On Academic Dissent: Which Way to the Debate?

On Academic Dissent: Which Way to the Debate? Revisiting liberal humanism in the context of corporatism as a capitalist phenomenon , and individualism in an (albeit failed) social democratic one, in The Unconscious Civilization John Ralston Saul argues that "there is no need for universities to turn out 21-year-old specialists equipped with no memory oftheircivilization 's experience, no ethical context, no sense ofthe larger shape oftheir society ."' In the last issue of this journal Ian Angus, revisiting the debate between left nationalists and advocates of post-modem theory, concluded that "we must craft a space for continuing debate that unites us as much by our disagreements as by our disunity.''2 In Canada as in the United States, commentators on the perceived dangers ofan illiberal education are legion. Often their legitimate objections to the formation of narrow specialists are miscast as either a condemnation (on the right) of an supposedly exclusive and coercive preoccupation with political correctness - class, race and gender- or (on the left) a condemnation ofpost-structuralist theory for undermining coherence and engagement. If universities are to avoid producing a talented and committed generation faced with the limited options of careers as technocrats or hot airballoonists, we might do well to revisit an ongoing debate about the relationship of disciplinary to interdisciplinary knowledge and teaching, foregrounded in but not restricted to Canadian Studies programs and publications . Jill Vickers is one of a few Canadian scholars in the social sciences actively engaged in the debate. In her 1992 working paper "Where is the Discipline in Interdisciplinarity?" she argued that "the rise of the contemporary disciplines is inextricably linked with the growth ofbureaucracy both inside and outside the university "; as such, traditional disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, despite their ongoing usefulness, can display characteristics of "self-maintenance, inertia and a rule-orientation rather than a goal-orientation."3 Revisiting these issues in a second working paperentitled ''In an Open Field, Un/Framed: Teaching and the Practice oflnterdisciplinarity," Vickers addresses the recent multiplication oftransdisciplinary paradigms and canons (foundational ideas) and the challenges these represent. She concludes with the need to develop "strong logical, historical , comparative, epistemological and cross-cultural skills" for mediating different kinds of evidentiary protocols given the "anti-discipline" approach of many influenced by the new knowledge areas ofwomen's studies and Native studies, for example.• Given that thisjournal publishes both traditional scholarship and what Vickers and others refer to as "the new knowledge," I would like, at the risk of oversimplification , to comment briefly on definitions in Vickers's initial working paper. A discipline, we are told, emphasizes a particular content and method in the sense of both rigour and territoriality, reliability and a limited number of questions that Journal ofCanadian Studies Vol. 31, No. 2 (Ete 1996 Summer) 3 can usefully be asked. Multidisciplinarity, in the sense of team research, is simply an aggregate ofdiscrete disciplinary perspectives that complement each other but remain distinct in their acknowledged authority. Interdisciplinarity, according to Vickers, offers two subtly different models of cross-fertilization. The strict or limited version ofinterdisciplinarity (functional bilingualism is her analogy) masters and wields but does not weld together two disciplines that can better address a particular problem together rather than alone. The so-called "general or loose" approach to interdisciplinarity (passive bilingualism), for its part, addresses a given theme or problem by welding as well as wielding two disciplines; ideally, its incursions, borrowings and integration are "respectable and respectful," passing the test of publishability in the journal of the "other" discipline. Presumably such passive bilingualism is not to be confused with full fluency, which I view as self-conscious (theoretically grounded) in its approach to empirical research. On occasion it reconciles the needfor social engagement with the exigencies ofa postmodern /postcolonial discourse. In my opinion such genuinely transdisciplinary work does not, for all that, need to be cast in impenetrably dense prose addressed to an exclusive audience, although it can and indeed should make demands on the reader as participant in.re/constructing meaning. If Canadian Studies (at least in this journal) makes room for all of the above, occasionally traditional scholarship, while solid and respectable, fails the admittedly subjective "so what" test...