Jonathan Kramnick, a philosophically-informed English professor at Yale, has a long and generally plausible takedown of the "interdisciplinarity" blather that has now overrun the universities; it is unfortunately behind a paywall, but here's an excerpt:
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....
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. [Steven] 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.
My only quibble is that we have to allow for the fact that some exising disciplines may not really match up with any part of the world, that sometimes disciplines are swallowed or displaced by others. But that should happen through intellectual evolution, not by administrative fiat resulting from management-speak!
(Thanks to Jason Stanley for the pointer.)
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