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The Proper Role of Interdisciplinary Studies
By Michael Roth, Huffington Post, February 22, 2010
Interdisciplinary programs and the faculty who created them were once the mavericks of college campuses, writes Wesleyan University President Michael Roth in an opinion piece published in Huffington Post. In the 1960s and ’70s, after decades of increasing departmental fragmentation and specialization, the move to have undergraduates focus on areas of academic intersection seemed revolutionary. But these days, Roth writes, interdisciplinary programs are “as common on campus as fake IDs.” Almost all selective institutions have interdisciplinary programs, and the word “interdisciplinary” has lost much of its power, coming to mean simply “thoughtful” or just “good,” he argues.
Much of the beauty of interdisciplinary scholarship lies in the inspiration it provides to undergraduate students, who see their professors’ work and are motivated to follow their own interests and increase their intellectual capacities. Roth calls this the “virtuous circle connecting [their] scholarship to [their] undergraduate teaching,” and finds that it invigorates departments and stimulates curriculum development. But some interdisciplinary areas—American Studies and Neuroscience are two examples from Wesleyan—have become departments of their own and have lost the air of revolution. This is because, Roth writes, “academic bureaucracy remains disciplinary while student demand and scholarly excitement is often interdisciplinary.” As institutions committed to liberal education plan for the future in an age of decreasing expenditures, they must also remain committed to finding ways to ensure professors can teach what they are most passionate about, and provide students with the skills they need “to launch their own intellectual adventures.” In the end, institutions must continue “reconfiguring the productive tension between the departmental and the interdisciplinary while enhancing the powerfully productive relationship of teaching and research.”
Michael Roth is a member of AAC&U’s LEAP Presidents’ Trust. The entire opinion piece may be read online. See how other members of the LEAP Presidents’ Trust are making the case for liberal education.
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