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Disciplinary Innovation in the Humanities
The following text presents a version of ideas developed jointly by the Townsend Center at Berkeley along with the Franke Institute at Chicago, the Center for the Humanities at Columbia, and the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities at Cambridge. The directors of the respective centers met in New York in late Fall 2006 to articulate some of the challenges facing research universities as they try to implement disciplinary change in the humanities and related fields.
We began by recognizing that almost all major research universities of the 21st century are struggling institutionally to deal with the important disciplinary innovations in the humanities. Examples of changes in all disciplines are legion, yet the basic departmental structure of most American universities (and many elsewhere) remains the same as it was over a century ago.
Intellectual developments in the humanities and social sciences have been accommodated, but mainly within the construct of “interdisciplinarity” — a term that has been with us at least since the 1930s. Many of the new fields that have come to be known as “studies” have been cultivated over the past several decades by means of interdisciplinary initiatives: institutes, centers, programs, workshops, and the like. These initiatives have been vital to sustaining a range of work that might otherwise have lacked support. Yet many emerging fields — such as Cinema and Media Studies and Science Studies — seem to reach across academic territories far larger than the term “interdisciplinary” can accommodate.The ongoing proliferation of interdisciplinary units creates an an instability between interdisciplinary studies and old institutional forms such as the humanities. Some administrators regard the effects of interdisciplinary proliferation as a nightmare, both institutionally and intellectually. Many find themselves at a loss to bring order to it. The faculty whose cross-cutting and innovative research puts them most in demand can in turn find themselves reporting to a dizzying number of campus addresses. And there is certainly an increased administrative “overhead” that has come with these ad hoc arrangements. On the other hand, we have calls for disciplinary retrenchment. Yet it seems extremely unlikely that the range and depth of the work that has demanded all the new initiatives over these past decades can simply be recontained within the traditional disciplinary structure, that all this work can be housed in the old silos.
Recomposing disciplinary structure necessarily raises searching questions about the very notion of “discipline” that is presupposed in our sometimes routinized discourse on interdisciplinarity. On the one hand, more attention to system-wide transformation might yield a more productive kind of institutional model than the one that insists on fixed disciplines and prolific interstices. But if one were to change the picture in this way, how might we remodel our institutional and administrative structures accordingly?
A promising initial step into this uncharted territory is being made in the formation of a Consortium for Disciplinary Innovation. The Consortium, a four-year pilot project endorsed by the Mellon Foundation, is a specific response to the foundation’s challenge to humanities centers and institutes to find new ways to connect with the core mission of the respective university constituents. Along with Berkeley (of which the Townsend Center is the representative), the University of Chicago, Columbia University, and Cambridge University are known for their intense intellectual vitality, and for a willingness to reflect on the structures and procedures of academic knowledge production.
The Berkeley Project on Course Threading
Pending final approvals, the Berkeley project will focus on disciplinary innovation in undergraduate curriculum, by way of a new program tracing thematic Course Threads that wind through multiple disciplines. The basic premise of the Berkeley project is that disciplinary change emerges from a process of critical reflection on what current institutional structures hold in place and what they exclude. Disciplinary innovation springs from the possibility of asking new questions, some of which are raised by changes in the world around us (for example, developments in technology) and others of which rise to visibility as familiar materials are brought into new configurations. Because of our open and progressive intellectual orientation, we at Berkeley have long been at the cutting edge of disciplinary change at the graduate level. Berkeley has been home to a number of innovative graduate programs in departments (for example, Rhetoric) that have played a key role in re-defining the landscape of the humanities nation-wide. Other programs in new and emerging fields (for example, New Media, Performance Studies, Humanities and Human Rights) have successfully moved from the incubator stage to a place where they can test and prove their long-term institutional viability. A number of these efforts at the graduate level have been supported by the Mellon Foundation’s grant for Mellon Strategic Groups.
While recognizing that disciplinary innovation at the graduate level has a magnifier effect and must continue, we also believe that undergraduate programs need to be incorporated into any overarching plan to deal with disciplinary change. Indeed, disciplinary transformation is unlikely to succeed if it does not address the structure of undergraduate education. Our challenge is to develop institutionally and intellectually viable ways to reflect the disciplinary shifts in the humanities while also exposing undergraduates to a less fragmented experience of “the humanities” than is currently possible.
