UCDT -- White Paper: Exploring the Milieu for Interdisciplinarity

The postsecondary industry is a major contributor to knowledge in our society. It has been charged with the responsibility to create and to disseminate knowledge for the ultimate benefit of human civilization. The primary responsibility for this task has been placed in the hands of faculty in distinct disciplinary communities. Since the mid- 19^th century colleges and universities have protected and nurtured these communities, and the benefits to society have been been substantial. In the past 150 years, we have seen an unprecedented expansion of knowledge and technological achievements. Although much can be said of the achievements of disciplinary communities, the practical application of knowledge often requires the integration of disciplinary knowledge.

The problems and issues that plague our society require solutions which exceed the abilities of individual disciplines. For example, societal problems in the areas of welfare reform, economic development, genetic engineering, environmental protection, and alcohol and drug abuse require the collaboration of disciplinary experts and policy makers. Critics have argued that societal problems are becoming increasingly complex and the ability of disciplinary communities to offer solutions is less than adequate (Epton et al, 1983; Chubin, et al, 1986; Klein & Doty, 1994; Davis, 1995). The academy needs to do a better job of stimulating dialog between disciplinarians, creating and sustaining new interdisciplinary fields, and teaching students to integrate various conceptual frameworks to generate new applications of knowledge.

The purpose of this paper was to identify the organizational issues which affect interdisciplinary activity at institutions of higher education. In this paper I have focused on the issues related to interdisciplinary team teaching because it offers the greatest challenges to the traditional academic structure. I reviewed the literature to identify salient structures and processes which appear to nurture or inhibit interdisciplinary research or teaching. The main question that motivates my study is: How does the organizational structure shape faculty participation in interdisciplinary activity?

The Disciplines

The central question of how human knowledge should be organized has been asked since the beginning of history. Scholars over the ages have created and implemented numerous frameworks to logically organize recorded knowledge. An antecedent to the modern framework for organizing knowledge can be found in ancient Greece and Rome in the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic) and quadrivium (arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy). In the modern era, both disciplines and professional fields have been implemented and maintained to create, organize, disseminate, and value knowledge. The discipline provides norms, epistemology, ontology, pedagogy, content, syntactical structure, a specialized language, and forums to facilitate education, indoctrination, enculturation, and certification. In general, both the production of knowledge (research) and the dissemination of knowledge (teaching) are arranged by the disciplines and professional fields.

With the advent of the German university model in the late 19^th century, and the dissemination of this model throughout the world, both instruction and research became highly specialized. Davis (1995) argued that the atomization of knowledge and the substantive expansion of scholarship lead to the empowerment of the faculty and their disciplines. Davis never explores this paradox-- knowledge became both narrow and broad simultaneously. The expansion of knowledge and technology really took off when the disciplines became more distinctive. Within these disciplines, numerous branches formed, but each branch tended to strengthen the discipline rather then destroy it.

Now, as in the past, each discipline has a set of paradigms that shapes the questions which are asked, the methods of inquiry, and styles of communication. These characteristics help differentiate the disciplines and preserve professions. The processes that keep a discipline intact are bounded by the local environment of the academic department or program. Like cell membranes, the academic departments are designed to separate the internal and the external environment. From the external environment originate resources and prestige, and from the internal environment come local norms, traditions, policies and procedures. Both the external and internal environment are vital for academic departments to survive. Academic departments must maintain their institutional role as primary custodians of the disciplines, nevertheless, in order to remain vibrant, they must be receptive to ideas that transcend the disciplines.

The disciplines have evolved, but not enough to suffice the needs of society. As knowledge has expanded, disciplinary norms have focused more attention on the esoteric topics of research. In many cases the disciplines have ignored issues which can not be neatly classified into a particular disciplinary field. They have also missed some opportunities to integrate knowledge to form a more comprehensive depiction of reality. This inability to see the big picture and solve societal problems has provided the impetus for critics to call for improvements in pedagogy to help students to think "out of the box."

