Written with Mary Hanneman
University departments – disciplinary ones in particular – have lately become targets of criticism, with some scholars claiming that “academic departments create more barriers than benefit.” Departments are said to divide people, curb innovative thinking and research, lead to over-specialization, and encourage rote coursework. Disciplines, some argue, “tend to focus only on a set of trees within a great forest,” and fail to integrate the range of skills students need for tackling real world problems. One IHE op-ed called departments “disciplinary trenches [that] hold us back.” Meanwhile, a movement for the creation of interdisciplinary departments grows.
As long-standing faculty members of a very large and non-departmentalized interdisciplinary school, a model many might be tempted to emulate, we question the functionality and benefit of large and wide-ranging academic units. In practice, these face a number of challenges that, in our experience, make them fall short of their mission.
At the root of the issues we discuss here is the failure to recognize and properly address the fact, as articulated by Robert Groves, that “disciplines ironically are engines of interdisciplinary activities.” The problems we describe below are largely the failure to recognize and properly address this reality, which is further reflected in the fact that universities are not designed to support interdisciplinarity. When a single institution tries to break away from disciplinary departments and their supposed disciplinary “trenches,” the result may be an even greater proliferation of trenches — only at the individual level.
As background, our non-departmentalized interdisciplinary unit, the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences (SIAS) at the University of Washington Tacoma, originated in 1990 when the University of Washington opened two “branch” campuses in the Puget Sound region. In Tacoma, a city south of Seattle, thirteen faculty members representing a gamut of the liberal arts launched the effort. The new creation offered one interdisciplinary major, called Liberal Studies.
In the intervening decades, the Liberal Studies program (as it was named), added the sciences and changed its name to Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences (IAS, subsequently SIAS), all while the campus itself grew to include six professionally-oriented academic units. Over the decades, SIAS has added majors, minors, a masters program, and certificates. Today it has approximately 140 full time faculty, offers 18 interdisciplinary majors and 24 minors, graduates over 600 students annually, and manages a $20 million budget. Still the core of the university, SIAS offers over half of the university’s undergraduate degrees and educates one-third of its students.
Amidst all this change and growth, two things have remained constant in SIAS: its valorization of interdisciplinarity, and its non-departmentalized structure.
Yet in our experience, instead of offering creative learning opportunities, reducing institutional barriers, and fostering innovative research, our School’s interdisciplinary ethos and large non departmentalized structure has harmed our university’s ability to educate students, failed to encourage faculty productivity and engagement, and impeded the ability of the university to effectively support the School. And while our School promises to foster interdisciplinarity, we believe our non-departmentalized structure in fact harms this very value it is said to promote.
Students
A university’s central mission is to foster the creation and transmission of knowledge. We know that a key element to achieving this mission is student engagement in university life. A robust literature finds that more bureaucracy and reduced personal interaction compromise student engagement and retention.
SIAS students pursue 18 different programs of study, come from diverse backgrounds and face a wide variety of personal challenges. Yet they all belong to a single, centralized, non-departmentalized academic unit, with no chair or dedicated staff to bridge the gap between faculty and administrators. This presents huge challenges in responding to students as individuals. By necessity our School addresses the wide diversity of student issues with increasing bureaucracy and impersonal treatment, as doing otherwise would impossibly tax the capacity of the Dean’s office. Flexible, informed responses to student concerns are replaced with a reliance on forms, rules and an auto-generated message promising a reply within “48 business hours.” Faculty administrators often find themselves in conversations with students they do not know, tackling curricular concerns they are unfamiliar with, or having appointments with faculty they have never met. When authority over curricular, academic, and student issues moves further and further away from the on-the-ground classroom and faculty-student experience, the decision-making process becomes less responsive to those realities. Communication slows down, messages are mixed, and complex student issues are endlessly kicked around.
Many currently tout the importance of moving to a more problem-based curriculum. In our School, creating such opportunities requires negotiating with an over-burdened central administrative structure which by necessity focuses on “one-size-fits-all” solutions. Creating professional internship opportunities, or innovative courses with out-of-the-ordinary features, like unusual credit hours, is likely to meet with resistance, or at best a lengthy period of negotiation followed by a cumbersome contract intended to ensure that faculty teaching loads do not deviate from expectations. While many of these problems are related to size, any academic unit that brings together diverse scholars will tend to be large and complicated.
In SIAS, our interdisciplinarity ethos can also hinder the development of academic identity, something that research shows helps build students’ resilience. For instance, we try to model interdisciplinarity through our physical setting, and faculty teaching in a student’s area of study are usually not co-located. Instead, a gender studies faculty might be located next to someone teaching writing classes, while down the hall a math instructor might be neighbor to a political scientist. Consequently, when a student visits a professor, they are not likely to run into another of their professors, much less other students in their classes. Hallways and common spaces are not designed to strengthen a student’s academic identity and community, nor help them understand and pursue career prospects or graduate programs. Since few students identify with our School’s interdisciplinary ethos, our physical structure adds to their sense of “homelessness,” and does too little to enhance their inclusion in our academic community.
