Core Interdisciplinary Programs and Discipline-Based College Faculties: Tensions and Solutions

The Goals:

• Support and empower core interdisciplinary courses or programs at colleges and universities organized in a traditional departmental structure.
  
• Develop model resources and analyses—curricular, pedagogical, administrative and theoretical—that assist faculties in their efforts to construct and improve intellectually substantial undergraduate education in the liberal arts.

The Need:

Because of the mixed influence of specialized post-graduate training on the culture and structure of academia, many faculty members teaching in undergraduate programs are poorly prepared to develop and teach courses that support a broadly conceived liberal arts education. For the same reason, administrators often struggle to provide effective faculty development. Tensions and Solutions will help to bridge this divide in academic culture between the liberal arts and disciplinary specialization. It will provide the instructive fruits of how others have thought through the problems at hand, offering practical know-how and theoretical clarification in support of the development of new programs and the refinement of existing ones.

The Structure:

Part I investigates and describes the difficulties faced and solutions crafted by professors in the adaptation of disciplinary coursework to the goals and formats of interdisciplinary liberal arts education. This part will help faculty who are uncomfortable teaching beyond their specialized expertise to see themselves, and to work with each other, as interdisciplinary teachers and mentors—able to employ their training for distinct interdisciplinary ends, without the intrusion of the more usual and specialized aims of departmental programs of study on their core curriculum planning and teaching.

Part II addresses the challenges to institutional norms and governance practices that must be faced by administrators committed providing a coherent and liberal intellectual life for their faculty and students. This part will allow administrators to anticipate problems and to empower faculty in ways that are both efficient and effective, considering in detail the administrative management (and mismanagement) of liberal arts curricular reforms.

Methods:
The research for Tensions and Solutions combines three distinct movements of inquiry.

1.   Site Visits. We undertake qualitative research among faculty and administrators engaged in interdisciplinary liberal arts courses and programs at several institutions. These visits not only collect information; they are informative in a more precise sense: the results increasingly form our ability to articulate the rationale and the techniques of coherent and interdisciplinary liberal arts education

2.   Periodic mini-conferences of faculty and administrators from 3-4 of the visited institutions to review and discuss the results of our visits. These meetings function as informal peer-review, and by facilitating a broader consideration of each institution’s experience, they also expand the reach and depth of the inquiry.

3.   Reflection and essay writing on the literature and the nature of liberal arts education.

Our goal is a wisely informed know-how or prudencia; the collection and analysis of lore and practical advice about how to make these programs work well.

Site Selection:
We apply two criteria to select programs for visitation:

1.   We seek programs for which we have a reasonable expectation, based on national reputation and program descriptions, that they have succeeded in crafting a coherent and interdisciplinary liberal arts core program.

2.   We seek programs whose relations to their larger institutions fall into an exemplary range.

Our working principle is this: a candidate program is one that appears deliberately, in some part of its curriculum, to have made disciplinary expertise subordinate and instrumental to distinct liberal arts curricular aims.
 
Contacts: David Neidorf dneidorf@middlebury.edu; J.D. Phillips phillipsj@wabash.edu