Philosopher of science Paul Griffiths (Sydney) gets this exactly right; an excerpt:
An interdisciplinary team is not a group of people trained in “interdisciplinarity”. It’s a group of people who have deep knowledge and sound judgment in their disciplines....
A discipline is much more than a particular stream of courses in the undergraduate syllabus, despite efforts to redefine it as such. A discipline is an international community of expertise.A discipline is the group within which one expert can legitimately judge another expert’s work. A historian, an epidemiologist or a quantum theorist is best placed to judge whether work in history, epidemiology or quantum theory is good work. They can tell if a course covers the right material. They can also tell who is the most promising candidate for employment or for promotion.
If these day-to-day management decisions are not made by disciplinary experts, bullshit can flourish. That is why universities were traditionally organised into departments based on a discipline or tightly related disciplines like the different branches of physics....
Disciplines are continually evolving. The changing structure of knowledge itself drives this evolution. The administrative structures of universities must accommodate these changes or become obstacles to progress.
For example, retired biologists will remember departments of botany, zoology and microbiology, with a department of biochemistry somewhere else in the university. The molecular revolution in biology dissolved those divisions as the ideas and techniques of the life sciences became more broadly integrated.
But a university cannot create meaningful disciplines or interdisciplinary fields by creating administrative units. Back in 1900 it was common for philosophy and psychology to sit together in departments of “moral sciences” or “mental and moral philosophy”. If we did that today it would not create an exciting new synergy. It would just make life difficult for everyone involved – staff and students.
Like running a research team, running a university means knowing when to defer to disciplinary expertise. Those actively involved in creating knowledge understand best what will create synergy and what will merely create confusion.
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