Societal issues require citizens and leaders that can synthesis information from a variety of sources and generate solutions which can suffice diverse constituents. Instead of preparing citizens for these complex problems, the academy has become self-serving. Describing academia, Robert Scott (1979) had this to say, "Its external connections with the society that sustains it have been allowed to atrophy by a self-indulgence that has increasingly made the production of knowledge esoteric rather than relevant to the very real problems besetting society (p. 319)." Some believe that interdisciplinary work can be used to rein in the overspecialization of disciplinary work and exploit new knowledge generating opportunities.

What is Interdisciplinary Work?

There is a substantial amount of variation in how scholars define interdisciplinary work.

Essentially, interdisciplinarity is the combination of two or more disciplines in the context of faculty teaching and research. The degree to which faculty integrate the disciplines defines the intensity of the effort. Davis (1995) defines interdisciplinary as "the work scholars do together in two or more disciplines, subdisciplines, or professions, by bringing together and to some extent synthesizing their perspectives (p. 5). " Lattuca (1996) created a typology of interdisciplinary scholarship "based on the kinds of teaching issues and research questions that motivated faculty members' scholarly work (p. 114)." This typology included informed disciplinarity, synthetic interdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity, and conceptual interdisciplinarity. Figure 1 summarizes the interdisciplinary types in the context of instruction. Lattuca found that this typology allowed her to classify the types of scholarly work she encountered.

Lattuca's (1996) typology illustrates that interdisciplinarity can be conducted by one or more faculty members. Most of the informants, who participated in Lattuca's research, indicated that they taught interdisciplinary courses alone. Although no research exist about the dominant interdisciplinary teaching format (lone faculty vs. teams), I believe a large proportion of interdisciplinary teaching is conducted by individual faculty. Academic programs such as

TABLE 1

TYPES OF INTERDISCIPLINARY SCHOLARSHIP (Lattuca, 1996, p.114-115)

environmental studies, women's studies, cultural studies, public policy, public health, and the humanities routinely incorporate interdisciplinary concepts. The faculty involved in these courses must constitute a sizable percentage of the interdisciplinary effort.

For the purposes of this paper, I focus attention on interdisciplinary teams. I have made this choice because the academy has had the most difficulty absorbing this scholarly activity into

its enterprise. Faculty who are interested in working in teams encounter a significant number of potential impediments. These impediments will be identified and explored later in the paper, but before discussing the impediments, it is important that we understand the issues and dynamics germane to interdisciplinarity and team teaching.

The Dynamics of Interdisciplinary Teaching

According to Davis (1995), the interdisciplinary course typically starts out with an idea that generates in the minds of one or two people. These individuals begin a dialog with others, through this process support, elaboration, and constructive criticism emerge. The core group recruit other faculty that may be able to contribute to the course. Newell (1994) describes the faculty who are most likely to be recruited to participate: "open to diverse ways of thinking, wary of absolutism, able to admit that they do not know; good at listening, unconventional, flexible, willing to take risks, self-reflective, and comfortably with ambiguity ( p. 37)."

When faculty come together, they are initially concerned with coverage of some body of knowledge which students ought to know. The greater the number of faculty members the more complex the "coverage" issue becomes. Rather than start with the need to cover the discipline, true interdisciplinary courses are not arranged around a particular discipline or set of disciplines. Interdisciplinary courses are "normally focused on a topic, although the term topic should be construed broadly as meaning an issue, theme, problem, region, time period, institution, figure, work, or idea (Newell, 1994, p. 38)." The framework of the interdisciplinary team teaching course emerges after lengthy discussions and negotiations with the team leaders. The creation of the framework is a novel and anxiety producing experience for most faculty. Faculty are custom to working alone within the frameworks provided by the discipline, but interdisciplinary courses often do not have this luxury.

