Five years ago when Ohio State University announced a $400-million plan to hire 500 professors over 10 years, officials specified that the new faculty would be attached to supradepartmental “discovery themes": health and wellness, food production and safety, energy and the environment, data analytics and materials for a sustainable world, and so on. Hiring around these themes would allow the university to “develop transformational approaches to issues of world-wide significance” and bring together “interdisciplinary teams of experts … to cooperate in developing solutions to the long-term issues that touch human beings everywhere,” as the news release put it.
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François Berger for The Chronicle Review
Five years ago when Ohio State University announced a $400-million plan to hire 500 professors over 10 years, officials specified that the new faculty would be attached to supradepartmental “discovery themes": health and wellness, food production and safety, energy and the environment, data analytics and materials for a sustainable world, and so on. Hiring around these themes would allow the university to “develop transformational approaches to issues of world-wide significance” and bring together “interdisciplinary teams of experts … to cooperate in developing solutions to the long-term issues that touch human beings everywhere,” as the news release put it.
Interdisciplinary fantasies of this variety are very much of the moment. Sometimes the vision looks forward with futuristic optimism. Just as often it seems like an excuse for cost-cutting austerity. Last year, the chancellor of Southern Illinois University proposed to “eliminate the primary obstacles for multidisciplinary interaction — the financial structure associated with departments.” In August the University of Akron announced that it would eliminate 80 degree programs to “increase resources in degree programs of greatest interest, opportunity and benefit to students” and “foster greater interdisciplinary collaborations.” Goucher College followed suit by revealing that it, too, was eliminating several majors while envisaging “new interdisciplinary combinations” that might be “more appealing to students.”
The desire to overcome boundaries between disciplines is not in itself new. Specialization has always had its discontents, and programs for interdisciplinary cooperation or the creation of new disciplines out of the synthesis of old ones are perennial features of academic life. What seems distinctive about the current moment is the argument against the very existence of disciplines and departments in the first place. At its most extreme, this new vision endeavors nothing less than a complete redrawing of the basic units of the university, so that once-separate departments of, say, economics, chemistry, or music dissolve into an open flow of information among scholars with varying skill-sets.
Whether it comes from well-funded initiatives to create new centers of inquiry or barely concealed attempts to cut expenditures, there is increasing pressure to find common cause with different kinds of colleagues, especially if these colleagues happen to come from the natural sciences. One should “think big.” The result is a certain shame at merely pursuing the questions of one’s home discipline, at being, for example, a historian who can’t join forces with a computer scientist, or an anthropologist who can’t find an ecologist and tap into money earmarked to study climate change.
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In principle, demands to look beyond one’s home field should apply to the full range of study from astronomy to zoology. And yet they never do. There is a reason humanists in particular feel that calls for them to be interdisciplinary are attacks on what they do. Arguments that undercut the foundation for separate disciplines apply disproportionately to those with depleted capital. Humanities departments are far more often called to justify their existence, and far more often encouraged to coordinate their work with what’s going on elsewhere, than, say, departments of electrical engineering. That this is so is hardly surprising but is worth some thought.
To recognize the importance of disciplines — to fight for their survival — is therefore to advocate for a picture of the world, an ontology.
One direction our thought might take us is to the nature of disciplines themselves. A discipline is an academic unit. It is neither a naturally occurring category nor an arbitrary relic of the history of higher learning. Rather, a discipline is an evolving body of skills, methods, and norms designed to explain parts of the world worth knowing something about. To recognize the importance of disciplines — to fight for their survival — is therefore to advocate for a picture of the world, an ontology. It is to insist that the world does not have a single order that is adequately captured by, for example, biology or physics or computation.
A pluralistic array of disciplines matches up with a pluralistic vision of the world: endocrine cells for the biologists, tectonic plates for the geologists, librettos for the musicologists, and so on. Pluralism of this variety should put limits on the way disciplines are coordinated. It should insist that no one discipline is reducible to another. It should also provide the foundations for an interdisciplinarity that is interactive, not reductive, one that takes as its premise that each discipline has something to contribute to matters of shared concern in virtue of its own methods and objects. This is an interdisciplinarity worth having.
In an essay that went viral several years ago, Steven Pinker lamented that the humanities have “failed to define a progressive agenda” and are resistant to “innovation” because they have rejected any influence from the sciences. “Art, culture, and society are products of human brains,” after all, so what’s stopping humanists from putting them all together? This plea for reform is consistent with a more general sense that “art” and “culture” need to be coordinated with the study of such things as “human brains,” but Pinker’s critique distinguishes itself by squarely addressing relations of power within higher education.
