Key Ingredients to Interdisciplinary Success

by Admin on 10/29/10 at 10:31 am

Skilled leaders, open-minded participants, and an on-going emphasis on seeking synergies
Back in the 1970s, Stanford professor Myra Strober wanted to understand how
elementary school teaching became an occupation dominated by women. Trouble
was, the young economists in her interdisciplinary research group focused on
statistical data from the 19th century, while the historians favored anecdotal
evidence from teacher diaries. Neither faction thought much of the other’s
approach to the topic – and said so.
Since that time, Strober notes, American universities have worked hard to
encourage more interdisciplinary endeavors, ranging from simple brown bag
seminars to multi-million dollar research centers. Stanford alone has launched

three major cross-disciplinary initiatives, on human health, the environment and international relations, in the past decade.
Yet getting scholars from very different academic traditions to work together productively – or even civilly – remains a
challenge.
As she writes in her new book, Interdisciplinary Conversations: Challenging Habits of Thought (Stanford University Press,
2010), “Most discussions about barriers to interdisciplinarity are about funding, the academic reward system, and the
difficulties of evaluating research from multiple disciplines. This book is about different barriers that are rarely recognized
let alone discussed: disciplinary habits of mind, disciplinary cultures, and interpersonal dynamics.”
Strober explains that when experts have been trained in a discipline over a long period of time, they become acculturated
to that discipline and have difficulty accepting and understanding different approaches to
knowledge. “All faculty everywhere are captives of their disciplinary cultures and habits,” she
adds. While these walls “permit focus and access to deep knowledge, (they) constrain
interactions with colleagues from other fields.”
Strober does not stop with defining barriers. “My book lays out a clear vision of how to
realize the creative potential of interdisciplinary conversations to solve complex problems
that do not respect disciplinary boundaries,” she explained in a recent interview. Like others
in the field, she believes that interdisciplinary work can increase the pace at which knowledge
is created. “Designing humane rules for containing health care costs requires input not only
from physicians and economists but also from ethicists,” she writes. “Creating peaceful
relationships with countries across the world requires insight not only from historians and
political scientists but also from agronomists and anthropologists.”

Still, she writes, “Talking to colleagues across disciplines is not for the faint of heart . . . Unless participants are open-minded
and dialogues well structured, the conversations can be boring, confusing, unpleasant or downright hurtful.”
An expert on women’s labor issues, Strober says her own interdisciplinary experiences have been mostly positive. As the
founding director of Stanford University’s Center for Research on Women (now the Clayman Institute for Gender Research)
in the mid 1970s, she promoted fruitful lunchtime exchanges and joint research projects among a variety of scholars with a
common interest: the nascent field of women’s studies.
The idea for her new book dates back to the late 1990s, when she took a leave of absence from her job as a Stanford
professor of education, and professor by courtesy in the Graduate School of Business, to serve as higher education program
officer for The Atlantic Philanthropies.
“We made some grants to see if we could foster interdisciplinary conversations at several universities,” she recalls in an
interview at her campus home, “and when I came back to Stanford, people still were emailing and telling me about the
seminars we had funded. The more that developed, the more I realized that this was a really interesting natural experiment
because all the seminars went in different directions.”
Aided by the Ford Foundation, Strober interviewed faculty who had participated in six year-long interdisciplinary colloquia
at three major research universities. Organizers had hoped that the programs would inspire new team-taught courses and
joint research proposals. But in fact, Strober writes, “Without a strong expectation on the part of seminar leaders that new
courses and research were to come out of the conversations, and without a seminar structure that worked toward
achieving these goals, faculty behaved like magpies. They collected numerous shiny bits for their own nests, but never put
them into larger structures.”
Professor Strober’s book is a timely and very welcome Several of the seminars were hampered by weak leadership. Another
addition to the literature about interdisciplinary work in common stumbling block was the way the interdisciplinary groups
the academy. As someone who has been working for
were composed. In one seminar organized by humanists, for example,
the last six years on fostering interdisciplinary
“Barry” the mathematician was a loner who never made comments or
endeavors at Stanford, I am sincerely grateful that
Professor Strober has been willing to hand over to the asked questions. When he did give a presentation, it was a highly
rest of us the wisdom she has gained from her specialized talk that completely lost the others in the group, including a
experiences. There is no doubt that her book will make dramatist and a studio artist.
a big difference in how university administrators and
More successful was a seminar put together jointly by a literary scholar
faculty can facilitate more effective interdisciplinary
dialogue and problem-solving. and a chemist. Its clearly stated purpose: to examine the connections
- Roberta Katz, Associate Vice President for Strategic between sciences and the humanities. “They chose scientists who
Planning at Stanford University really wanted to help non-scientists understand science, and they
chose humanities people who wanted to understand science,” Strober recalls. “It’s important how you compose the group,
and it’s important to have a strong leader who builds trust and believes that interpersonal interactions are important.”
On an institutional level, Strober suggests that universities make more of an effort to reward scholars who are willing to
step out of their disciplinary comfort zones – particularly young faculty on the road to tenure. She’d also like to see more
follow-up funding, to encourage team-teaching and ensure that joint research proposals continue to grow after the initial
meetings have ended. As she writes, “It’s is unrealistic to think that In her book, Myra Strober shows us how to take
new interdisciplinary courses and research projects can be launched interdisciplinary conversations to the next level so that we
after only 20 or so conversations.” move from conversations to interdisciplinary research
projects and courses that cross disciplinary boundaries.
Despite the challenges, Strober is optimistic about the potential of Interdisciplinary conversations are important, but without
interdisciplinary studies in American higher education. The way she structures and resources to support on-going
sees it, universities ought to diversify their teaching and research collaborations, the broad impact of interdisciplinary
portfolios, just as individuals should invest in both stocks and bonds. research will not be realized. We are fortunate at the
“Investing in research within a single field may be thought of as Clayman Institute to have such structures in place and this
is due in part to Myra’s directorship in the early days of
comparable to investing in bonds,” she explains. “It is a relatively safe
the Institute, where she brought scholars together and
investment, but with possibly less potential for solving the major fostered the kind of dialogue that continues to define the
problems of society.” Investing in interdisciplinary research is riskier, Clayman Institute.
requiring a large initial investment that may not bear fruit. But on the - Shelley Correll, Associate Professor of Sociology and
other hand, she says, “The payoff might be spectacular.” Director of the Clayman Institute for Gender Research

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