In the ideal interdisciplinary course, the conflicts that emerge during the discussions are incorporated into the course. Students are introduced to disciplinary boundaries and fault lines which nurture or inhibit the creation and dissemination of knowledge. Faculty have resolved these disciplinary obstacles, and what emerges is fertile territories which require new maps. The conceptual maps are charted by faculty to help students integrate their learning.

In summary, Davis (1995) says this about the ideal interdisciplinary team-taught course, "the subject grows out of the idea; it is invented by the faculty who participate in the course, it is more than the sum of the disciplinary parts, and it is presented to the students, as nearly as possible, as an integrated whole (p.52)." Learning outcomes are the tools which give the interdisciplinary framework its shape. The learning outcomes provide definition for the framework by articulating what students should know and do. The framework can be used as the impetus for both pedagogy and learning. Due to its nature, learning outcomes tend to be more complex for interdisciplinary courses.

When planning an interdisciplinary course, it is important to understand the scope, depth, and sequence of the curriculum. In the disciplinary world a priori models exist to help faculty define the curriculum, but in the interdisciplinary world models may not exist, so faculty must start from scratch. The boundaries that define the interdisciplinary curriculum are negotiated through dialog among team-members. The definition of curricular boundaries may generate numerous in-depth discussions among team-members. In an ideal interdisciplinary course faculty create rules to define the curriculum. Of all the elements in the curriculum to be identified, Davis (1995) argued that deciding who will do what is critically important.

Decisions about the organizational structure of an interdisciplinary course are complex compared to disciplinary courses. The complexity of the structure increases when students and faculty, stationed in different departments and colleges, are brought together to participate in the curriculum. Interdisciplinarians must coordinate with administrators to decide what campus units will receive the student credit hours, what departments will release faculty to teach the course, which department's graduate student instructors will be hired, where will the course be taught, and what department will pay for the cost of creating and distributing instructional material. In an age where campus units and their deans are evaluated in terms of their ability to produce revenue, interdisciplinarians must create cogent reasons for using campus resources to support a collaborative venture.

Once the interdisciplinary team-taught course proposal is developed, the team must get approval from the college curriculum committees. The college curriculum committees are mindful of which courses are academic concentrations, electives, and distribution requirements. The proposed course must make a contribution to the graduation requirements, so the team must fit the course into the overall curriculum. If a college or department has a similar program, the interdisciplinary proposal may be seen as a competitor with the local program. The perception that the interdisciplinary program may steal students away from the local program may impact curriculum committee program approval.

The Ideal Interdisciplinary Team Taught Course

Davis (1995) defines team teaching as "all arrangements that involve two or more faculty in some level of collaboration in the planning or delivery of a course (p. 8)." He argued that the goal of team teaching is to integrate interdisciplinary perspectives. Faculty integrate interdisciplinary perspectives through the process of collaboration. According to Davis, the ideal team taught course is defined by excellence in collaboration in the context of planning, content integration, teaching, and meta-evaluation of the testing and the evaluation plan.

In the ideal interdisciplinary team taught course, the team members engage in democratic decision-making, and the project goals are a product of the collective interest of the faculty. The content is integrated so that the multiple disciplinary perspectives are packaged into a cogent curricular product. Teaching is performed so the constellation of main professors, visiting instructors, graduate student instructors, and instructional tools are orchestrated to produce outstanding pedagogical music. And the teaching and evaluation component of the curriculum reflect the salient educational values of the team.

Now that I have introduced the process by which interdisciplinary teams create and implement a curriculum, I will examine it in greater detail to identify impediments which make it difficult to conduct interdisciplinary work. In addition, I will suggest institutional arrangements which may make it easier for faculty to participate in interdisciplinary activities.

