Creative research and teaching increasingly occur at the junction between traditional disciplines. As a result, many colleges and universities have committed themselves to fostering interdisciplinary scholarship. But the scholars who work at that junction are confronted with conventional departmental hiring, review, and tenure procedures that are not suited to interdisciplinary work and that can slow or block the progress of their careers.
To explore the issues confronting interdisciplinary faculty members, we have reviewed literature and documents on college and university Web sites and responses to a survey sent to all members of the Council of Environmental Deans and Directors. While the survey focused on environmental studies, the challenges facing interdisciplinary scholars affect fields across higher education, from cross-cultural literature to urban and women’s studies.
We found that institutions around the United States are only just beginning to recognize the need to develop new procedures for handling interdisciplinary scholars. Of the 19 institutions responding to our survey question, “Do you have the process for interdisciplinary hires and promotion codified?” three said yes, and four said that codification was under way. But while growing numbers of universities and colleges have adopted formal procedures for hiring, and sometimes for reviewing, interdisciplinary faculty members, few have a comprehensive approach to the entire pretenure experience. Often, as such scholars move toward tenure, their intellectual contributions to works with many authors are challenged. That creates a disjuncture: Lured into the collaborative research needed for progress in an interdisciplinary field, scholars are later held to the standards of specific disciplines.
What should the new standards be? Until new standards are codified, should young interdisciplinary scholars try to follow the rules originally set up for, and by, disciplinary scholars? Decisions about pro-cedures can’t be deferred because there are young scholars who want and need guidance now.
Preparation for supporting and awarding tenure to a scholar with an interdisciplinary or joint appointment should start at the hiring phase. As much as possible, the search committee and pretenure reviews should replicate the committee structure and procedures that will be used for the recommendation for tenure to ensure that expectations are consistent. Interdisciplinary scholars are often hired through the efforts of two or more departments. The letter of appointment must spell out the research, teaching, service, and advising obligations for all departments involved. Some institutions require a formal “contract” that defines those roles and relationships at the beginning, and then binds the departments and deans to those expectations through the tenure process.
Having homes in several departments often means that faculty members have limited “face time” and in some units are not at home anywhere, or are at home everywhere, and may have to do extra duty -- to attend multiple sets of departmental meetings, for instance. Therefore, some institutions, like the College of William and Mary, have acknowledged, “Chairs, program directors, and deans shall be especially cautious when defining governance expectations for pretenured faculty holding continuing joint appointments. Unless otherwise agreed, faculty holding fixed-term joint appointments shall have governance responsibilities only in their home units.”
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill further advises that: “The arrangement most likely to protect the faculty member is to assign basic responsibility to the ‘home’ department but to require that the review committee include faculty from both units.” And the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor calls for training for department chairmen and division directors to enable them to deal with the complications of hiring, reviewing, and promoting interdisciplinary faculty members.
The letter of appointment should indicate the general composition of pretenure and tenure-review committees in terms of representatives from departments related to the new faculty member’s area of scholarship. The criteria on which the review will be based should be included. Our survey results indicated that a joint committee from more than one department was typical for pretenure reviews, although some institutions handle the reviews through one department, or through separate reviews by two departments. At the very least, pretenure reviews should include an assessment by the chairman or director of other units in which a faculty member has an appointment. We also found that while most interdisciplinary scholars had service responsibilities in more than one department or unit, fewer had voting privileges in multiple units. Departments should consider whether it is unfair to require service and not allow voting or whether voting responsibility would just increase the burden further.
Once hired, interdisciplinary scholars frequently face a set of common difficulties in their research, teaching, and administrative roles. Interdisciplinary research often entails special challenges because of the high networking costs: colleagues with different priorities and different field seasons, and disciplinary language barriers. Time and energy are also required to make and maintain connections, including vetting and editing documents with many authors. The best strategy may be to collaborate with colleagues whom they see frequently and who hold up their end of the relationship.
Interdisciplinary research often has long start-up times as programs are defined, established, and completed. Young faculty members must try to structure their research so that their publications make it into the tenure dossier. That may also take some explicit counseling by senior faculty members who are sensitive to the challenges of giving tenure to interdisciplinary scholars. It is worth exploring the issue of authorship with tenure committees so that expectations are clear. If necessary, senior professors in the same field from other universities should be invited to educate senior disciplinary faculty members about the realities of quality scholarship in interdisciplinary fields.
