In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

* Disciplines and Interdisciplinarity * Wilson Smith Thomas Bender context The teaching activities of colleges and universities are organized in departments based on disciplines driven by and guided by research agendas. The way disciplines manage intellectual production and reward excellence is thus central not only to the content but also to the administration of universities. Local teaching responsibilities are significantly shaped by the directions taken by the disciplines, which are oriented to global research communities rather than the college curriculum. Work in the various academic units depends upon the stability of the disciplines, but too much disciplinary stability can stifle the vitality of academic culture. By the 1920s the management of universities had taken a more or less standard form, organized into schools or divisions and disciplinary departments, and beyond the local institution the disciplines were formed into national and even international professional organizations. This arrangement has remained in place ever since. Despite considerable organizational persistence, the content of the disciplines has been repeatedly transformed over the decades. Change was driven by the inherent volatility of research agendas marked by shifting scholarly interests, whether the result of developments intrinsic to disciplinary practice or of public concerns urged upon academe. At play, too, were the tensions of disciplinary paradigms (policing mechanisms) and movement into new domains or modes of inquiry. And still another issue came to bear upon this complex balance as well. To the degree that the reward structure of the disciplines honors those who push knowledge forward within a discipline, there was always the question of whether the most advanced disciplinary thinking addressed the varied challenges of our common life on this planet, which typically extended beyond the scope of any single discipline. In order to grapple with the life of a cell, for example, to say nothing of a whole organism, the life sciences turned to interdisciplinary methods, whether by linking established disciplines, as in biochemistry, or by bringing in methods of analysis developed in other disciplines, such as computational sciences. Similar issues emerged in the social sciences and humanities (12). Foundations have repeatedly urged such interdisciplinary work, using the argument that both natural phenomena and social life sometimes demand a more holistic approach than can be captured in a single discipline (VIII, 11). After World War II, however, with the notable exception of the foundation-supported move toward an interdisciplinary behavioral science and area studies, the social science and humanities tended to move in a different direction, seeking disciplinary autonomy, favoring rigor over reach (3, 5; VIII, 12). Social and academic turmoil of the 1970s produced a double movement in academe: some scholars, mostly in the harder social sciences and philosophy, withdrew from public discourse and moved into highly technical work, while many in the humanities reached out to fill the vacuum, incorporating concern with a variety of social problems into humanistic research and teaching (4). The language and concepts central to nearly all considerations of the disciplines from the 1960s onward were largely drawn from one small book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, published in 1962 by Thomas Kuhn (1). His historicist understanding of science was taken to legitimate the historical disciplines (or humanities) more generally. He also described the discipline as a community of peers, thus indicating that the maintenance of a disciplinary “paradigm,” the basis for truth-making and validation in “normal” science, was at least in part a social process, which undermined the more extravagant claims of disciplinary autonomy and objectivity. Other more radical scholars, taking his ideas in directions he would not have taken, drew on his work to argue a strong position on the social construction of knowledge. Given the centrality of Kuhn’s work across the disciplines, challenges to his framing of the process of scientific innovation and the validation of knowledge had important implications for discussions of academic knowledge as a whole (2). The Cold War need for greater knowledge of other parts of the world and pressing domestic social issues prompted the development of interdisciplinary, problem-focused academic structures. The earliest of these in the 1940s were Army area studies programs that brought selected soldiers and teachers together on the basis of a wartime need to know about the language and culture of a particular enemy region. Their aim was not disciplinary affiliation, yet these bounded areas too often became another form of intellectual enclosure (12). Later, the several movements associated with the “rights revolution” of the 1960s and 1970s pressed universities to establish interdisciplinary centers that would address issues...

Share