Impediments to Interdisciplinary Work

Hurst (1992), in his dissertation research, studied the relationship between academic reward structures and cross-departmental research. An important objective of his research was to inform the discussion about alternative organizational structures which would nurture collaborative cross-disciplinary research in environmental studies. Hurst worked in collaboration with the Taskforce on Environmental Studies at the University of Michigan to investigate the current state of teaching and research as well as alternative organization structures to support teaching and research in environmental studies. Hurst conducted a survey of faculty involved in environmental studies at the University of Michigan and interviewed faculty and administrators involved in interdisciplinary research and teaching at Michigan and other universities.

Emerging from Hurst's (1992) review of the literature, a picture of interdisciplinarity teaching and research becomes discernible. Interdisciplinary programs face hostile forces which limit their effectiveness and long-term viability. Limiting factors include disciplinary communities, disciplinary journals, academic departments, effective rubrics for evaluation, learning curves, and financial constraints.

In a research university the academic departments are the primary agents for executing the institutional mission. Saxberg (1986) argued that, "The whole university reward system-- merit, advancement, and tenure --rests within the departmental structure (p. 195)." Academic departments are often autonomous, loosely coupled units which are designed to minimize "communication costs" and to subsidize the "academic norms of professionalism (Hurst, 1992, p. 13)." Academic departments and their allied disciplinary communities exert tremendous pressure on faculty to conform to disciplinary norms. Disciplinary cultures exert powerful social and psychological pressures which shape the epistemology and ontology of faculty. These cultures, by in large, determine the questions that will be investigated and the methods which will be employed. For many faculty, the disciplinary culture provides the conceptual framework from which reality is interpreted. Frameworks that emerge from different circumstances are typically dismissed.

Academic departments typically provide the basis for reward and resource allocation. Funds are disbursed to academic departments to encourage the creation, dissemination, and conservation of well defined forms of knowledge. The boundaries between academic departments are well understood and respected by faculty and administrators. Faculty who venture outside of their academic departments may be seen as siphoning off important resources in pursue of endeavors which have minimal impact on the prestige of the academic department.

Lattuca (1996) also examined the role of the academic department in the process of conducting a qualitative study of interdisciplinarity. Like Hurst (1992) she found numerous studies which pointed to academic structures, policies, and practices which favored disciplinary activities over interdisciplinary activities. But unlike Hurst, Lattuca claimed that literature may be dated or "the attitudes of faculty and administrators have not kept up with these changes [the emergence of many interdisciplinary programs such as cultural studies, women's studies, etc.] (p. 42)."

Lattuca (1996) found the departmental structure was cited as a major impediment to interdisciplinary teaching and research. Although Lattuca acknowledges that the department can be an agent in discouraging faculty from participating in interdisciplinary activities, she remains, nevertheless, optimistic. I found this position only marginally supported by the data Lattuca presented and the literature which she summarized. Lattuca makes a fundamental flaw when she generalizes throughout her dissertation about the condition of interdisciplinarity based on the data she collected from her small sample. I have the impression Lattuca was reaching beyond her data without full understanding that her sampling techniques were creating outcomes. The informants Lattuca interviewed were drawn from a wide spectrum of faculty. Nevertheless, they were all interdisciplinarians who managed to carve out of the disciplinary hegemony interdisciplinary niches from which to teach or conduct research. The perspectives of the faculty who manage to function in this rarified niche are going to be naturally more optimistic when compared to those who did not succeed. Lattuca admits this point, but only sparingly (p. 240).

Lattuca (1996) reported her informants with joint appointments were not always equally appreciated by the departments to which they were affiliated. The local conditions within the departments dictated the receptivity of the interdisciplinarians scholarship. Nevertheless, departments that are populated with faculty who actively integrated theories from multiple disciplines were naturally more accommodating

Tenure and Promotion

The environment for interdisciplinary scholarship is defined to a substantive extent on the .

articulation and enforcement of tenure and promotion decisions. If perceptions of disciplinary excellence drive the sense-making and criteria-making process within a department, the niche for interdisciplinary activities will be narrowly defined. Once faculty have achieved tenure, they may have substantively more freedom to conduct interdisciplinary scholarship. Lattuca says this,

Many informants shared the opinion that junior faculty should concentrate on disciplinary research and teaching before tenure; only after tenure was it "safe," as one informant put it, to make interdisciplinary research and teaching a major scholarly focus. Informants believed that the rules changed once tenure was achieved; only then, they argued, were faculty free to pursue interdisciplinary scholarly work (p.211).

