Remaking College: Innovation and the Liberal Arts

6. Breaking Barriers and Building Bridges in Teaching

Chapter 6 Breaking Barriers and Building Bridges in Teaching David W. Oxtoby President, Pomona College Interdisciplinary research, bringing together contributors from a range of fields to collaborate on broad problems or bringing a novel perspective to a traditional subject, is the hallmark of scholarship in the twenty-first century. A future breakthrough in molecular biology may rely on advanced techniques in statistics or computer science, while an analysis of political movements in China may be shaped by an understanding of the history of religious minorities in that country. The era in which advances in knowledge could be simply classified by traditional academic disciplines has passed. But why has interdisciplinary work had so much less impact overall on how we teach and learn? How can our colleges encourage the crossing of boundaries by our faculty and students, preparing our graduates for a world in which solutions to important problems require ideas from multiple sources? Answering these questions is critical for the future of liberal education in our institutions. Structural and Cultural Impediments to Interdisciplinary Innovation I spent the first twenty-six years of my career at a research university (University of Chicago) and have been, for the last nine years, at a liberal arts college (Pomona College). My experience in the research university world showed me the importance placed on interdisciplinary work in research and in graduate teaching. There was a flexibility that led to the formation of new research centers every year which brought together faculty members from a range of academic departments, almost always in response to external funding from grant agencies and foundations. New graduate programs were regularly created at Chicago in the form of degreegranting “committees” that gathered faculty members from across the university. 78 Knowledge, Learning, and New Technologies Of course, traditional departments persisted, but there was an openness to a variety of groupings both intellectually and in the allotment of space to faculty members and their research programs. In coming to a smaller college, I expected such cross-departmental connections to become even easier. Given the smaller scale and the ease for faculty members to make connections across the entire institution, I thought surely barriers to starting and maintaining interdisciplinary experiments would be lowered. Instead , I was surprised to find that if anything the opposite was true. While some of what I say relates specifically to Pomona College, my contacts with faculty elsewhere suggests that most liberal arts colleges fall short of the ideal of those flexible interdisciplinary habits of mind that we seek, at least in principle, to convey to our students. Why is this? First, the smaller scale of our colleges can actually reduce flexibility . If a single central person in a new interdisciplinary field is away on sabbatical, the entire program may suffer or be put on hold. While it is common at a large university for one or more members of a department to have space in another building , it is almost a matter of principle that everyone from a department should be housed together at a small institution. Second, with this fixed, smaller number of faculty, it is simply harder to sustain a level of interdisciplinary work because the same individuals are doing it all. One faculty member in our politics department, for example, also plays critical roles in three interdisciplinary concentrations: public policy; environmental analysis; and science, technology, and society. Third, the disciplines often can be bound up in the local politics of fighting for and retaining faculty positions, which can be threatened if new faculty members are brought in who cross disciplinary boundaries and can contribute to core teaching in more than one area. One small college I know has separate departments of Spanish, French, and Italian. But the principal reason for this lack of interdisciplinary effort at many liberal arts colleges is that most faculty members become more traditional in mindset as they move from research to advanced teaching to core teaching. While novelty in research is rewarded, there are few incentives to change the way we teach; departmental curricula are agreed on collectively, and change can threaten that consensus . It is easier to move from the blackboard to PowerPoint (adapting to new technology) than to change the fundamental content of a course over time. There are, of course, some noteworthy exceptions to this lack of interdisciplinary teaching at the institutional level (St. John’s College stands out here) and at the level of Breaking...