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Consider this ominous anecdote: “Several university presidents and provosts have lamented to me that when a scientist comes into their office, it’s to announce some exciting new research opportunity and demand the resources to pursue it. When a humanities scholar drops by, it’s to plead for respect for the way things have always been done.” This juxtaposition of the excitingly new with more of the same is glib and moralizing, but the language Pinker uses is interesting all the same. Why does he assume that value ought to fall on excitement and novelty, that an institution whose distinctive rationale has been the continuity of research ought to prefer what he calls “innovation”?
A cliché sprung from the tech industry and business schools in the mid-’90s to describe how companies can appeal to neglected sectors of the market, “innovation” is now so ubiquitous in academic culture as almost to pass without notice. Pinker pairs it however with a sibling piece of corporate jargon — “silo” — that is worth our attention. “If anything is naïve and simplistic,” he writes, “it is the conviction that the legacy silos of academia should be fortified and that we should be forever content with current ways of making sense of the world.” Surely many readers of this essay have at some point heard a dean or outside consulting agency decry faculty lodged in silos, or departments siloed in tepid irrelevance, each split off from the other. The history of this pejorative and its migration into the lexicon of university administration tells a fascinating story.
Like “innovation,” “silo” emerged in business schools in the same era as part of an effort to describe strategies for responding to customer needs and technological change. According to the influential “customer-focused solutions” model of management theory developed at the time, a silo is any “system, process, department etc. that operates in isolation from others” and thus prevents the efficient flow of information from one unit of an organization to another. A corporation whose finance or research or sales divisions are walled off from each other has too many silos, the argument goes, and so finds it difficult to be flexible with respect to markets and innovative with respect to products. A successful corporation therefore should strive to break down its silos and “connect the dots” between previously isolated bits of data or expert practices. Employees should be routinely shuffled, and even well-functioning products remade.
It is something of a wonder that an account of how to optimize the internal structure of a corporation, an organization designed to maximize profits, has been brought to bear on the university, an organization designed to explain the world. To get a sense of how far this migration has gone we might compare a 2007 article from the Harvard Business Review titled “Silo Busting: How to Execute on the Promise of Customer Focus” to a recent, much-lauded multi-author study, The Undergraduate Experience: Focusing Institutions on What Matters Most (2016). Here is the article in HBR:
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To deliver customer-focused solutions, companies need mechanisms that allow customer-related information sharing, division of labor, and decision making to occur easily across company boundaries. Sometimes this involves completely obliterating established silos and replacing them with silos organized around the customer, but more often it entails using structures and processes to transcend existing boundaries.
Here is The Undergraduate Experience:
Strong institutions align their resources, policies, and practices with their educational purposes and student characteristics, just as well designed courses align goals and assessments. While this may sound self-evident, it can be vexing because higher education institutions often operate as collections of strong but separate programs. Thriving institutions transform silos into systems by supporting cross-unit coordination and by paying more attention to the student experience than to how the organizational chart divides up the campus.
Critics of the corporate university often speak of the pernicious influence of actual companies and bottom-line thinking on the governance and ethos of higher education. The idiomatic drift one sees in these two gobbets certainly partakes of the larger phenomenon, but it does so particularly around the question of organizational structure. The silo busting designed to match “strategic packages of products and services” to consumers comes instead to match “resources, policies, and practices” to the “student experience.” Facilitating this move are several other related keywords in the management-theory lexicon: “Coordination” is one of the “The Four Cs of Customer-Focused Solutions,” for example, and “systems thinking” is the term of art for understanding the entire corporation as “a learning organization.” The busting up of academic disciplines thus involves a transposition at once of a dialect and a plan — a dialect that is a plan — to remake the fine composition of the university itself.
A university would still divide into parts, but these would be flexible, open-ended gatherings defined in relation to an evolving market: students and the problem-having, challenge-posing world in which they live. The ideal is of a cluster that might take shape around a given problem or challenge while sharing temporary space on a hiring plan. Whereas silos (i.e., disciplines) stake their claim on inherited expertise, clusters draw from topics external to the disciplines that fall under them and eventually disappear.
To get us to this bright future, existing forms of expertise should, the thinking goes, be broken down so the university better fits a world that the disciplines fail to address. The academy ought to be shaped not to explain what the world is but to supply what the world demands. The difference is between an epistemological and an instrumental rationale. And with this difference, important norms are breached or abandoned. These norms vary by discipline. With respect to the humanities, the first that usually gets mentioned is the norm of deliberativeness much heralded in recent attempts to value the “slow” nature of what we do or to define the literary disciplines in particular around an ideal of attention. At ostensible odds with corporate values of efficiency, speed, and responsiveness, the humanities on this view value a contrary pause over what might otherwise get passed by, what might require linguistic or historical or formal training of one or another kind.