Nevertheless, the receipt of tenure was no guarantee things were going to be smooth sailing.

During the promotion process, many of the informants posited that it was important to package one's scholarship to conform to disciplinary expectations. The informants attempt to compensate for disciplinary expectations by providing written documentation which addressed the anticipated concerns of their disciplinary evaluators.

Some of the informants indicated that although their departments verbally expressed support of interdisciplinary work, the home departments did not really appreciate their work. There appears to be a lag time between the intellectual or conceptual commitment to interdisciplinarity and the adjustment of evaluation and territorial consciousness necessary to support interdisciplinary activity. Budget allocations also lagged behind departmental intentions to support a particular course.

Learning Curve Hurdles

Academic disciplines are often associated with specific jargon and research methodologies. These symbolic and epistemological hurdles make it difficult for faculty to nurture important interdisciplinary relationships. Interdisciplinarians must invest time and effort to build relationships and research programs. These start up cost tend to be much higher when compared to cost associated with disciplinary research.

Both Hurst (1992) and Lattuca (1996) found that the scarcest resource for an interdisciplinarian is time. The long time lines often associated with interdisciplinary scholarship tax the ability of faculty to teach and conduct research.

Disciplinary Communities

Hurst (1992) reported that disciplinary communities exerts reputational control through departmental reward structures. The disciplinary community--through its disciplinary organizations, conferences, and journals--control the levers of professional reputation and career advancement. Conference presentations and publication of research in peer-reviewed journals are widely accepted modes to certify scholarly excellence. Within the postsecondary institution these metrics are used to disburse promotions and resources. Institutional reputation or prestige is a function of the degree to which faculty can maintain produce using these measures of scholarship.

Scholarly journals are often the means of assessing the worth of a faculty member. Journals that have disciplinary focus bestow the greatest prestige on the professors who publish under their auspices. Venues for publishing interdisciplinary research are fewer and are sometimes seen as purveyors of less than serious science. In academia reputations are a function of publications in disciplinary journals and the blessings of the academic disciplinary community.

Faculty prestige and access to resources are closely related. Faculty who conduct research typically bring significant grants and other resources to their academic departments. Academic search committees often hire faculty who have significant scholarship and revenue generating potential (Finnegan & Gamson, 1996). The majority of funding for research tends to be disbursed to investigators who are pursuing disciplinary centered research projects.

Hurst (1992) reached the following interpretations about factors which affect support for cross-departmental, collaborative research:

1. The research agenda of academic departments in universities are strongly influenced by the corresponding national (or international) disciplinary communities.

2. Disciplinary communities norms favor research that is theoretical and mon-disciplinary.

3. Disciplinary norms are embodied in the reward structures of academic departments primarily through the awarding of tenure and salary increases.

4. The influence of disciplinary norms on departmental research agenda is stronger in graduate that professional school settings and has more influence on physical than social scientists and on researchers whose research interests are more basic than applied.

5. External research support continues to favor basic, disciplinary research (p.19-20).

Financial Restraints

Lattuca (1996) explored the competition and allocation of departmental resources in the context of interdisciplinarity. When departmental budgets are tight, which is often the case, competition for resources becomes intense and thus individual faculty become very concern with how funds are allocated. When faculty leave their home department to teach an interdisciplinary course, the department has to reallocate its resources to cover courses. Participation in interdisciplinary activity can be seen as burdening one's colleagues with "covering" for them in their absence. To avoid this situation, some faculty teach the interdisciplinary course as an overload. Ideally, an interdisciplinary program, with its own budget, pays the home department for the cost of the faculty member who will teach an interdisciplinary course. Unfortunately, interdisciplinary program administrators may have to "beg" the departments for people and resources just to keep going (Lattuca, 1996).

