LiberalArtsOnline Volume 7, Number 1
January 2007
This month, William H. Newell (Miami University in Ohio) describes the interdisciplinary process and considers its relationship to Western empiricism and rationality. He argues that interdisciplinary studies are integral to liberal arts education and essential for living in today's complex world.
The Role of Interdisciplinary Studies in the Liberal Arts
by William H. Newell
Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Miami University (Ohio)
Many people believe that current liberal education prepares students for work, citizenship, and life during the next half century. It also seems evident that economy, polity, and society are embedded in an international context that has undergone significant changes in recent decades and promises to undergo even more dramatic transformations in the years ahead. Most public intellectuals as well as experts in future studies would agree that the increasingly global society of the first half of the twenty-first century will be characterized by increasing connectivity, diversity, scale, and rapidity of change. This is not a new notion. My contention is that these and other such characteristics will interact to create a world in which the defining characteristic of human existence is complexity. Furthermore, I believe that interdisciplinarity is the only game in town for understanding and addressing this complexity. As such, interdisciplinary studies are a necessary and important component of today’s liberal arts education.
The Need for Interdisciplinary Studies
Our students will face challenges in the next several decades unlike those in the past. In general, small events on one part of the planet and in one sphere of human existence can now end up having large and relatively rapid effects on other parts of the planet and in other spheres of human existence. We read examples of these nonlinear interconnections in the newspaper every day. They come not only from international relations and global environmental problems, but also from our daily lives at work, in our communities, and at home. Connections among diverse elements on different scales lead to changes so rapid they are impossible to comprehend from only one perspective. Coping with this complexity will require a new way of understanding—one that does not rely on having only a single viewpoint.
Academic disciplines are necessary but not sufficient for understanding complex issues.
Each discipline addresses only one aspect of the increasing complexity of human existence. That reductionist, divide-and-conquer strategy worked well when the spheres of human existence were relatively independent—when one could talk about the natural world separate from the human world; the economic sphere separate from the social and political spheres; and about Asia and North America separate from the Middle East and Africa. While there were points of intersection, the disciplines worked well in splendid isolation. No one took intellectual responsibility for interconnections among the turf of the different disciplines, and the academy got away with omission. The rest of society disparaged the academy as an ivory tower, but most critics were indulgent, recognizing that scholars require distance for perspective, and valuing scholarly contributions to society.
Today, however, criticisms of the academy contain little indulgence because there is little faith that the academy has much to offer society. Scientific research is seen as valuable but dangerous, and as something that could be conducted in corporate labs. The humanities and soft social sciences seem focused on postmodern self-criticism more than on culture and society per se, much less on the human condition. And the hard social sciences have their hands full predicting the next fiscal quarter or the outcome of next month’s election, much less understanding longer-term trends—forget about coping with those trends. Moreover, it is becoming more difficult to sell a liberal arts education to a public whose own education is increasingly professional and illiberal.
At a more fundamental level, contemporary critics of the liberal arts are quite correct that academic disciplines by themselves are inadequate for understanding contemporary societal problems. They tend to misdiagnose the problem, however, accusing the academy of disinterest, disengagement, or incompetence, when they should blame us for not finding a way to integrate the insights of different disciplines into the complex issues confronting individuals and societies in the twenty-first century. While the critics are wrong about the source of the failure, they are correct that colleges are not doing enough to prepare faculty and students to bring disciplines to bear on complex issues and integrate their insights into a more comprehensive understanding of each issue. This process is called interdisciplinary studies (IDS). In a world characterized by complex problems, interdisciplinarity turns out to be pragmatic, whereas disciplines become relevant largely through their contribution to interdisciplinary inquiry.
The Nature of Interdisciplinary Studies
A decade ago, Julie Klein (Professor of Humanities in the Interdisciplinary Studies Program at Wayne State University) and I compiled a definition of interdisciplinary studies that reflected an emerging consensus among interdisciplinarians in the United States: "Interdisciplinary studies may be defined as a process of answering a question, solving a problem, or addressing a topic that is too broad or complex to be dealt with adequately by a single discipline or profession . . . IDS draws on disciplinary perspectives and integrates their insights through construction of a more comprehensive perspective." [3] In the last half dozen years, the definitional debate among interdisciplinarians has shifted to the nature of that process. Following up earlier work by Klein [2], I proposed a series of steps in the interdisciplinary process [6], which were then modified in response to subsequent discussion in the professional literature on interdisciplinary studies. [a] My latest version of those steps is as follows: [5]
A. DRAWING ON DISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVES
While these steps have heuristic value in identifying all the tasks that need to be completed by the interdisciplinarian and clarifying which parts of the process logically precede other parts, they can also be misleading. For example, they give the impression that they are discrete when in fact they often overlap. They also make it appear that the process is monotonic when it is actually iterative, in that the completion of a step often provokes reexamination of an earlier step. Much as with the steps in the scientific process, in practice, researchers often jump ahead and then return to address the steps skipped over. Furthermore, the process can be initiated at any of several steps, though one must then go back and complete the earlier ones. Perhaps most misleading is the impression that integration is deferred until all contributing disciplines are mined for insights. In actuality, most interdisciplinarians tend to integrate as they go, forming an increasingly complete understanding of the topic as the insights of additional disciplines bring out more of its complexity.
