From Jerry A. Jacobs, The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Recently we’ve heard a lot of talk about interdisciplinarity, along with claims that traditional academic departments are limiting the ability of the modern university to meet the world’s most daunting intellectual challenges. Will the disciplines soon be seen as anachronisms, holdovers from an outdated 20th-century model? In my view, efforts to reorganize academe based on interdisciplinary principles would have disastrous consequences in the short term—and would end up reproducing our disciplinary or departmental structure in the long term.

While calls for stronger interdisciplinary ties have a long history, in recent years the movement has had a strong wind behind its sails. The National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health have set aside funds for interdisciplinary research, and leading research institutions have undertaken sweeping efforts. For example, in late 2007, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor announced plans to hire 100 faculty members over five years “in areas that advance interdisciplinary teaching and research.” A national survey of faculty members in American colleges, conducted before the current economic crisis by the sociologist Neil Gross, of the University of British Columbia, and colleagues, reveals that interdisciplinarity as a concept is broadly popular with faculty members as well.

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