Competition Among Academic Departments

At large research universities academic units tend to be loosely coupled to each other financially and intellectually. Financial management systems, such as Responsibility Center Budgeting (RCB), encourage academic units to engage in revenue maximizing behavior to optimize student FTE and research revenues. Each unit is expected to be as self-supporting as possible. The notion of "each tub on its own bottom" is the prevailing style of central management.

Binkman & Morgan (1997) said this,

RCB is a system whereby all or part of the tuition reflected in enrollments, along with sponsored research and other revenues, is returned to units in proportion to what the unit "earns." In theory, the units controls its own pricing policy and is responsible for all, or nearly all its cost (Berg, 1985). Surpluses and deficits are the responsibility of the unit. Additionally, in most RCB systems, the central administration of an institution oversees a taxing or subvention system where some activities such as libraries, judged to be valued but outside of proper market forces, are subsided. Other central services, such as computing or printing, often operate on a charge-back system and must compete with outside vendors (p. 295).

This financial system discourages cross unit collaboration at the grassroots level. Individual faculty in different academic units wishing to collaborate must be conscious of the financial impact on their home unit. Sharing student FTE between units may mean trimming revenues which might otherwise contribute to the bottom line for the home unit. To counteract the financial disincentives to participate in interdisciplinarity, funds acquired through a subvention system may be distributed to interdisciplinary programs.

Central administration, in order to sustain some level of interdisciplinarity, may use the subvention system to provide important seed money to help fledgling programs. Nevertheless, the interdisciplinarians have a short window of opportunity to become rooted into the academic infrastructure. The new interdisciplinary program must acquire a stable financial and human capital. Because seed money will soon be exhausted, the interdisciplinarians must financially attach themselves to a department or external funder as well as acquire new professors who are willing and able to participate.

RCB system assigns decision-making about efficiency and effectiveness of programs to the program level. At this level it may be difficulty for deans and program coordinators to understand and to appreciate the contribution an interdisciplinary program makes to the institution as a whole. Even traditional courses, such those that fall under general education, have been cannibalized by professional schools seeking to maximize financial returns. Some professional schools administer general education programs for their students. Thus, they endrun the traditional offerings of liberal arts colleges within their own institution. Given this competitive environment, it may be difficult for interdisciplinary programs to emerge.

Organizational Learning Disabilities

Senge (1990) wrote The Fifth Discipline with primarily the business organization in mind. Nevertheless, his ideas about learning organizations have be used in a variety of settings, including postsecondary institutions. Senge claimed that the effective learning organization relies on five learning disciplines: (1) system thinking-- a conceptual framework and tools for creating a dynamic view of interrelated systems; (2) personal mastery-- clarifying personal vision to experience reality more objectively; (3) mental models-- articulating generalizations for how things work; (4) building shared vision-- using vision to encourage worker commitment; and (5) team learning-- recognizing and using dialog and metacognition to manage the group process.

The five learning disciplines must occur thorough out an organization in order to be effective. At the departmental level, faculty and administrators must have a system-wide understanding of how an interdisciplinary initiative will affect its relationship with the collaborating departments and central administration. This understanding will develop only after they have articulated an adequate mental model of how research and teaching are facilitated and rewarded within their department and the collaborating departments. Members of the interdisciplinary team must understand their role and be capable sharing their personal and group vision.

Senge (1990) argued that the inability of organizations to articulate and to employ mental models limits their collective ability to learn. He says this, "If we cannot express our assumptions explicitly in ways that others can understand and build upon, there can be no larger process of testing those assumptions and building knowledge (p. xix)." In the context of interdisciplinarity, it is essential that the institution "learn" from the experiences of faculty who are conducting interdisciplinary teaching and research.

