Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 15, No. 169.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
Date: Wed, 08 Aug 2001 07:23:50 +0100
From: "Norman D. Hinton" <hinton@springnet1.com>
Subject: Re: 15.168 disciplinarity
> I have come to believe that the only
> interdisciplinarity that is valid is the kind that develops when people
> engaged in real problems find that they need to go outside their
> disciplines and either learn about or consult/interact with people in other
> fields. Interdisciplinarity that is invented and/or imposed by
> administrators and grant agencies tends to reflect fashions and is often
> quite cynically political, although of course there will always be people
> who jump on the bandwagon and generate a flurry of activity
>
Now this I completely agree with -- I joined a new University in its
second year, and the president and Vice Pres. for academic Affairs told
us that the entire faculty *would* be "multi-disciplinary" -- one of
that year's buzzwords. OF course, nothing came of this except a
horrible number of committee meetings and task forces, at the end of
which (2 whole years later), things stayed about the same.
In recent years the same things have happened with "assessment" and with
"diversity", except that some meaningless rules were put in place and a
lot of paper shuffling resulted.
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