Faculty
In SIAS, the duties, responsibilities and authority of a department reside in the School and its entire faculty. The university’s Faculty Code prohibits most of these responsibilities from being delegated to faculty committees. Faculty thus collectively decide on curriculum and academic programs, and provide recommendations to campus leaders for faculty hires based on the “full and discriminating considerations” essential for effective appointments. We vote on all of the School’s faculty contract renewals, as well as all promotion cases. Moreover, each year faculty review their colleagues to “evaluate their merit and arrive at a recommendation for an appropriate merit salary increase.” This year, each full professor in our School reviewed over 140 files to vote on their pay increases.
A faculty study of this workload recently estimated that collectively, fulfilling our proper role in personnel decisions would entail over 13,000 hours of faculty labor annually, or an average of over 100 hours/year/faculty member.
In addition to the problem of size and workload is the fact that the Code requires faculty to vote on hiring, tenure and promotion decisions for everyone in the academic unit. For us this means voting on colleagues in fields in which we have literally no background. It may sound interesting for a historian to vote on tenure for a chemist – the historian might learn a great deal about chemistry in reviewing the file. But does a historian actually want (or have the time, much less the capacity) to learn enough about chemistry to cast a meaningful ballot?
In short, faculty in our non-departmentalized interdisciplinary school either make what are by their very nature uninformed votes on crucial matters, raising ethical concerns, or we simply defer to the “experts” (i.e. the tenure/promotion committee members), in contravention of our School’s aspirations as well as the legal expectations of our duties under the Faculty Code.
This voting regime also leaves junior faculty unsure of how to pursue and explain their career trajectories; most of those voting on promotions will have no background in their colleagues’ field. How will those voting understand the promotion file, and what criteria will they use when they vote? Indeed, wide differences across the various groups within our School leaves much room for uncertainty over how to assess a candidate’s scholarship. This leads to the frequent necessity of discussing each discipline’s norms: the importance of books versus articles, the meaning of first authorship, the role of grants, and so on. And if we use interdisciplinary rather than disciplinary standards, is it right to mentor junior faculty toward meeting standards and expectations that may not hold up outside of our own institution?
Perhaps our large interdisciplinary unit could foster creative and innovative research collaboration. Certainly that is the hope and expectation. Yet it has never been our experience that sitting together in one room (real or virtual) for gigantic faculty meetings has resulted in faculty deciding to work together on interdisciplinary projects. If anything, the burdensome workload has resulted in faculty disengagement – with so much time devoted to reviewing files, hiring and voting, one common faculty response is to disengage from the School community, giving way to individual “trenches.”
Collaboration is much more likely where faculty members feel greater ability to participate meaningfully in university life and exercise greater agency. Moreover, regardless of department size or its interdisciplinarity, a faculty’s intellectual community and potential collaborators are frequently, if not usually, outside of their individual university.
Institution
Considering our School and its relationship to the university, one advantage is clear: Since academic units require administrative support, and exist as administrative units for budgetary purposes, our large unit results in some cost savings. Indeed, the current trend in higher education to consolidate academic units into larger departments and schools is largely driven by austerity budgeting. In our case, the additional cost to the university of creating and supporting a departmentalized structure within our School is an important reason for the persistence of our current predicament, as the university depends on the large cross subsidies we generate. This of course is a common role that the liberal arts play in higher education’s financial landscape.
Yet there are obvious costs to the university’s mission, beyond those already discussed, that are directly traceable to our School’s breadth of mission and size.
Because of the span and complexity of issues the Dean and her staff confront, many important issues in our School must remain unaddressed. Inevitably, curricular innovation and hiring needs that would be a high priority in a smaller School fall behind more immediately pressing issues. Routine faculty matters, such as medical leaves and visa arrangements, don’t get the attention needed to avoid mistakes and delays. Such instances are understandable given the impossible demands our non-departmentalized school places on the Dean: she must be both a Dean and the department chair to over 140 faculty members. As chair, she must weigh in on all personnel decisions, and regularly review each faculty member. As Dean, she must fundraise, engage and energize an advisory board, and establish a presence and create opportunities in the local community – all while advocating for the School at the campus level. Since the other six Deans on campus have on average half the number of students, sponsor only a handful of degrees that share disciplinary coherence, and oversee a small fraction of SIAS’s faculty numbers, all coming from similar academic disciplines, they can more easily establish their School’s priorities and advocate for them. By contrast, our School’s wide-ranging and complex agenda always leaves room for serious unaddressed issues.
Conclusion
While large, interdisciplinary departments may hold some allure – some argue they should be the future of higher education – our decades of experience with a particular one should give the academy pause, as the larger context of higher education is not designed to support their success.
Creating truly interdisciplinary academic units, in our opinion, requires dedicated work by faculty coupled with financial support by the institution. Without this, student alienation, faculty disengagement and administrative inefficiencies will result. As voting decisions fall prey to the collective action problem that undermines good citizenship, individual trenches rather than a vibrant community may arise.
Institutions of higher education are of course highly variable and complicated. We do not believe that any particular internal organizational structure is always optimal. But in our experience, without extensive changes to higher education’s landscape, intellectually cohesive departments play the key role of knitting together the diverse roles played by faculty, students and administrators. They also help create the sense of community central to the success of any institution.
To those interested in analyzing the possible benefits of large interdisciplinary academic units, we offer this cautionary tale from the interdisciplinary trenches.
Katie Baird is a Professor of Economics and Mary Hanneman is a Professor of Modern East Asian History. Both are at the University of Washington Tacoma.
Contact us at: Katie Baird (kebaird@uw.edu) and Mary Hanneman (hanneman@uw.edu)