects for many years.

Finally, I would be remiss in not thanking my husband, George Klein, who was pressed into service many times as a sounding board for ideas, even when he least expected it.

JULIE THOMPSON KLEINDetroit 2009

INTRODUCTION: A MODEL FOR INTERDISCIPLINARY CHANGE

Interdisciplinarity has become a mantra for change in the twenty-first century. The word appears in countless reports from professional associations, educational organizations, funding agencies, and science policy bodies. It is a keyword in strategic plans, accompanied by a companion rhetoric of innovation, collaboration, competitiveness, and the cutting edge. It also echoes in the way that we describe knowledge and education today. Images of knowledge as a foundation or a linear structure have been replaced by a network and a web. Images of the curriculum follow suit, supplanting fragmentation and segmentation with integrating, connecting, linking, and clustering. The concept is not new or, as some suggest, merely a passing fad. The earliest documented use of the word dates to the 1920s, in social science research and the general education movement. Others trace the concept’s origin to the 1940s, in the Manhattan Project to build an atomic bomb, and many cite the 1960s and 1970s, in a surge of educational innovation and experimentation. Current interest is more widespread, fostering the belief that interdisciplinarity is now basic to both research and education. In 1997 the editors of the Handbook of the Undergraduate Education (Gaff and Ratcliff, 1997) declared that a historical reversal of the trend toward specialization was underway. In 2004 Johan Heilbron called the diffusion of interdisciplinarity throughout the academy since the 1960s “probably the clearest sign of the erosion of disciplines as the predominant mode of academic organization” (pp. 37-38). And in 2009 Brint, Turk-Bicakci, Proctor, and Murphy reported that interdisciplinary research and teaching is now widely considered a notable feature of academic change, documented by a sharp increase in collaborative research, administrative advocacy, funding, and a literature of best practices.

The belief that interdisciplinarity is more important today is affirmed by a shift in requests for help. Twenty years ago, it was not unusual for the director of an individual program to seek advice about a single initiative. Today it is not unusual for a high-level administrator to request help creating a more favorable institution-wide support system. The multiple connotations of the word signal the reasons for heightened interest. Interdisciplinarity is associated with bold advances in knowledge, solutions to urgent societal problems, an edge in technological innovation, and a more integrative educational experience. Administrators, in particular, value the organizational flexibility to respond to new needs, offer new fields and forms of education, attract faculty in new areas, stimulate greater coherence in the curriculum, establish a distinct identity among peer institutions, enhance collaborative use of facilities, be more competitive in securing external funding, and forge new partnerships with government, industry, and the community. Faculty cite the ability to pursue new intellectual questions, work in new areas of teaching and research, counterbalance the isolation of specialization, infuse innovative and active-learning pedagogies into the curriculum, develop integrative and collaborative skills in students, and respond to societal problems. Students appreciate opportunities to learn about a broad range of disciplines, study real-world problems and issues, make connections between their majors and other disciplines and fields, pursue interdisciplinary majors and concentrations, find and integrate knowledge from different disciplines, and gain skills of higher-order critical thinking, synthesis, and collaboration for working in teams.

A search of the LexisNexis online news service over the past several years puts a more concrete face on the reasons for heightened interest. This century began with updates on the widely touted interdisciplinary (ID) general education program at Portland State University and recommendations to strengthen ID learning requirements at Texas Christian University. In 2001 the Chronicle of Higher Education heralded the birth of a new field of Internet studies. In 2004 Northwestern University announced a plan to create more interdisciplinary options, and Vanderbilt University’s English department added new courses emphasizing cultural influences on literature. The year 2005 brought news of a global studies major at UCLA and a campaign at the College of New Caledonia in British Columbia to strengthen interdisciplinary awareness in training programs for health care professions. A search of the Educational Resources Information Center database over the same period yielded additional reports of integrative curricula in a wide range of areas, including adult learning, technical and scientific communication, information architecture, Web-based education, international business, natural resource management, and math and science courses.

The most recent study of interdisciplinary programs adds further evidence. When Brint, Turk-Bicakci, Proctor, and Murphy (2009) examined patterns of growth in nine fields between 1975 and 2000, they found that growth has been particularly strong in the areas of technological innovation and social incorporation of traditionally underrepresented populations. However, growth was not distributed evenly, suggesting that interdisciplinary organization is not likely to continue in all fields. These authors foresee new brain and biomedical fields, such as cognitive science and neuroscience, eventually becoming institutionalized in departmental structures. Environmental studies might also become more fully institutionalized as departments, though activist agendas do not fit easily within the professionalized structures of academic departments.