A related norm, perhaps less easy to see and less prone to (pardonable) sanctimony, is that of the open question, a tolerance for letting some difficulties stand once they are articulated. One reason to bust up a silo is that it doesn’t offer a solution to the “issues” plaguing us, from climate change to disease and beyond. Humanists’ intuitive rejection of this sort of language reveals an important, if tacit, norm embodied in the fine grain of literary-critical writing especially: the hard-to-shake draw to the intractable, the sense that the goal is to state and explore problems rather than solve them.
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Not all challenges are new, nor is every problem solvable. The intuitive resistance to utility, moreover, derives from the pluralism of the disciplines themselves. A respect for the diversity of the world entails both that what the literary disciplines study is real and meaningful and that it ought to be studied on its own terms. Literary works and other cultural artifacts of course address topics that are of interest to the broader academy, but they don’t tend to resolve them — or not in the same way that the sciences or engineering do.
To pick an example from my own research interests, writers from Jonathan Swift to Tom McCarthy have taken up the problem of consciousness — how can sentience arise from mere matter — which is of vital interest to philosophy, neuroscience, and beyond. But no matter how hard literary critics were to bear down on their texts, we would be unlikely to crack this problem as formulated by these other disciplines. Instead, critical method, like the texts it studies, would likely keep the problem open, poke around its edges, ask whether it has been framed in the right way, resituate the conversation.
The defense of disciplines is neither conservative nor elegiac. It is a defense of a vision of the world as itself plural.
That does not diminish the importance of humanistic disciplines or their objects of study. Rather, it reveals something important about both. Literary criticism aims to tell truths about its special objects — texts and other cultural artifacts — but these objects don’t do their truth-telling work in the same way as the sciences. Accordingly, critical method doesn’t have the same procedures or norms of explanation that the methods of the sciences have, although it is no less rigorous and no less accountable to standards of evidence, perspicuity, and elegance. That this is so should be the spur to a conversation among disciplines based on mutual esteem. With respect to a topic like consciousness, after all, literature and criticism ask their questions in the language in which the phenomenon — lived experience — takes shape and appears to us in its various forms and locations. Philosophy and science quite often do not.
A common argument against disciplines opens with the premise that some are closer than others to the fundamental nature of the world. On the more radical end of this view, only the natural sciences get at truths about the world, and other disciplines should exist only insofar as they are coordinated with these truths. Interdisciplinarity in this case means reducing the methods, arguments, and norms of one discipline to the supposedly more grounded picture of another. Such reductionism assumes a unity of knowledge across the academy and asserts the priority of basic science as the foundation of everything else. There is only the world of nature, in this view, and so every explanation of that world must eventually converge with its fundamental units of life if not its fundamental units of matter. The point of any academic discipline is therefore to perform a reduction that would in some fashion express this underlying unity and order.
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This model found its early and decisive articulation in the famed entomologist E.O. Wilson’s call for “consilience” among disciplines, a term he retrieved from the 19th century to describe a “dream of unified learning … ‘jumping together’” the fields of knowledge “by the linking of facts and fact-based theory across disciplines to create a common groundwork of explanation.” The idea is that there is ultimately just one object and one method of study: the world of living creatures and the science by which it is explained. We only need some time to get the structure of learning in place so that “sound judgment will flow easily from one discipline to another” and the distance between them will gradually disintegrate.
Considered in this fashion, the history of the disciplines tells a story of their lamentably fragmented knowledge and, at the same time, their steady convergence into a unity, as the insights of the more foundational fields travel upward, limit, and reshape the explanatory frameworks of the fields they support: to wit, biology transforms psychology and psychology the humanities.
The vision can sound messianic: “We are approaching a new age of synthesis, when the testing of consilience is the greatest of all intellectual challenges.” But the ultimate upshot beyond Wilson was to provide a picture of interdisciplinary inquiry that would take the claims of the humanistic disciplines to task by testing them against the ostensibly more grounded claims of the sciences, a kind of unity by reprimand.
So, for example, in a study that defines consilience as the “vertical integration” of disciplines, Edward Slingerland argues that “humanists need to start taking seriously discoveries about human cognition being provided by neuroscientists and psychologists,” discoveries “which have a constraining function to play in the formulation of humanistic theories.” In what does this constraining relation consist? The answer will be familiar to anyone acquainted with the usual obloquy: “Bringing the humanities and natural sciences together into a single, integrated chain seems to me the only way to clear up the current miasma of endlessly contingent discourses and representations of representations that currently hampers humanistic inquiry.”