When people don’t know much about a field, they look for validation and external endorsements of the value of research in the field, in the form of publications, letters, and grants. Unfortunately, proposals that include interdisciplinary questions can be difficult to write and find support for. The situation is improving, but most grant agencies remain as disciplinary as universities, and, by definition, interdisciplinary projects don’t fit their disciplinary guidelines. The agencies often have problems reviewing interdisciplinary work. Reviewers may demand more rigor in their own area and may not recognize the value of the synthetic approach. Further, a junior scholar won’t have a track record that reviewers can rely on in terms of leading projects requiring teams of investigators, often with large, complex budgets.
We recommend that junior faculty members talk to program managers about their research interests and ask their advice about successful strategies. Many agencies now set a high priority on supporting interdisciplinary research, and program managers will be eager to help young scholars find their way. Faculty members can ask colleagues for copies of successful interdisciplinary proposals, and they should revise and resubmit rejected proposals. Although rejection is discouraging, reviews often contain information, including language that helps reach the review community.
What about teaching and administration? Interdisciplinary faculty members often co-teach courses, frequently getting credit for only part of the course. Yet as the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill says, “To have two professors come together to create what will inevitably be a new course, to coordinate its development, teaching, and the administration of assignments and grading, is significantly more difficult than providing two separate courses.” Moreover, departments are credited with just one-half of the students, and often these classes are electives, and therefore are often not considered by departments to be as important as foundational classes.
With knowledge of several departments, interdisciplinary scholars are popular to have on college and university committees and as speakers at institutional events. Junior faculty members should be protected from too much administration and service under any circumstances. Interdisciplinary faculty members have the most trouble when they are in a new program, or are on a very small faculty. In those cases, they may be called upon -- or be prompted by their own passion -- to help build the program. Senior mentors should watch this carefully so that the young faculty members still accomplish the appropriate scholarship required to get tenure. A passionate scholar who creates a successful new program, then gets denied tenure, is one of the saddest of outcomes. And women and members of minority groups, who are underrepresented on most college and university faculties, must be especially vigilant about accepting too much service because their advice is readily sought, not only for their interdisciplinary connections, but also as representatives of a minority viewpoint.
Preparation of the dossier for tenure requires particular care because departments, deans, and provosts may have very different understandings of expectations. It is best to identify at the time of hiring how the departmental recommendation for tenure will be structured: interdisciplinary committee, or one or two departments. In our survey, when we asked how committees for tenure review at the departmental level were constituted, most respondents said that they created joint committees from more than one department.
Assuming a positive interdepartmental recommendation to go ahead with the case, what should be the makeup of the tenure-review committee? It is often helpful to have an external expert take part in the tenure review: In nine of the cases reported in our survey, the tenure-review committee included external reviewers who were experts in the interdisciplinary fields of the candidate; in five they did not.
While the criteria for tenure vary from institution to institution, when committees sit down to review a case and make a recommendation, typical questions are: Does the candidate have a scholarly mind? Is the candidate known for an important advance? Is he or she an effective teacher? Is he or she engaged in and contributing to the academic community? Is he or she on a trajectory indicating that there will be significant contributions in the future?
In interdisciplinary cases, people raise an additional set of questions: What was his or her contribution to a grant or publication by several authors? Why is he or she not as well known to external letter writers as peers pursuing disciplinary research? In half of the cases reported in our survey, external evaluators were specifically asked to comment on interdisciplinary contributions and impact. In several cases, candidates’ CV’s were annotated with information about journal standing or the candidates’ contributions. We recommend that guidelines documenting those frequently asked questions be added to the tenure dossier of interdisciplinary scholars, so that the tenure-review committee does not see a particular candidate as weak, just because these systemic issues are raised.
Institutions serious about fostering interdisciplinary scholarship need to move beyond making joint hires and simply hoping that they will work out. Colleges and universities need to recognize the inherent institutional and faculty-development challenges of interdisciplinary scholarship, and create a culture and procedures that will allow interdisciplinary scholars to thrive.
Stephanie L. Pfirman is professor and chair of environmental science at Barnard College. James P. Collins is professor of life sciences at Arizona State University. Susan Lowes is director of research and evaluation at the Institute for Learning Technologies at Teachers College of Columbia University. Anthony F. Michaels is director of the Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Southern California.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 51, Issue 23, Page B15