Others have also observed a gap between the rhetoric of endorsement and the realities of campus life. When Irwin Feller (2002, 2006) examined a number of leading U.S. research universities, he found checkered patterns of growth, stasis, and decline in interdisciplinary initiatives, with discernible variations in the willingness of administrators or faculty to accept them. Even where initiatives take hold, they survive mainly as enclaves or showpieces within the historically determined disciplinary structure of higher education. As a result, they have limited staying power, engendering only marginal changes in performance norms, resource allocations, and outcomes promulgated in strategic plans. Lacking deep roots within the core functions of hard money budgets, tenure lines, and space, they remain vulnerable. In a recent study of interdisciplinarity in research-intensive universities, Creso Sá (2005) noted further gaps, including a lack of comprehensive studies and data on research structures, programs, and funding outcomes. Moreover, evidence is mixed and fragmentary, and discussions of organizational structures and strategies are often normative or speculative.

The gaps are evident in both education and research. Changes that foster interdisciplinarity, Faith Gabelnick (2002) reported, are occurring on many campuses. Yet so is resistance. Fear of losing past routines and traditions is high on the list of objections. Furthermore, Stuart Henry (2005) warns, a new round of disciplinary hegemony is trumping interdisciplinary ascendancy with efforts to co-opt, absorb, regularize, and normalize successful experiments in the curriculum. Mindful of the same challenges in interdisciplinary research (IDR), James Collins cautions that deeply embedded cultural issues confront individuals and institutions. When respondents to preliminary surveys for the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) report, Facilitating Interdisciplinary Research (2004), were asked to rank supportiveness for interdisciplinary research, they indicated a trend toward more favorable environments. Yet they were also aware of the barriers: 71 percent of 423 respondents to the individual survey and 90 percent of the 57 provosts and vice chancellors who answered a provost survey believe that major impediments exist locally. Administrative, funding, and cultural barriers between departments collectively impede movement across boundaries, perpetuating institutional customs that create “a small but persistent ‘drag’ on researchers who would like to do interdisciplinary research and teaching” (Collins, cited in Facilitating Interdisciplinary Research, 2004, p. 171).

The arguments in support of interdisciplinarity are persuasive. However, promotional rhetoric and the promises of strategic plans ring hollow when interdisciplinary work is routinely impeded and discounted. Diana Rhoten (2004) came to a similar conclusion in a study of IDR centers and programs funded by the National Science Foundation. Despite all the talk about interdisciplinarity, universities are failing to walk the walk. Many are simply adopting interdisciplinary labels—without adapting their disciplinary structures and artifacts. The authors of Facilitating Interdisciplinary Research (2004) affirm that few universities have implemented systemic reforms for lowering institutional barriers. Even institutions with well-known profiles and a significant portion of faculty identifying themselves as having ID affiliations and commitments recognize the need to address persistent impediments. Uneven development benefits some but leaves others at the margins (Dubrow and Harris, 2006).

Simply speaking the word can “warm a room,” Caruso and Rhoten (2001) quipped, generating “knowing nods” of agreement about interdisciplinarity’s explanatory power, relevance, and practical applicability. Yet organizational roadblocks, skepticism, and lack of agreed-on metrics to gauge quality counter claims. The contradictory discourse is not new. For more than thirty years, Peter Weingart observed, interdisciplinarity has been “proclaimed, demanded, hailed, and written into funding programs” (2000, p. 26). Yet specialization continues unhampered. Researchers publicly pronounce openness to interdisciplinarity. Their endorsements, though, do not necessarily translate into practice. In short, affirmations of the need for interdisciplinarity cannot be taken at face value.

Facilitating Interdisciplinary Research (2004) admonishes institutions to examine their structures for supporting interdisciplinarity within the context of the larger, overarching framework that both defines and constrains it. Karri Holley (2009) echoes the call in her book on the current challenges and opportunities for interdisciplinarity. She outlines changes that foster, support, and reward faculty engagement through an active and deliberative process. Developing a new institutional culture, Holley exhorts, requires a flexible vision, structural modifications, and shifts in organizational behavior and norms. This book deepens the conceptual framework and broadens the pragmatic strategies for doing so in a model of a systemic approach to creating campus cultures conducive to interdisciplinary research and education. In the absence of a systemic approach, arguments for change are weak, plans are underdeveloped, current activities and interests are underidentified, existing resources are not leveraged to greater effect, best practices are not incorporated, barriers and impediments are not eased, and outcomes are limited to marginal efforts that cannot be sustained. The buzzword factor also prevails. In a guide to program review discussed more fully in Chapter Four, the American Studies Association cautions that terms such as disciplinary, multidisciplinary, and interdisciplinary are often just buzzwords. They replace informed arguments with superficial aphorisms such as, “Everyone is interdisciplinary today,” a proclamation belied by evidence.

