Creating Interdisciplinary Campus Cultures: A Model for Strength and Sustainability

by Julie Thompson Klein, Carol Geary Schneider (Foreword)

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

237 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Alejandro Teruel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Curiously I find myself reading about university-level interdisciplinary teaching and research in reverse chronological order. I have coordinated and co-taught interdisciplinary courses on Software Engineering development with high performance teams (Computer Science + Social Psychology), IT management (IT + Hospitality Management) and Engineering Ethics but my more recent interest was sparked by the idea of integrating efforts being carried out at my University on courses about UN Sustainable Development Goals and an ongoing effort to development a more comprehensive Cyberethics course. There are other ongoing interdisciplinary research and teaching efforts being carried out at the Universidad Simón Bolívar, so I felt it was high time to read up on literature that could help us benchmark our efforts.

In spite of having been written ten years ago, Julie Thompson Klein’s book is as good a place as any to start looking at the challenges of building sustainable university-level interdisciplinary courses and programs, particularly in the area of Humanities and Social Sciences. Of the three books I have recently read, this has by far the best chapter on the history of such efforts. In the conclusion of the book she wraps it up as:

The modern system of disciplinarity is little more than a century old. It is a product of the professionalization and institutionalization of a new system of knowledge production in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Interdisciplinarity is nearing its own century mark. The first era was characterized by developments in social science-, agriculture-, and defense-related research, as well as general education and the field of American studies. At midcentury, it became more prominent in the wake of government-funded programs for problem-focused research, followed by groundbreaking educational experiments. The first widely recognized typology appeared in 1972, and the literature expanded exponentially after that. Scholarly and programmatic work would continue to test what the underlying concept meant while enlarging it in new contexts.

All three books have rich and extensive bibliographies, but Klein is the only one to present a separate resources chapter with briefly annotated entries grouped into five sections:

[O]verviews and bibliographies; domains of practice; interdisciplinary studies; integration, collaboration, and evaluation and assessment; and Web-based searching and networking.

Unfortunately several of the web links she includes are broken or no longer exist, and a quick search either did not turn them up, but many of her references still seem worth following up.

The chapter titled Bridging National and Local Maps contains an outstanding and detailed framework recommendation for what to include in a survey built to elicit an institution’s “interdisciplinary inventory” and the chapter on Platforming Interdisciplinarity contains an interesting proposal for what an institution’s central website on interdisciplinarity should contain.

The three books I have read focus on barriers to interdisciplinarity and review or propose strategies to overcome them. Klein is particularly interested in interdisciplinary program’s sustainability, since, as she quite rightly and insistently points out, many interdisciplinary efforts have petered out or been axed, some of them after very promising starts or quite successful trajectories. In this connection, the chapter on Fostering Programmatic Strength and Sustainability is definititely worth reading, specially for its well chosen cautionary tales. She devotes a separate, and important chapter ( Monitoring the Interdisciplinary Career Life Cycle) to staffing and providing well-thought out career paths for faculty engaged in interdisciplinary efforts.

Klein’s book is definitely worth reading, even if I agree with Bonnie Irwin’s Goodreads review in that “...it would have been nice to have a greater amount of synthesis and analysis.” Julie Thompson Klein purports to base her work on several key reports and books such as the National Academy of Science’s 2004 report on Facilitating Interdisciplinary Research and the Council of Environmental Deans and Directors (CEDD)’s 2007 Interdisciplinary Hiring, Tenure and Promotion: Guidance for Individuals and Institutions, although, since I have not read these books, I cannot say to what degree she fleshes out, complements or relies on these reports.

If you are more interested in interdisciplinarity in the life sciences, then I would recommend the 2014 Convergence: Facilitating Transdisciplinary Integration of Life Sciences, Physical Sciences, Engineering, and Beyond (Committee on Key Challenge Areas for Convergence and Health, Board on Life Sciences, Division on Earth and Life Studies, National Research Council). The more recent (2018) The Integration of the Humanities and Arts with Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in Higher Education: Branches from the Same Tree (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, Board on Higher Education and Workforce, Committee on Integrating Higher Education in the Arts Humanities Sciences Engineering and Medicine) is particularly interesting if you want to look at more recent examples of interdisciplinarity, especially those bridging Art and Life Sciences, although somewhat disappointing in its principal aim of finding and evaluating:

...the evidence behind the assertion that educational programs that mutually integrate learning experiences in the humanities and arts with science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine (STEMM) lead to improved educational and career outcomes for undergraduate and graduate students.

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[Bonnie Irwin · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good reference about the history and future of interdisciplinary programs and valuable information on how to sustain them. References to other works are rather dense, however, and it would have been nice to have a greater amount of synthesis and analysis.