My field areas are environmental history and environmental studies. As such, I would seemingly be the ideal target for a message like Taylor’s. Environmental studies, in particular, is a field that falls between multiple stools – biology, political science, English, anthropology, history, geology… – it is, inherently, an interdisciplinary major.

But are students, or faculty, best served by having it unmoored from departments? My experience as someone who can wear either the “studies” hat or the “history” hat is that departments lend necessary stability to interdisciplinary programs like this. The two modes I’ve seen are the more common approach of having the faculty for such a program anchored in their respective disciplines’ departments – you might teach environmental studies, but you are hired as a member of the history/biology/English department – and the less common approach of hiring people in expressly to teach as interdisciplinary faculty.

Neither works very well. The problem with the former is that the new hire serves two masters – unless the position is very clearly defined at the outset, you end up having that person being called upon by their department to teach generalist courses as well as the cross-listed ones in their specialty – and if the other departments involved in the program lack the clout of the hiring one, you can get a tug-of-war going over the new hire’s courses.

The problem with the latter is that, in the absence of departmental support, the faculty teaching in the program lack a power base from which to agitate for new lines, grant support, defend their faculty and majors, and the like. Basically, they have all of the responsibilities of a department without the authority of one. Now, this is not so bad a position if one is already senior faculty (and therefore is protected by tenure and by the relationships one has established in the community) but it’s a particularly vulnerable one for a new junior hire.

A very few institutions have environmental studies departments, which draw on the expertise of related departments during the search process. From what I have seen, those departments tend to be stable and supportive – but they are very rare. It is not clear to me whether this is because of some inherent problem with interdisciplinary programs, or whether it’s due to lack of administrative interest in funding new departments and the difficulty of reorganizing old ones. (A sample question: if the new program is granted a department of its own, what happens to the faculty who taught some of its classes but were based in departments of their own? What happens to the departments that hired them, if they transfer to the new one?)

I would also add that while environmental studies is, itself, an interdisciplinary major, everyone I know who teaches it is based in a discipline. We are all open to the information and perspectives other disciplines bring to the table, but we are all still various species of specialists, not generalists, both as teachers and as scholars. (Bluntly put, the field’s too freakin’ big – I have enough on my plate with the cultural-historical end of things without becoming an expert in C4 photosynthesis as well.)

Looking back on other people’s comments, and the debate about higher education funding at the state level, reminds me of the parable about the blind men describing an elephant. This thing we call the academy looks very different depending on where you are sitting.

I hope that we can keep re-evaluating the competing visions of the academy in the light of what it means for students at the undergraduate level. It would be a shame to see the disappearance of liberal education from public universities. This is the greatest danger I see in Taylor’s reform proposals.

Yes, humanities education as a preparation for life is rather different from humanities education as a preparation for graduate school.

If you tried to be a public intellectual with a generalist sensibility now, before or after tenure, you??re something of an odd person out?but tenure itself is not what causes that to happen.

It seems to me that this was one of the issues in play between Larry Summers and Cornel West at Harvard, no?

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I was also annoyed by the nasty swipe at a colleague who thinks that studying Duns Scotus?? use of citations might possibly be worthwhile.

Yes. The fact of the matter is that intellectual risk is intellectual risk. Tayler made this project sound like old-fuddy-duddyism. Maybe it is. And maybe it’s an exciting project about the circulation of ideas, intellectual influence, and its institutionalization. It’s hard to tell.

I was just at a conference where I listened to a presentation on paint, chemical dyes, and color reference in late 19th century American literature. Sounds rather specialized and dull, no? NO. It was fascinating.

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I’m deeply in favor of doing something about disciplinary rigidity, but I thought Taylor’s remarks were half-baked. I’d like to see him sketch out a 10-year plan that leads from Columbia as it is now to Columbia without departments. Or, if not a 10-year plan, how about a novel in which that happens.

If you really want to make graduate education and research more fluid you have to allow faculty time for tooling-up in new areas. When you’re tooling-up you aren’t cranking out publications. If you are, maybe you aren’t tooling-up in a deep way. Learning new ways of thinking is difficult.

