AS A POLITICAL and Social Thought major with a thesis looming on the horizon, I decided to attend a lecture entitled "Interdisciplinarity and Anxiety" last week. Let's just say the topic resonated rather well. The speaker was Louis Menand, a professor of English and American Language and Literature at Harvard and a regular contributor to the New Yorker.
This lecture is especially pertinent to University undergraduates, as it seems so many students are trending towards interdisciplinary programs. Not only are there the more politically-focused programs such as PST and Political Philosophy, Policy, and Law, but now the University also offers interdisciplinary programs for students in the hard sciences, such as Environmental Thought and Practice and Human Biology.While generally this trend will be healthy for intellectual development and academic scholarship, it is important for students to see the potential perils of what could become an excuse for academic dissipation.
Professor Menand discussed how interdisciplinarity partially evolved from the rise of the fields of women's studies, African-American studies, queer studies, and so on. This historical understanding illuminates both the benefits and challenges of interdisciplinarity. On the one hand, students are studying groups of people historically left out of scholarship. They are gaining a much deeper understanding of the complexity of human experience.
On the other hand, for undergraduates especially, an interdisciplinary program is often a more legitimate way to eschew one discipline and instead dabble in several fields. How else can one graduate with classes ranging from "Marxist Political Theory" to "Hydrology"? Many professors, in fact, recommend students to only have one major instead of having two majors and a minor, or an interdisciplinary major. The worry is that students will have only enough knowledge of any one subject to get through cocktail party conversation. They believe it will be better for students to have a depth of knowledge about International Relations, for example, rather than a superficial understanding of half the disciplines offered at the University. A study by Martin Davies and Marcia Devlin entitled "Interdisciplinary higher education: Implications for teaching and learning," although largely supportive of interdisciplinarity, still points out, "An education that is too broad might not allow for sufficient expertise in the home discipline to allow an adequate appreciation of when interdisciplinarity is needed and when it is not".
If done with due diligence and maturity, though, interdisciplinarity is a great option for students. It allows students to understand issues on a much more nuanced level and prevents them from developing academic blinders. A student specializing in feminist theory will tend to see everything through that lens. This is not a bad thing, necessarily, but surely there are other factors to consider when studying the real lives of real women. For example, it would be difficult to grasp the situation for women in Nigeria without an acute understanding of the religious conflict between Christianity and Islam there.
Professionally, an interdisciplinary background is especially beneficial. Commentators often accuse officials in the State Department of knowing next to nothing about religion. With the current state of affairs of Iraq, it goes without saying that in future state-building ventures, government officials should have a more comprehensive understanding of all the factors that can affect a state, from its religion to its political history to its geography.
Perhaps a good method for guarding against academic dissipation is to truly limit the number of fields one studies, rather than taking courses in all different academic directions and scrambling to think of a coherent way to tie them together once fourth year arrives and thesis proposals are due. After their second year, students should try to hone in on two to three fields to study. This should allow for both a manageable breadth and depth of scholarship.
Interdisciplinary programs allow committed students the opportunity to use the scholarship of multiple disciplines to challenge their minds and potentially study issues in a whole new light. The best part about an interdisciplinary major, though, has little to do with theses or the Academy. The flexibility of the mind encouraged by these programs inculcates citizens of the world. Indeed, the complexity of the real world is the greatest testament to moving away from a single-minded approach to academics.
Marta Cook's column appears Tuesdays in The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at mcook@cavalierdaily.com.
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