This swipe at the humanities is less interesting for its by now hoary content than for the imaginary relation among disciplines from which it is derived. On the model of vertical integration, the natural sciences would lie beneath and limit the disciplines built on top of them because they are closer to every discipline’s common point of reference. Human behavior explained by sociologists, for example, would refer to and be limited by the explanation of the same behavior studied by biologists. Nearer to home, written or performed phenomena studied in literature departments would refer to and be limited by the cognitive or neural explanation of the same, and so on. The more fundamental the part of the world, the more fundamental its discipline of study. Pinker’s shot across the bow of the humanities is just a further instance of this argument, coarsened with the corporate language of silo-busting.
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The mistake is to conceive of the disciplines and the relations among them against a common point of reference: the physical or biological world, explained by basic science. The point is of course not to dispute that the fundamental constituents of the universe are physical and its units of life biological. But not every part of the world can have a physical or biological explanation. That is why we have disciplines in the first place. The behavior depicted in novels, say, cannot be explained by biology because fictional characters are not biological creatures. The world made present by poetry cannot be explained by physics or botany because it is not exactly physical, or not in the same way, and its flowers are not real flowers. Reading is not the same as seeing, nor writing the same as thinking.
Pace Slingerland and Pinker, the world studied by the academic disciplines is irreducibly plural: Minds and behavior, literature and literary history, cells and organisms, mark out separate kinds of things with different constituents in play and varied techniques for their explanation. This account is just as committed as the reductionist one to a picture of the world and is no less principled in elaborating its stakes. These begin with what the philosopher of biology John Dupré has called “the disunity of the sciences,” namely, “the denial that science constitutes, or could ever come to constitute, a unified project” because “the extreme diversity of the contents of the world” requires an extreme diversity of aims and methods for its accounting.
François Berger for The Chronicle Review
Despite all the fanfare about the brain over the past several decades, for example, it has proved difficult to reduce psychology to neuroscience. “Suppose the functional correspondence of the nervous system crosscuts its neurological organization (so that quite different neurological structures can subserve identical psychological functions across times or across organisms),” Jerry Fodor asked in “Special Sciences: (Or, the Disunity of Science as a Working Hypothesis)” (1974), his landmark demarcation of the natural and social sciences. “Then,” he answered, “the existence of psychology depends not on the fact that neurons are so sadly small, but rather on the fact that neurology does not posit the natural kinds that psychology requires.”
Psychology should proceed without expecting to be reduced to neuroscience because it explains something other than the brain. And indeed it has. Conclusions in the language of the first have not been consistently reached from research in the language of the second, although of course links between the two have been far-reaching and significant. The work in cognitive science and philosophy of mind I have found most relevant to literary analysis, for example, takes as its basic premise that consciousness and perception cannot be reduced to events in the brain. The failure of reduction is the spur to knowledge, not its disappointment.
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If the world described by the sciences fails to exhibit a unity, there is little reason to believe that the world traditionally considered beyond the interests of science — the humanities — should be any different. The argument from disunity supposes that there are disciplines because of the way that the world is structured. It supposes that one discipline fails to reduce to another because the world explained by the disciplines is plural in kind, containing many varieties of things, from millipedes to minuets. These things don’t dissolve into something else on closer inspection. As the philosopher of science Anjan Chakravartty has put it, the “different domains of inquiry ask different questions regarding different entities and processes, and there is no evidence to suggest that facts at ‘higher’ levels of description are generally and in principle capable of being expressed in terms of facts about entities and processes at ‘lower’ levels. … There are many ways one might carve nature at its innumerable joints.” Interdisciplinary reductionism idealizes the sciences, and yet it turns out that the reductionist program is not the way actual science works.
Every discipline has an evolving set of terms, skills, and norms established over time and in relation to its evolving domain of study. For literary studies, these would be the practices of disciplinary reading along with their associated lexicon of form, style, or genre and their associated norms of attention, rigor, historical grounding, and so on. If interdisciplinarity is to be worthwhile, it must bring these methods and norms into some relation to those associated with other domains of study — but the relation cannot be one of mere translation or reduction. An interdisciplinarity worth having is possible only with the background recognition that a pluralism of phenomena entails a pluralism of methods and norms, each adequate to its subject and none intrinsically better than another.
The humanities, like other fields of study, tell us important truths about some parts of the world. Disciplinary diversity is grounded in a pluralistic vision of things. But such pluralism necessarily produces tensions among different methods and truth claims. The best interdisciplinary humanities work confronts these tensions head on. Consider what happens when the literary critic Angus Fletcher and his coauthor, the cognitive scientist John Monterosso, examine the relationship between the literary device of free indirect discourse and the psychology of empathy.