Interdisciplinary change entails many of the same challenges and opportunities as other initiatives. Generally it is easier to foster change within a small institution than a large one. It is also easier to work with individual enclaves than to achieve institution-wide transformation. Interdisciplinary change, however, is more complex because it runs counter to conventional ways of thinking, behaving, planning, and budgeting in academic institutions (Gaff, 1997). An old administrative saw comes to mind—that interdisciplinary programs exist in the white space of organizational charts. Today, though, the white space is more crowded. Modern systems of higher education, Burton Clark (1995) found in an international study of research universities, are confronted by a gap between older, simple expectations and the complex realities that outrun those expectations. Definitions that depict one part or function of the university as its “essence” or “essential mission” only underscore the gap between simplified views and new operational realities that are transforming the way we think about knowledge and education (pp. 154-155).

Trowler and Knight’s studies of institutional change in higher education (2002) shed further light on the gap Clark identified. The standard model of “contextual simplification” assumes that organizations are culturally simple, fitting into a small number of pigeonholes. Trowler and Knight found, though, that “any university possesses a unique and dynamic multiple cultural configuration which renders depiction difficult and simple depictions erroneous” (p. 143). Viewed from an analytical telescope, differences in values, attitudes, assumptions, and taken-for-granted practices look small. Viewed from an analytical microscope, they loom large. Interdisciplinarity compounds the problem of contextual simplification because academic work is presumed conventionally to lie within the confines of departments. Faculty interests, though, cut across boundaries and are not confined to the overt reality of recognized units.

In reviewing the track record of educational experiments of the 1960s and 1970s, Keith Clayton (1985, p. 196) suggested that the “concealed reality of interdisciplinarity” may be greater than the overt reality. Some activities flourish most readily, in fact, when they are not labeled as interdisciplinary. Clayton was talking about geography, medicine, veterinary science, agriculture, and oceanography. Yet his observation is true of other domains and parallels three other related concepts. Charles Lemert (1990) called the composite set of structures and strategies that challenge the prevailing metaphor of disciplinary depth a “shadow structure,” and J. Hillis Miller (1991) described new developments that cross departmental, disciplinary, and institutional boundaries as a “hidden university.” Brown and Duguid’s (1996) concept of canonical practices is also applicable. Canonical practices in organizations are prescribed and set down in official documents, mission statements, and other defining texts that function as road maps for members of an organization to follow. The relatively static nature of canonical practice, however, can never keep up with the complexity and variability of events on the ground, in the rough terrain missed by large-scale maps. The dynamic character of knowledge and expertise drives divergence with the emergence of new ideas, understandings, modes of work, and reinterpretations and reconstructions of tasks, projects, and roles.

Dynamism and divergence also drive another concept in this book: distributed interdisciplinary intelligence. The methods and theories of textuality, narrative, and interpretation appear not only in traditional disciplines of humanities but also in social sciences and the professions of law and psychiatry. Gender is not a conceptual category in women’s studies alone. Culture is not the sole intellectual property of anthropology or the traditional textual disciplines of humanities. Sustainability is not the sovereign province of environmental studies. The concepts of information and communication have been developed in not only engineering but also in media studies and library and information sciences. Conflict, justice, and democratic participation in decision making have a presence well beyond political science and policy studies. Research and teaching on the body occur in both medicine and art history. Diversity is a core concept in several interdisciplinary fields as well as general education requirements and discipline-based majors and research programs.

THE BOOK

Every campus will not follow every strategy presented in this book because local institutional cultures, priorities, and resources differ. Campuses will also be at different stages of development. Some are just beginning to think about how to foster interdisciplinarity. Others want to coordinate current activities more effectively while keeping options open for the future. Regardless, informed decision making depends on awareness of the variety of approaches being used around the country in concert with a careful reading of the local culture. As the president of one university remarked in a consulting meeting with his cabinet, “Let’s hear what is happening and the strategies being used elsewhere, then decide what makes sense here.”

