Edward J. Balleisen had grand plans for an interdisciplinary collaboration at Duke University back in 2010. The associate professor of history crisscrossed the campus and met individually with 25 faculty members to gauge their interest in being part of a group that would study regulatory governance.
He found strong interest. What he really needed, however, was money and logistical support.
For decades, colleges have waxed poetic in strategic plans and speeches about the need to support interdisciplinary research. But many have been slow to devote administrative resources to overcome the considerable financial, bureaucratic, and cultural hurdles that prevent more faculty members from producing such scholarship. Advocates of interdisciplinary research say it is increasingly necessary in an interconnected world where solutions to global challenges are rarely found in a single discipline.
This special report explores how academics are breaking down some of the barriers that prevent them from building stronger ties with one another and with their local communities. Copies of the full report are also available for purchase.
Mr. Balleisen was lucky. Over several years, he says, Duke created a culture that encourages faculty members to connect with colleagues in other departments. Part of that effort includes seed money for collaborative projects and the creation of a series of centers on campus that don’t belong to any college, but instead serve as hubs to connect disparate faculty members.
Mr. Balleisen received roughly $25,000 from one such center, the Kenan Institute for Ethics, which also provided staff support to arrange meetings while the collaboration of scholars from history, political science, law, and other disciplines was fledgling. Now, almost seven years later, the group has created new courses for undergraduates, including “The Modern Regulatory State,” and has secured an external grant to help it recruit even more faculty members. While economics has been the most influential discipline to work on regulatory issues in recent decades, Mr. Balleisen says, many other fields contribute to a fuller understanding: Scientists and engineers, for example, are helpful on risk assessment, political scientists on policy, legal scholars on the procedural requirements of regulatory policy, and historians on how regulatory governance evolves.
“This could never have happened without the structure of the institute,” Mr. Balleisen says. “Just assuming that any idea worth exploring is going to happen on its own is actually unrealistic.”
While academe is far from resolving complicated questions surrounding interdisciplinary research, Duke isn’t alone in finding ways to grease the wheels of collaboration on campus.
A major barrier to interdisciplinary research is the need to change the culture around tenure-and-promotion standards. Junior faculty members, with good reason to worry, are unsure how they’ll be evaluated for work that crosses traditional disciplinary boundaries. A 2004 National Academy of Sciences survey found that provosts and other academics ranked “promotion criteria” as the primary impediment to interdisciplinary research. And while colleges have since made headway in embracing interdisciplinary research, institutional culture continues to be a barrier, says Julie Klein, an emerita professor of humanities at Wayne State University who studies how such work interacts with tenure and promotion practices.
Creating a culture for interdisciplinary research requires constant communication, especially when it comes to tenure and promotion for junior faculty members, says David K. Rosner, a Columbia University professor whose work connects social history and public health.
When junior faculty members in Mr. Rosner’s interdisciplinary program were coming up for tenure, he made sure he was on their promotion committees, he says. He wanted committee members from the medical center to benefit from the expertise of a historian.
There was, in fact, much that professors in the medical center needed to know about history. Mr. Rosner often found himself explaining the nuances of his discipline, which measures success in very different ways than do medical fields.
Historians, for example, often do not require large grants to do their work, and may need as little as a computer and some travel money. They are far more likely to be evaluated based on the books they write rather than by peer-reviewed scientific articles and research grants.
“You worry that if they’re left to their own devices, the first criteria they’ll come up with is what’s his or her overhead, or how much NIH money did they get?” Mr. Rosner says. “One of the things I’m always explaining is that a Guggenheim is really a signal of intellectual attainment even though it has very little money attached to it. Every generation, in some sense, has to be re-educated.”
Merlin Chowkwanyun, an assistant professor in sociomedical sciences, Mr. Rosner’s program, says he’s not as concerned about how his interdisciplinary work will affect tenure and promotion because his department has a tradition of encouraging collaboration. “If I was in a traditional history department, I’d probably have more concerns,” says Mr. Chowkwanyun, who has a doctorate in history and a master’s degree in public health.
Perhaps even more challenging is how to create a culture that signals to scholars — whether senior professors or graduate students — that interdisciplinary research will be valued. To do this, some colleges are rethinking how they communicate what scholarship they prize. The University of Southern California, for example, recently overhauled language in its tenure-and-promotion manual to strip references to “independent” scholarship.
“Becoming an ‘independent investigator’ is the way we’ve measured someone’s career advancement, but that seems to be inconsistent with the goal of interdisciplinarity,” says Randolph Hall, USC’s vice president for research. “Frankly, a lot of people still use that language. What we try to value instead is your impact. And your impact could be part of a team, or as an individual.”
Since Mr. Hall started his research post in 2010, he has noticed a change in how faculty members view the university’s commitment to recognizing collaborative research. “When I started, there were numerous, numerous complaints that the university just didn’t recognize interdisciplinarity, that we didn’t care about it,” he says. Now, “if anything, the complaint I might get is that we don’t recognize individual work enough.”
But change requires more than just messaging. Support for interdisciplinary research needs to be embedded in an institution’s culture. Mr. Hall says Southern California established an office led by experienced federal grant officers that focuses on helping large interdisciplinary teams craft complicated proposals for federal grants and other outside money.
“What normally will happen on these large proposals is different people will write different sections of the proposal, and assemble it into a larger document,” Mr. Hall says. “Where many people fail is they don’t sufficiently edit that public document to make it speak to a common theme. That’s where the grant-writing support helps.”
For interdisciplinarity to flourish, barriers must be broken down at several levels of the university, and one position central to such efforts is that of the dean. Yannis C. Yortsos, dean of USC’s engineering college, advocates for what he calls “engineering plus” — a mind-set that encourages faculty members to think about how their work could be valuable to other disciplines and help solve societal challenges.
Engineering professors, for example, have teamed up with their counterparts in the cinematic arts to create video games, and with those in the school of social work to develop ways artificial intelligence can be used to prevent the spread of HIV among homeless youth.
While Mr. Yortsos frequently communicates the worth of interdisciplinary research, he says faculty members are often enthusiastic about such collaboration and don’t need much persuasion. Administrators need to strike the right balance — allowing the research to develop organically, but stepping in with university resources when an effort looks promising.
“The only thing to do from a dean’s perspective is to make sure you don’t create obstacles for people who want to pursue this research,” he says. “You also need champions on both sides. The intent to collaborate has to be equally strong on both sides. You can’t go to the school of theater and say, ‘Look, I have a solution to your problem.’”
That kind of support requires a top-level commitment to interdisciplinarity. At Duke, Mr. Balleisen now holds the title of vice provost for interdisciplinary research, and helps other researchers start their own group projects.
“This type of representation in the provost’s office was really important to figure out how to get around obstacles that impede interdisciplinary research,” he says.
“You need an appropriate mix of bottom-up enthusiasm and creativity, and a structure to provide support.”
Vimal Patel covers graduate education. Follow him on Twitter @vimalpatel232, or write to him at vimal.patel@chronicle.com.
