{"id":472,"date":"2010-10-01T13:43:18","date_gmt":"2010-10-01T17:43:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.montclair.edu\/crdirector\/?p=40"},"modified":"2019-05-13T09:31:48","modified_gmt":"2019-05-13T13:31:48","slug":"where-is-interdisciplinarity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/2010\/10\/01\/where-is-interdisciplinarity\/","title":{"rendered":"Where is ‘interdisciplinarity’? – by Neil Baldwin"},"content":{"rendered":"

Kudos to Editor-in-Chief Robert Frodeman; Associate Editors Julie Thompson Klein and Carl Mitcham<\/a>; Managing Editor J. Britt Holbrook; the distinguished Editorial Board of Jose Antonio Lopez Cerezo<\/strong>, Wolfgang Krohn<\/a>, William Newell<\/a>, Nancy Tuana, and Peter Weingart; and the entire editorial and production team at Oxford University Press <\/a>for the new,\u00a0hefty (580 pp), substantial and insightful Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity just published last month.<\/p>\n

I will\u00a0return to this signal accomplishment in a moment.<\/p>\n

But first, by way of\u00a0roundabout response to the title-question posed above, two citations from the\u00a0September 3 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education special\u00a0section, What’s the\u00a0Big Idea?<\/strong><\/a> in which, for the tenth anniversary of The Chronicle Review, scholars and illustrators were asked, “What will be the defining idea of the next decade, and why?”<\/p>\n

Elaine Howard Ecklund says it will be Abandoning Disciplines<\/strong>: “[It] will be tough,” she concedes. “Our entire tenure and promotion system is controlled by disciplinary review boards…Universities have traditionally prized disciplinary purity and specificity, but that approach is ill-equipped to nurture the kind of expansive, creative, multipronged thinking that is needed to meet our most pressing problems.”<\/p>\n

Mary Beard <\/a>says the next big\u00a0idea will have to be The Dark Ages — or, Rather, How to Prevent Them<\/strong>: “Whose culture [is it]? What culture? And how will (or should) cultural priorities evolve to reflect changes in the world political order?”<\/p>\n

The jacket photo of The Oxford Handbook<\/em> is a huge, luminous floating computerized portrait of our earth, the globe, at the time of Pangaea. Its cautionary symbolism\u00a0forced me to step back and take the large — and long — view, a healthy perspective\u00a0for any self-respecting, introspectively-honest professor.\u00a0 Many pixels have been expended on the paradoxical mixture of emotions that swirl through the mind of an intellectual designated, for\u00a0orderly reasons, to a certain department in a certain building on a certain campus — the most poignant of which is the feeling one gets from time to time that knowledge\u00a0is ideally\u00a0the property of no-one and the province of\u00a0 everyone.<\/p>\n

Nature is interdisciplinary and thus it\u00a0follows that the mind predicated upon the phenomenal\u00a0world\u00a0will not always follow a proscribed path.<\/p>\n

One of the redeeming attributes of the new Oxford Handbook<\/em> is that it recognizes this fact of life. Julie Thompson Klein and Richard Parncutt question the received notion of privileged works as the sole\u00a0signposts\u00a0in art history; Carole Palmer reminds us that information\u00a0originates by being scattered; Paul Thagard <\/a>points to the inherently collaborative nature of cognitive science; Veronica Boix-Mansilla asserts that interdisciplinary learning is\u00a0the most pragmatic of all epistomologies; J. Britt Holbrook questions the integrity of the definition of “peer” as a way to dissect peer-review; Clark A. Miller endorses the velocity of proliferation of centers and institutes\u00a0as\u00a0a salutary fragmentation of\u00a0disciplines; Bill Newell <\/a>stresses the importance of continuing to infuse undergraduate general education curricula with interdisciplinary courses that\u00a0respect the unique brains of \u00a0“net-gen” freshmen; Stephanie Pfirman and Paula J.S. Martin show how collegiality and interdisciplinarity go hand in hand.<\/p>\n

These are just some selections from a seminal and inspirational volume <\/a>that should be required reading for all of us — in higher education and beyond <\/a>— who see\u00a0college and\u00a0university cultures as permeable membranes, letting in diverse molecules of knowledge\u00a0from the wider, ever-changing\u00a0world…and thereby releasing multi-perspectived young\u00a0citizens outward to that world.<\/p>\n

— N.B.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

********************<\/strong><\/p>\n

…<\/strong>and furthermore<\/strong><\/em>, as Thomas Jefferson <\/a>wrote, “If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea…He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper\u00a0at mine receives light without darkening me.” [cited by Robert Darnton<\/a>,\u00a0Director of the Harvard University Library<\/a>, \u00a0in his October 1, 2010 welcoming address\u00a0at a conference at Harvard to discuss the possibility of creating a National Digital Library<\/a>.]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kudos to Editor-in-Chief Robert Frodeman; Associate Editors Julie Thompson Klein and Carl Mitcham; Managing Editor J. Britt Holbrook; the distinguished Editorial Board of Jose Antonio Lopez Cerezo, Wolfgang Krohn, William Newell, Nancy Tuana, and Peter Weingart; and the entire editorial and production team at Oxford University Press for the new,\u00a0hefty (580 pp), substantial and insightful […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-472","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-director-s-essay"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/472","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=472"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/472\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1096,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/472\/revisions\/1096"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=472"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=472"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=472"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}