The book is not an encyclopedic catalogue of every program, center, and project across the country. It presents a conceptual framework for change that is concretized in a portfolio of representative strategies and practices from a variety of institutions, large and small, public and private, oriented to teaching and research intensive. The conceptual framework brings together a number of ideas from organizational theory, higher education studies, and the discourse on interdisciplinarity that are defined throughout the course of the book. The underlying premise is that interdisciplinarity is a pluralistic idea. It is embodied in a heterogeneity of forms and practices that are changing the way we think about knowledge and education. They range from informal networks and communities of practice, where like-minded individuals create alternative social and cognitive space, to new and emerging fields. Individual activities have discrete locations, but they also intersect and cross-fertilize, adding to more frequent boundary crossing and the greater pluralism and complexity of the academy today. Local context, in turn, results in added variations.

The portfolio of strategies presents current lessons of practice, based on literature review and field experience. The literature review spanned studies of higher education, institutional change, and organizational theory, as well as the voluminous discourse on interdisciplinarity that spans print publications and the “gray literature” of conference papers, reports, documents, guidelines, and, increasingly, online materials. Some readers will be familiar with these literatures. Most, however, are not, with the exception of administrators and faculty who read studies of higher education organization and management. Moreover, few members of any campus read the literature on interdisciplinarity in depth. As a result, even the most committed faculty and administrators are not fully aware of resources and strategies for interdisciplinary change, leaving them uncertain about the most appropriate and effective approaches to planning, implementing, managing, and sustaining initiatives.

My field experience consists of over three decades of teaching in an interdisciplinary program and visits to other campuses that are the best means of feeling the pulse of change and testing the feasibility of strategies. Field experience also revealed that three questions are uppermost in the minds of faculty, administrators, and planning groups:

• What changes are occurring?

• What is happening on other campuses?

• How should we respond locally?

These questions are all the more pressing in a new period of financial exigency driven by an international economic crisis. Now more than ever before, it is crucial to have answers to the questions that typically arise in order to strengthen arguments for change, anticipate and counter resistance with evidence, and inform decision making with precedents, literature, and the accumulated wisdom of theory and practice. In answering the most common questions that arise, this book benchmarks the topic of interdisciplinary change. Benchmarking is not a passive exercise in reading. Benchmarkers review literature, documents, and other quantitative and qualitative data. Yet they do not simply apply lessons from written material and the narrow connotation of numbers, measures, and standards. C. Jackson Grayson (1998) defines benchmarking as a form of action learning that is extended through direct observations, site visits, participation, and interactions aimed at learning tacit knowledge, culture, and structure. It is a process of identifying, learning about, adapting, and implementing outstanding practices from other organizations in order to help a given organization improve its own performance. This book guides the process for improving interdisciplinary performance.

THE AUDIENCE

The intended audience of the book is wide and large. The primary audience comprises the thousands of administrators, faculty, planning committees, and task forces across the country striving to create favorable environments for interdisciplinary education and research. Because interest is so widespread, their disciplines and fields span the entire academy, from department-based majors engaged in reforms to the expanse of interdisciplinary programs and projects identified in Chapters One and Two. Likewise, interdisciplinary research appears widely, in department-based projects, ID centers, and cross-campus initiatives. In order to serve this broad audience, the book bridges three perspectives:

• Upper-level administration, strategic planning, and policy

• Mid- and lower-level planning, management, performance, and evaluation

• Individual, small group, and project- and program-level work

The three perspectives are often treated separately, diminishing common understanding and cooperation. For that reason, the book is designed to be read in common at all levels of an institution, then returned to later for more focused discussion of specific topics by particular groups. The secondary audience for the book is threefold. First, even in a time of constrained resources, academic libraries seek comprehensive overviews and guides to the latest resources. They will find the Resources section at the end of the book especially helpful, since it provides a guide for collection building for the entire campus. Individual programs and central oversight bodies that maintain their own libraries will benefit as well. Second, professional associations, national policy bodies, and funding agencies with an interest in interdisciplinarity also need authoritative overviews. Third, individual scholars and students of higher education can use the book as a resource on the changing history of interdisciplinarity, and it can be adopted as a textbook in undergraduate and graduate courses on higher education, organizational management, and interdisciplinarity.

THE STRUCTURE

Preparing for interdisciplinary change requires two mappings. The first map is national. Chapter One provides an overview of developments associated with interdisciplinarity today in science and technology, social sciences, and humanities. As a result of the heterogeneity of activities, faculty and administrators have different connotations in mind when they hear the word interdisciplinary. They need a common picture of the drivers of change. Shared awareness will enable individuals to locate themselves within the larger landscape of higher education, reduce their sense of isolation, lessen ignorance and skepticism about other domains, and foster a common commitment to easing mutual barriers. The chapter also introduces a core vocabulary for campuses and ends with a summary statement of the conceptual framework of the book.