The stakes in such an effort are large. For those students who go directly from their college studies into careers or to professional schools, undergraduate courses are likely to be the only formal exposure to “the humanities” they will ever have. Undergraduates, even students who major in one of the humanities disciplines, often have little sense of how each of the several humanities might contribute in different ways to the object of knowledge, much less the capacity to link the humanities with neighboring disciplines in the social sciences. As for the gap between the humanities and the sciences, far too many students still experience a version of what C.P. Snow called the “two cultures.”
In brief, the Course Threads project represents an effort to re-imagine the architecture of relationships among courses currently located in separate departments. At present, that architecture is arranged by blocks and tiers: the blocks are the departments, and the tiers are the various levels of courses (lower division, upper division, and special courses for majors in their junior and senior years.) Outside the major, students tend to choose courses on a somewhat random basis; they aim to meet the university’s breadth requirements and to maximize convenience while still satisfying their own intellectual curiosity. All this can be difficult to achieve and offers no assurance either that the result will be coherent or that it will reflect the more exciting developments in the humanities. The Threads concept points to an alternative architecture that can be developed by recognizing and drawing out the web-like connections among adjacent courses — connections that are often obscured by the departmental structure — and by encouraging faculty to teach the questions and issues that are occluded by the present compartmentalized framework.
While consciously evoking the metaphors of network and web that have been used to describe new information technologies, the Threads represent a flexible structure, designed to ensure that their revitalizing, interrogative function will be ongoing and renewable. While there is no doubt considerable value to the “major department” and “random sample” model of a liberal arts education, we believe the Threads option will contribute substantially to an understanding of the value of an innovative, multidisciplinary humanities curriculum for those majoring in the humanities as well as for those who may come to the humanities from majors in other fields. Indeed, certain “threads” — whether representing both emergent areas of inquiry in the humanities such as the “new media,” or traditional concepts such as “beauty” — would be specifically designed to introduce students outside of the humanities (including in engineering, the biosciences, and mathematics) to the potential relevance of humanities scholarship to their own fields of study.
The Course Threads model is thus designed to capture the strengths of the venerable “core curriculum” approach without repeating the weaknesses of that structure. Our further aim is to avoid forming invidious distinctions between centers and peripheries or unstable divisions between “established” and “new” areas of inquiry. Whereas the notion of a “core” can impede innovation, the Threads are designed with sufficient flexibility to sustain intellectual excitement and interest among the faculty over the long-term. This is also why each of the Threads needs to be supported by a faculty seminar or workshop, especially in its formative stage. By placing faculty teaching courses within a given Thread into direct contact with one another, the disciplinary orientation of teaching — and the research that underpins it — will be subject to challenge and open to questioning from intellectual perspectives that are not discipline-specific in the ways that departmental allegiances encourage. Similarly, placing faculty in an intellectual setting where conversations about the Threads are possible is likely to cultivate certain kinds of innovative teaching efforts that would not be possible otherwise. And faculty in dialogue can begin to address the level of cross-referencing and coordination desirable among the teaching they do within the Threads. Thus, without creating shadow departments or instituting additional “programs,” the Threads will afford undergraduates and students the chance to explore the possibilities for disciplinary innovation; they will invigorate intellectual exchange across disciplinary boundaries; and they will bring the benefits of innovations at the research level into the curriculum.
The larger point behind the Berkeley project is that new methods of inquiry and new opportunities to change the way in which courses are taught can be opened up by identifying and cultivating the adjacencies and linkages that are hidden by the departmental structure. Our ambition is to have the Course Threads grow to become an integral feature of a Berkeley undergraduate education, though as an elective opportunity rather than another requirement for graduation. Pursuing a Thread, students would build loose affiliations with students from other departments and disciplines with similar interests, while faculty teaching Thread courses would offer research opportunities and academic advising to students “certified” as following a given thread and completing a certain number of courses (possibly three courses) in it. Together, the faculty and students in each Course Thread would constitute something like a virtual college house.
The first phases of implementation of this project will begin in academic year 2007-2008. Those interested in participating can look for updates in the Townsend Center newsletter and website, and may also contact Director, Professor Anthony J. Cascardi or Program Director, Professor Celeste Langan, for further information.