It’s interesting to me that the faculties were the miserable ones in these scenarios I’ve described. They all wanted things to go their way, and of course couldn’t agree on what that way was. But they all knew there should be a way. The students didn’t have a way yet, so they were very happily enjoying the benefits of the more open approaches the faculties were bound into by the structures of the programs. Each of these programs seemed to be working quite nicely at the student level.

I don’t want to clutter up TB’s thread here so I’ll just point to some further thoughts on that and other aspects of interdisciplinarity I’ll post soon over on my own site, Dead Voles.

I was briefly in an administrative post in the Institute for Liberal Arts, in the spring of 1994, just before I got the offer to come to Swarthmore.

I think the problem with me as an administrator is that I don’t think I’d do a good job at the nitty-gritty of administrative work.

On a more serious note, I’m curious about whether you have ever considered taking an administrative tack in order to put your ideas into practice. Or, let me put it another way, have you considered the best institutional ways of actually changing an institutional culture so that its function and form more closely match. I loved the earlier post about your ideal liberal arts institution, and have no doubt that you could design a wonderful college from scratch, but how to go about changing one?

— Michael E. (Emory English)

You’re right at the end to doubt the sufficiency of institutional interdisciplinarities. The structures in play turn out to be much more complex. I’ve had direct experience with three such attempts:

1. I taught for several years in an interdisciplinary human development program. The design was inspiring: the faculty was interdisciplinary and team-taught a core symposium, the purpose of which was to introduce students to a variety of perspectives on issues in the human studies. Students were expected to dynamically adapt to this cognitive ambiguity and develop flexible interpretive strategies.

And they did, to a striking degree. The problem? With few exceptions, the faculty did not. Instead, they bunkered up in their disciplines and grew ever less willing to talk with each other.

2. I interviewed at a boutique college within a larger university. The college had been founded by human ecology radicals in the 60s mold who favored holistic development of the students in relation to our complex environment. In due course, as they aged, they hired a new generation of exciting young scholars at the cutting edge of postcolonial, feminist, and race and ethnicity studies to carry on the radical vision.

And they did, but it was a different radical vision. The old white men who founded the place found themselves othered as liberal, privileged, romantic pseudoradicals by the younguns, who abandoned the environmentalism and righteously indoctrinated their students in race/class/gender oppression dogma. The hallways dripped with tension and they were unable to come to agreement on anyone to hire.

3. At another, newer interdisciplinary program (this time, a visionary interdisciplinary revitalization of a whole university), the founder told me regretfully that I was a “polarizing candidate.” The problem? I was actually able to operate in a variety of discourses, and therefore the ‘politicians’ in the faculty who controlled the decision were unable to figure out whose faction I would belong to. And they didn’t trust that I would agree with them on the stuff they took for granted – fairly enough, since I showed them amply my inclination not to take things for granted. (That had probably been a problem at #2 also.)

I’ve since come to take interdisciplinary advertisements less naively at face value. In practice, interdisciplinarity works against the political and affective structures of turf and identification that interactively shape our senses of place in the fields of academe. As you say, it does take a kind of mensch-iness, a willingness to constantly be displaced, an ‘incredulity toward metanarratives’ that’s a lot easier to apply to others than live for oneself. And because there are no hard and fast rules of right and wrong, valid and invalid, good and bad, (or because there are diverse such) interdisciplinarity requires enormous commitment to patiently holding questions unanswered and talking things through with trust and care, again and again. In real life, people like things more settled.