The picture of IDS that emerges from this process is that of the interdisciplinarian shuttling back and forth between one discipline and another, and between the disciplines and the complex issue under study. He or she is receptive to what each discipline can contribute to an understanding of that issue without becoming dominated by any one disciplinary perspective. The interdisciplinarian is engaged in analytical "either/or" thinking when drawing on a discipline as well as synthetic "both/and" thinking in integrating the insights of different disciplines. Since a complex issue looks different from different vantage points, disciplinary insights can conflict as well as complement one another. So the interdisciplinarian must create common ground on which to construct a more comprehensive understanding of the complex issue than any single discipline can provide, utilizing techniques such as redefinition, extension, reorganization, and transformation. [5] Understood this way, interdisciplinarity is fully complementary to the disciplines, embracing them as it draws insights from them, while transcending them as it integrates those insights into a more comprehensive understanding. In addition, the interdisciplinarian must take on the task of identifying and characterizing the linkages between variables studied by different disciplines, since these connections are typically unexamined by any discipline. In short, the interdisciplinarian examines complex issues by taking insights the disciplines have to offer, pulling them together, reconciling them, ferreting out missing information, and then maximizing the contribution of the disciplines to an understanding of the problem. Conceptualized this way, interdisciplinarity is the bridge between the academy and the real world, the means by which our students can be empowered to use the disciplines to address the complex world in which they live.
Interdisciplinary Studies in the Liberal Arts
The role of interdisciplinary studies in the liberal arts, then, is to help students see the real-world relevance of the various academic disciplines, their comparative strengths and weaknesses, their power and their blind spots. It is to remove disciplinary knowledge from the ivory tower and make it relevant to their lives and their world. In doing so, interdisciplinary study provides motivation for studying academic disciplines. Indeed, when general education programs are the primary curricular home for interdisciplinary studies, and when students are shown how interdisciplinary study contributes to real-world decision making, general education becomes the means for pulling together their education, placing their major in perspective, and highlighting the relevance of the liberal arts. No longer are general education requirements merely something students must get out of the way before they get down to the business of their major.
While that vision is impressive enough, interdisciplinary studies appear even more revolutionary when placed in the larger sweep of Western intellectual history. Interdisciplinary studies represent a dialectical adjustment to the grand Western experiment with reductionism—the intellectual strategy of dividing phenomena into constituent parts and studying those parts separately with the presumption that knowledge produced by narrow disciplinary specialists can and will be easily combined into an understanding of each phenomenon as a whole. Thus, early efforts at interdisciplinary studies began only a few decades after academic knowledge production started to coalesce into disciplines, and took off in the 1960s as disciplines proved inadequate to address prominent and complex societal problems. By moving beyond an exclusive reliance on the either/or dichotomies of reductionism to include as well the both/and thinking of holism, interdisciplinary studies challenge the very conceptualization of rationality and empiricism that have characterized Western thought since Aristotle.
To recognize how Western rationality is grounded in dichotomous thinking, one need only examine the truth tables of formal logic to see that its propositions can only be true or false. [b] Since statements about the world must be dichotomous, the world itself must be dichotomous—a thing cannot both have a characteristic and not have that characteristic. Yet the complex world studied by interdisciplinarians (and inhabited by our students) is rife with internal contradictions. Characteristics depend on context, on whether one looks narrowly within a specific sub-system or broadly at a complex system as a whole.
To appreciate how Western empiricism is likewise grounded in dichotomies, consider multivariate statistics—the epitome of empirical thinking. The lovely properties statistics provides (unbiased, efficient, and sufficient estimators) rely on the degree of independence of the variables used to explain the behavior of the dependent variable. If independent variables are too highly correlated (technically, if their multicollinearity is too great), the entire statistical model breaks down. Yet the complex world studied by interdisciplinarians is fundamentally interconnected. Indeed, nonlinear connections of complex systems—where small causes can have large effects—guarantee that multicollinearity is the rule, not the exception. Thus, IDS comes in precisely where Western rationality and empiricism run up against their inherent limitations.
Seen in the broad sweep of Western civilization, interdisciplinarity rights the imbalance of reductionist, dichotomous, either/or thinking over holistic, inclusive, both/and thinking. Interdisciplinary studies make it possible for us to build on the rationality and empiricism characterizing Western thought, while moving beyond them to confront the fundamental complexity of the world our students inhabit. The divide and conquer approach of reductionism has been sufficient to advance us greatly as a civilization, and it will continue to be important in providing disciplinary insights into the various sub-systems out of which our complex world is constructed. But as our society increasingly runs up against complex problems that disciplines are insufficient to illuminate, much less solve, we will rely more and more on interdisciplinary studies. The students we educate with interdisciplinary skills represent the future of Western civilization. In short, interdisciplinary study is not just an innovation in curriculum or pedagogy. It is the dawn of the other half of Western civilization.
Notes:
References:
For examples of IDS programs see:
The Department of Interdisciplinary Studies, Wayne State University
New College, the University of Alabama
The Capital Scholars Program, the University of Illinois at Springfield
Gallatin School of Individualized Study, New York University
The School of Interdisciplinary Studies/Western College Program, Miami University in Oxford, Ohio
Biographical Note:
William Newell is a professor of interdisciplinary studies at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, where he has taught since 1974. He has served as executive director of the Association for Integrative Studies for fifteen years and was its founding president in 1979. He has published three books and forty articles and chapters on interdisciplinary studies and/or complex systems in higher education, public administration, and social science history. He has served as consultant, external evaluator, or public lecturer over a hundred times at colleges and universities in the United States, Canada, and New Zealand.
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