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I was on the faculty of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) for a number of years (until I failed to make tenure). As some of you may know, it’s a very good school, but nonetheless, it’s a second tier school behind MIT, Cal Tech, and Carnegie-Mellon. One thing that struck me about the place was that interdisciplinarity had a very different valence there from what it had at my undergraduate school, Johns Hopkins, or my graduate school, SUNY Buffalo. Those places had strong departments, as that’s how things are done, but there was interdisciplinary work being done and in recognized centers. This work was regarded as cutting-edge and high-risk.

Not so at RPI. There interdisciplinary work was regarded as ho-hum and conservative. The bold and the brave craved disciplinary purity. (Note that this was over two decades ago. I don’t know the present mood.)

Why the difference?

I don’t really know, but my guess goes like this: RPI was really an engineering school, and the engineering disciplines are practical disciplines. Out in the field engineers in one discipline have to collaborate with engineers from other disciplines because real products, whether they be consumer appliances or 100-story mega buildings, require the coordinated and collaborative efforts of people with many different intellectual skills. So, at RPI interdisciplinarity was the stuff of the work-a-day world, the mundane world. If you’re one of the privileged ones working in the academy, however, you should aspire to disciplinary purity.

But isn’t that the question – whether the academy is a privileged sanctuary for pure intellection, in which case things like tenure as a protection of academic freedom makes sense, or a fancy tech school, in which case why the hell should we have job protections no one else has? Both, at different levels of status-reproduction – as Matt says.

…and that makes me doubtful about the merits of the rest of the argument, since it suggests that there’s something radically wrong about the premises somewhere.

I was also annoyed by the nasty swipe at a colleague who thinks that studying Duns Scotus’ use of citations might possibly be worthwhile. This is the sort of thing that makes me think that the Burkean “Everything Studies” department might in practice be a narrow intellectual monoculture that would congratulate itself on how broad it was.

But, on the other hand, while it sounds great to have graduate education aimed at a wider array of professional outcomes, once you starting thinking about it, you wonder what that would look like. A Ph.D in English is not presently terribly useful if you would like to be a writer in some non-academic context or profession. But could it be, or would it just be better to dive in and try to work as a writer? Would more training just defer the acquisition of experience, no matter how the training was designed?

Completely agree with North that removing tenure actually works against Taylor’s desire to incentivize risk. It isn’t tenure that works against that, it’s the entire habitus of academia. Removing tenure wouldn’t magically alter that. If you tried to be a public intellectual with a generalist sensibility now, before or after tenure, you’re something of an odd person out–but tenure itself is not what causes that to happen.

This is actually something that at least one Swarthmore department has decided to prioritize, despite the fact that a rather alarming number of its students do go on to get Ph.D.s. In fact, while Taylor’s argument is designed around reorganizing graduate education and research production, I think it maybe applies even better to undergraduate education, as long as the disciplinary rigor stays put. And that’s not really a question of structures so much as actual execution.

I’d also argue that a lot of the structural changes Taylor talks about are totally meaningless without real changes in emphasis and incentives, and would actually make the problems worse without that. Most departments *could* privilege policy-relevant work over getting published in the fanciest narrow journal available, but most don’t. If you are an untenured professor, you’re constantly working to maintain your job security, whether you have a rolling 7-year contract or a tenure-track job; because most departments reward traditional academic success, that’s what you’re trying to do. Replacing tenure with 7-year contracts, with no other change in incentives, is going to make this problem worse instead of better. Some of the most interesting professors I know of are people who got tenure and started working exclusively on policy-relevant research, or started a working group on a risky issue, or totally switched subfields and are now doing interdisciplinary research and teaching. With a 7-year rolling contract, many of those people might have stuck to something safer.

Taylor is hoping to make risky, exciting, non-traditional research more possible, but his proposed remedy could very easily do the opposite. And there are certainly ways that departments could promote policy-relevant interdisciplinary scholarship NOW, especially at wealthy small colleges which have neither major resource constraints nor the need to maintain a graduate training program that fits the discipline’s norms.