Free indirect discourse is the literary technique in which a third person narrator seems to slide into the perspective of a character without changing the tense or grammar in which the story is being told, such as when the narrator of Jane Austen’s Emma shows the reader how the eponymous protagonist perceives her new friend Harriet: “Those soft blue eyes and all those natural graces should not be wasted on the inferior society of Highbury and its connections. The acquaintances she had already formed were unworthy of her.” Since it allows us to view the world from the point of view of a character with a lighter touch than such devices as interior monologue, free indirect discourse is one of the novel’s best strategies for presenting what a character is thinking. For that reason, it has caught the attention of scholars interested both in how novels elicit empathy for characters on the page and whether reading novels can make one a more empathetic and thus perhaps a more ethical person. According to Monterosso and Fletcher, recent “scientific” attempts to answer these questions usually treat the device as a third-person “pivot” to first-person experience and so as a way to understand a character’s thoughts as they are expressed in her own private language.
Surely many readers of this essay have heard a dean or outside consulting agency decry faculty lodged in silos, or departments siloed in tepid irrelevance.
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Fletcher and Monterosso’s own analysis of free indirect discourse reveals instead that the form often holds several centers of consciousness in tensile balance, including, in their example from Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, the “gently ironic” perspective of the narrator along with the character’s own self-mockery. The difference between the two analyses seems to emerge from where the specialist attention falls: on experimental design suited to multiple subjects or on discrete sentences examined in their larger contexts (the paragraphs, chapters, or novels in which they appear).
For Fletcher and Monterosso, interdisciplinary collaboration allows them to move from an understanding of what free indirect discourse often entails to an experiment designed to measure its effects. Shifting between the protocols of different disciplines requires a balance of distinct notions of evidence and persuasiveness, as well as what counts as truth. The result in this case is an important hedge on the notion that the novel elicits empathy and an important pause on the recruitment of reading for ethics.
In the experimental design characteristic of the sciences, there is a premium on simplicity — variables must be minimized and noise filtered out. In contrast, the sort of attention paid to free indirect discourse — or any elemental dimension of literary works — adds complicating variables to arrive at its truth claim. In their discussion of the Austen example, Fletcher and Monterosso first expand the citation from two sentences concerning Mrs. Bennet’s response to learning that Charles Bingley will attend the next assembly to the entire paragraph from which the sentences are taken and then outward even further, to aspects of plot and the history of marriage, gender, and power. Their claim to a persuasive truth depends on the explanatory rigor of literary critical method. One distinctive feature of this method is that it scales up the level of complication while remaining internally coherent, coordinating features of syntax and tone with dimensions of historical and narrative situation. The word for this kind of scaling and this kind of explanation is of course “reading.”
On a highly idealized picture, disciplines that minimize variables find it easier to agree on truth claims and thus, in their view, to build knowledge over time than disciplines that scale upward in the effort to be persuasive. The sheer variety of factors that can go into or be left out of an influential reading means that the literary disciplines are prone to what might seem from the outside to be a circular eclecticism and heterogeneity, periodically redefining their interpretations or even their core concepts with little convergence or accumulation. Such eclecticism should not detract from the discipline’s claims to say something true about the world. Rather, it should reveal something important about criticism as a method, its movement from individual artifacts to explanations that hold across forms, genres, and contexts.
If the rationale for any explanation is that it “makes the world more intelligible,” as Michael Friedman put it in his classic discussion “Explanation and Scientific Understanding” (1974), this is because the explanation takes up what some part of the world is, both the nature of its composition and the demands for its understanding. What a discipline endeavors to understand cannot be reduced to something unrecognizable in its own language, as in some of the more regrettable attempts to apply evolutionary psychology to literary interpretation or aesthetic theory. Recognizing this, scientists themselves abandoned the reductionist program long ago. It is something of an irony then that reductionism has returned in the effort to diminish the value of humanistic thinking.
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If we are to be “scientific” about literature and art, we need to understand their place in the diversity of the world. If we are to be interdisciplinary, we require a model of interdisciplinarity that respects the character of disciplines at a moment when their independence is under attack. The defense of disciplines is neither conservative nor elegiac. It is a defense of a vision of the world as itself plural. For those involved in decisions about the future of higher education, such pluralism is the best way to secure truth amid peril.
Jonathan Kramnick is a professor of English at Yale. This essay is adapted from Paper Minds: Literature and the Ecology of Consciousness, just out from the University of Chicago Press.