Harvard Says It Wants to Boost Interdisciplinary Research. Its Professors Have Questions.

“Interdisciplinarity” has become something of a buzzword among Harvard professors.

At Harvard, there is widespread enthusiasm for interdisciplinary work, which implies innovative research and broad collaboration. In an interview with The Crimson in November, Faculty of Arts and Sciences Dean Hopi E. Hoekstra said that one of her goals was to facilitate more interdisciplinary work across FAS disciplines.

The idea has come to the forefront of discussions at Harvard about the future of the Arts and Humanities division. It has featured heavily into the strategic planning process for the division, promising humanists an opportunity to weigh in on pressing issues including climate change and artificial intelligence.

But in interviews with The Crimson, seven professors from the Arts and Humanities division said that the term, as it is popularly used, may raise more questions than it does answers.

“The word ‘interdisciplinary’ is a little slippery,” said Jeffrey Schnapp, a professor and the director of metaLAB (at) Harvard.

“In my view, what often is thought of as interdisciplinarity is a very thin, light version of interdisciplinarity that doesn’t have a fundamental, transformative effect on the way knowledge is produced, the way it’s disseminated, and the way research questions are framed,” Schnapp said.

David M. Levine, a professor of Theater, Dance, and Media, said interdisciplinarity should not be considered an end in itself, but that it must be in service of a specific intellectual goal.

“The reason I think interdisciplinarity is a goal is a little weird, is because when you try to do a class on fusing chemistry in English, for instance, you’re kind of randomly making up a topic, and that topic doesn’t really have its own history,” Levine said.

“This is what I mean, when you say you kind of need the disciplines to have interdisciplinarity. You couldn’t have an interdisciplinary institution, because I don’t leave knowing anything,” he added.

English professor Lawrence Buell said that, while crossing disciplines can free scholars from academic silos, “interdisciplinarity can also become a kind of catchphrase.”

Buell said that interdisciplinarity can mean “escape from the silo, joining forces, expanding your thinking. But it can also mean free floating loose talk.”

Some professors raised the concern that interdisciplinary research, if conducted carelessly, could rely on only superficial connections between fields, sacrificing expertise.

Daniel Heath Justice, a visiting professor of Ethnicity, Indigeneity, and Migration, said that “interdisciplinary scholars can reach wide without going deep, to the detriment of the project that they’re looking at.”

He said that as academic institutions build in more flexibility for interdisciplinary work, they should maintain the rigor and traditions of existing disciplines.

“If we don’t appreciate the fact that all disciplines have genealogies then I think we can approach them in a really slipshod and disrespectful way,” he added.

One existing route for students to engage in interdisciplinary work is through special concentrations, where they design their own program of concentration. But Alexander Rehding, a professor of Music, said that one difficulty in promoting interdisciplinarity in special concentrations can be a lack of methodological rigor.

“There’s no 97 course, there are no fundamental methods, and you kind of have to piece it all together and often the results are kind of piecemeal,” Rehding said.

Levine, the Theater, Dance, and Media professor, said that though his work blends different disciplines and media, “I don’t consider myself an interdisciplinary artist.”

Referencing a sculptural hologram he created for the Museum of the Moving Image, Levine said, “I wasn’t interested in making that holographic piece because it was technological, per se. I was interested in a sculptural sense — in order to do what I wanted, I had to master the technology.”

“I mean, if you look at what I make, it’s interdisciplinary, but that’s not the idea of interdisciplinarity as a kind of fetish,” he said.

Rehding said that in addition to administrative support and research for interdisciplinary scholarship, to truly achieve interdisciplinarity at Harvard will require an open mindset among its scholars and faculty.

“What you need primarily is a willingness to engage with others and to a certain extent, make concessions and preserve a certain openness to other approaches,” Rehding said.

“A lot of this kind of work is hit or miss in the best sense,” he added.

—Staff writer Luka Pavikjevikj contributed reporting.

—Staff writer Stella M. Nakada can be reached at stella.nakada@thecrimson.com.