Here is my reflection: I LOVED re-reading Abby Goode’s piece on Slow Interdisciplinarity, and LOVED Matthew Cheney’s blog post. (The questions Matt poses at the end are so generative!) I also found this short blog post from Academe “Becoming Interdisciplinary” helpful. But I also found reading these pieces difficult and sad, which I think you will understand if you continue reading below…
Interdisciplinarity at PSU cannot be understood without understanding how it has been operationalized here: Clusters. And clusters cannot be understood without knowing their origin story and how they have developed these past 6 years. The year Birx introduced clusters (fall 2015) was in the midst of a bruising, contentious process to describe and justify programs (URSA – I have since forgotten what this stands for! Anyone?). Since then, we have had several additional reports and consultants describing financial issues and advocating for various solutions. Prior to writing this I did a search through my emails, and the shear volume of acronyms and spreadsheets and reports is … something. Overwhelming? Depressing? Funny?
One constant in this time period is that we started on campus to focus on the costs, rather than the values, that various disciplines, programs, and majors brought to the university. This negative framing put faculty on the defensive. When it seemed like the latest financial analysis could spell doom for a major or a faculty job, people were strategic, and often in ways that ran counter to the stated goals of the cluster initiative. Rather than encouraging people to reach out, to collaborate, to be curious about their colleagues from other disciplines, the effect was ironically more entrenched silos and a greater inward focus, at a time when we were being told that interdisciplinary clusters were our future.
Lest this reflection seem like one faculty members’ rant at having lost their major (but not their job thankfully) – yes, I am sad, angry, and frustrated that this happened. But I think it is important to know what we are really talking about when we are talking about interdisciplinarity on campus. We are talking about a particular kind of thing, or activity. Clusters have always been tied to actions that led to lost jobs, lost programs, lost majors. These are inextricable.
What we must learn from this history is that interdisciplinarity is incompatible with scarcity and fear. People don’t have the energy or motivation to collaborate and build new things when they are being asked to justify their existence. And as Matt rightly points out, interdisciplinarity actually costs a lot in investment and other things. It has been a trojan horse for cost savings at PSU, but true interdisciplinarity is actually the opposite.
One last thought: some of what I am writing will be unfamiliar to other faculty members at PSU, even those who have been along for the entire ride of clusters. I think it is important to recognize the inherent unequal power dynamics on campus, which clusters have sadly exacerbated or at least have made more visible to those who are willing to notice. There are large programs with many faculty members and lots of enrolled students, who have been relatively immune from all of this turmoil. And there are smaller programs, with fewer faculty and students, who are fighting for survival. Anthropology/Sociology made it out alive after URSA in 2015-2016, but was killed off later. Some others have survived the latest round of program curtailment, but are nervously looking toward the horizon at the next financial analysis.
When disciplines that are valued so differently by the university come together to collaborate, who holds the power? How could these dynamics not shape our engagement with each other?