Interdisciplinary Teaching as a Chimera

Burt Thorp, Director of Interdisciplinary Studies, University of North Dakota

Is the concept of interdisciplinary teaching merely a trendy term, the latest fashion in higher education, and a way of renaming what everyone already does in their classrooms? I thought about this while reading a new book by Louis Menand, Harvard English professor and winner of a Pulitzer Prize in history. That book is The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University (Norton, 2010). In his chapter entitled “Interdisciplinarity and Anxiety,” Menand makes the point that interdisciplinarity is neither new nor transformative. (96) He writes that modern disciplines “emerged with the modern research university, between 1870 and 1915.” (97) I perked up at this point in my reading, being reminded of one of my favorite writers, William James, and his 1903 essay “The Ph.D. Octopus”—the title alone indicates his disgust with the pernicious doctorate introduced from German universities. The piece can be found in James’s 1911 collection Memories and Studies and is also widely available online—more on him later. After a quick and interesting tour through the history of higher education, Menand concludes his chapter: “Interdisciplinarity is an administrative name for an anxiety and a hope that are personal.” (125)
Finishing Menand’s book, I could not stop thinking about my own experience teaching both English and history courses at UND. Students in English courses are different than those in history courses—they have a distinct vibe in each. That vibe is really just the students’ varied expectations, especially by the majors who have had other courses in their disciplines. History majors expect a certain kind of course, with a familiar presentation style. So do English majors. Each discipline operates with “underlying habits of thought,” a phrase I picked up from Marjorie Garber’s Academic Instincts (Princeton, 2001; see page 74). And the sprinklings of other majors who appear in an English or history course sometimes assert their disciplinary chops. I had one criminal justice major in a history course explain to me how things were done differently in his major—papers were more report-like, more to the point and concise. Should I have said, “So? This is a history course! Write a long essay.” I didn’t, because I felt a surprising respect for his assertion of disciplinary roots. Perhaps my feeling was an example of anxiety masking as Interdisciplinarity, Menand’s thesis. I am, then, an interdisciplinary teacher who admires disciplinary teaching. I am in awe (awe = a mixture of fear and respect) of the authority and pedigrees of our traditional disciplines, pedigrees that go back to Herodotus and Thucydides in the case of history and to Plato and Aristotle in the case of literary criticism. Interdisciplinary Studies goes back—what?—a few decades (Garber, in her chapter entitled “Discipline Envy,” mentions a 1972 discussion by Roland Barthes of the topic).

I was thinking too about my teaching style. For me the journey from English course to history course takes ten minutes; I finish the first at 9:50 and begin the next at 10:00. As Director of Interdisciplinary Studies this quick transition should not faze me, but it often does. I notice a wrench as I rapidly morph from philologist to historian. Now I firmly believe that the skills of philology and close reading transfer to history and the other way around also! But I do want to be a historian in my history courses and a close reader in my English courses. I detect unrest in the classroom when I get too historical in one and too literary in another, something that happens fairly often. Being interdisciplinary can be uncomfortable. Perhaps this is why a popular model for an interdisciplinary course is team teaching. I have team taught also and found it fun. But one does just sit at ease in one’s discipline and let the other instructor do their thing while waiting and watching to see if the students make connections. Is this interdisciplinary teaching, or simply juxtaposition of disciplines?

Every discipline is interdisciplinary. If that assertion is correct, then all teaching is interdisciplinary teaching. Here is how it works: on the blackboard, place one’s own discipline in the center and then stretch out to each side all the other disciplines that contribute—the more philosophical or theoretical on the left, say, and the more historical or descriptive to the right (it could be the other way). So, for instance, with history in the center, philosophy and theology go on one side and archaeology and textual study on the other. Keep on doing this. I was put to this task years ago by a professor in grad school; there is nothing new about it. I find such a scheme for organizing disciplines implicitly throughout William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (London and Bombay: Longmans, 1902) as when he writes at the end of Lecture II, “abandoning the extreme generalities which have engrossed us hitherto, I propose that we begin our actual journey by addressing ourselves directly to the concrete facts” or in a footnote when he writes about “lines of disparate conception, each corresponding to some part of the world’s truth, each verified in some degree, each leaving out some part of real experience.” (123)

[Thanks to Bill Caraher for telling me about Louis Menand’s new book.]