What is your major? It's a question that has become ubiquitous among college students everywhere upon meeting a fellow student for the first time. We ask young people to declare a "major" almost immediately upon entering higher education so that we can quickly guide (or push?) them into the correct learning path, which leaves them little space to explore ideas and disciplines that fall outside their chosen path. It's no wonder that students change majors so frequently. We are asking them to commit to something they really no very little about, aside from a stray AP course in high school or a discussion with a parent or family member. The human brain continues to develop for another 6-7 years once college begins for most people, so why wouldn't our interests and passions?
The term discipline itself is of Latin origin, coming from the term disciplina, which means "instruction given, teaching, learning, knowledge" (www.etymonline.com). The emergence of disciplines in our educational system can be attributed to a number of different possible causes. Boisot (1972) argues that disciplines arose out of a natural tendency to separate, classify, and conceptualize the surrounding, as well as the need to take full advantage of all accumulated knowledge. Aram (2004) also speculates that disciplines were also the result of a belief that citizens had to be educated in specialized fields in order to participate in the economic life of the country. Disciplines have, of course, evolved over time as our knowledge of a particular area increases. One need not look much further than alchemy to know this to be true. The truth of the origin of our modern disciplines no doubt lies somewhere in between, but the truth of our need to organize, differentiate, and separate knowledge cannot be argued.
As disciplines have grown, foundations of knowledge have been established and theories discovered that govern not only the understanding of information in this area, but the way in which that knowledge is sought out in the first place. The term interdisciplinarity perhaps first appears in a December 1937 issue of the Journal of Educational Sociology and proceeded to gain some momentum in the decades that followed. It became increasingly popular during the social unrest of the 1960s as demands were made to abolish disciplinary structures and replace them with more holistic organizational structures that accurately reflected daily life. That momentum tapered off in the following decades, as did the exuberant social and political activism. However, the seed had been planted and there was a recognition of what interdisciplinarity could reveal and facilitate.
Today, we are left with a kind of tension in academia between disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity. Much of the organizational structure of the university and academia more broadly is constructed around disciplinary modalities. There is no question that a great deal of discovery and innovation continues to emerge from this structure. However, we are also recognizing that our attempts to solve some of the more pressing societal problems (racism, sexism, climate change, political polarization, etc.) have stalled. Many proposals continue to be brought forward, but they often suffer from limited vision. They may very well work when viewed through a singular disciplinary lens, but they don't scale up when they run into the brick wall of human irrationality.
This is where interdisciplinarity has so much potential power. Might we not better consider how to solve for these pressing problems if we examine them through multiple lenses and explore how knowledge or technique gained in one discipline may be utilized in another? Might we not use the language of one discipline to more accurately describe a phenomenon illuminated in another? We limit our ability for creativity when we commit to only relying on a fraction of human knowledge before we ever even attempt to address a problem. There are pockets of this work happening, and space for interdisciplinarity to be nurtured and celebrated, but we've yet to scale it up. Doing so may just help us more fully realize our potential to address the truly pressing problems of our age.
Aram, J. D. (2004) Concepts of Interdisciplinarity: Configurations of Knowledge and Action. Human Relations, 57(4), 379-412.
Boisot, M. (1972) Discipline and Interdisciplinarity. In Interdisciplinarity: Problems of Teaching and Research in Universities. Paris: OECD, pp. 89-97.
