Interdisciplinarity Has Become a Buzzword. Here’s How to Course-Correct.

It seems everyone at Harvard believes that interdisciplinarity can be a worthwhile pursuit. Hardly anyone agrees on what that should mean in practice.

In an interview with The Crimson last November, Faculty of Arts and Sciences Dean Hopi E. Hoekstra said one of her goals is to bolster interdisciplinary scholarship and research. Now, recent reporting suggests that faculty are divided on the University’s current approach.

Before interdisciplinarity enters the dictionary of vacuous higher-ed vocabulary (presumably sandwiched between “civil discourse” and “the death of the humanities”), Harvard should be clear about what the term entails — and what it doesn’t.

To our eyes, the University stands at a cross-disciplinary crossroads. Down one path lies an organic, student-led culture of academic exploration across many fields. Down the other lies an artificial, top-down approach that smashes together disciplines as an end in itself.

We favor the former, but some at the University seem intent on pursuing the latter.

Take research as an example. Harvard is home to groundbreaking work on problems that exceed disciplinary confines, like climate change or artificial intelligence. At the same time, many of our University’s brightest minds largely remain within their disciplinary silos, generating fresh insights through novel and innovative applications of traditional methods. An overcommitment to interdisciplinarity can produce research that’s a mile wide but an inch deep.

Harvard is responsible for the difficult job of nurturing the next generation of researchers. It should expose them to the already-vast array of existing disciplines — not scrape together Franken-classes for the sake of novelty.

Thankfully, Harvard doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel in service of interdisciplinarity. An older higher-ed cliché may be the answer: We’re talking about the “liberal arts.” By fully committing to providing a robust foundation in the liberal arts, Harvard can better equip its students to engage in meaningful cross-disciplinary exploration.

Such a change would require students buy in too. Institutional reforms to shore up the place of the liberal arts will fall flat if we continue to squander opportunities to explore by using our General Education courses to take gems or pursuing double or joint concentrations with little value beyond the extra line on our diploma.

Of course, the University doesn’t have to sit around hoping students will see the light. Perhaps Harvard could take a page out of Columbia University’s book by requiring students to take robust, manageably rigorous versions of introductory courses like Hum 10, LPS A, Stat 110, and CS50.

And at this point, it almost goes without saying: If Harvard is serious about interdisciplinary learning, it should take the opportunity to establish departments in existing, clearly meritorious areas of cross-field exploration — Ethnic Studies being the obvious example.

Slapping fields together at random isn’t interdisciplinarity. Conflating the two helps neither the University nor the prospects of worthwhile cross-disciplinary inquiry.

This staff editorial solely represents the majority view of The Crimson Editorial Board. It is the product of discussions at regular Editorial Board meetings. In order to ensure the impartiality of our journalism, Crimson editors who choose to opine and vote at these meetings are not involved in the reporting of articles on similar topics.

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