Senge (1990) recognized that learning occurs in the minds of individuals, so any scheme to promote learning must begin with the individual. In postsecondary settings, faculty, administrators, and students must be the recipient of interdisciplinary learning. Learning how to implement and sustain interdisciplinary research and teaching should start with the faculty. As they learning individually and collectively, the knowledge they construct should be use to leverage greater productivity and institutional prestige.

For Senge (1990), the "learning" in learning organization has a special meaning. He uses the word "metanoia" to describe an epiphany experience which creates a fundamental shift in thinking. So learning goes beyond imbuing information, it requires the individual and their organizations to be both adaptive and generative. Fundamentally, organizations must adapt to their environment in order to survive, but they can not stop there. In order to prosper members in the organization must believe that they are creating something worthwhile. Energy and enthusiasm emanates from workers when they sense collectively pride in the creation of something valuable.

Senge (1990) claims that most organizations suffer from "learning disabilities." These learn disabilities stymie the ability of organizations to service the needs of their clients and leverage their strengths. Senge has identified seven learning disabilities: (1) people tend only to focus only their position with little concern for other functions within the organizations; (2) when things go wrong people tend to find scapegoats; (3) managers attempt to be proactive without a comprehensive understanding of the problem; (4) people tend to focus on events (a primordial response) rather than the longer-term patterns of change that lie behind the events; (5) sense-making mechanisms are not calibrated for the primary threats that organizations face-- subtle changes in the competitive environment which have threatening consequences over time; (6) although people best learn from their experiences, they intent not to directly experience the consequences of many of their important decisions; and (7) management teams may appear to function cohesively but this may mask deep divisions which affect team performance.

These learning disabilities are probably at work in most postsecondary organizations. Here are some examples of learning disabilities which affect higher education: (1) because of the financial and competitive environment within most universities, academic departments tend to focus on leveraging their own position. This parochial interest of the academic departments makes collaboration counter-intuitive; (2) the paltry environment for interdisciplinary becomes an institutional issue rather than a departmental issue; (3) the consequences of the reward system are never clearly articulated in terms of its affects on interdisciplinarity; (4) and institutional committees or initiatives created to study and manage interdisciplinary are not equipped handle systemic issues.

Learning disabilities block the ability of postsecondary institutions to recognize patterns of behavior and systemic structure issues which may be at the root of the problem. When evaluating the climate for interdisciplinary it is easy to assign responsibility to people or reward structures, but the real issues involve the interplay between faculty, administrators, committees, reward structures, policies, procedures and disciplinary trends. Interdisciplinarians are part of the system, thus they are both subject to and participants of the system. For the system to become more receptive to interdisciplinary scholarship generative learning must occur throughout the processes. Generative learning requires the participants to articulate the system structure and repurpose it so the number of winner can be enlarged. In the end, all the participants must be convinced that they will come out ahead if they collaborate.

Senge (1990) argued that his disciplines are not effective as models, and indeed, they "will not create the learning organization but rather a new wave of experimentation and advancement (p. 11)." If interdisciplinarity is to take root it will require experimentation on many different levels throughout the institution.

Faculty must struggle to find the most productive and insightful constellation of disciplinary concepts and analytical frameworks to conduct interdisciplinary teaching and research. Academic managers must struggle to find and to support the interdisciplinary investments which will create the greatest leverage for their academic programs. New management philosophies and financial models must be erected to institutionalize support for interdisciplinary scholarship. Both faculty and administrators must be prepared to adjust the institutional mission, culture, policies, and procedures to maintain an appropriate level of interdisciplinary activity.

Local System Problems

The problems interdisciplinarians have getting support for their work is primarily a local problem (Lattuca, 1996). The local promotion and tenure committee, the dean, and the provost collectively create systems which shape the climate for interdisciplinarity. Sometimes these messages are clearly articulated, more often they are a cacophony of conflicting criteria. The prevailing mood is that interdisciplinary work requires considerable resources, and the resultant scholarship may be of insufficient quality. The problem will interdisciplinary scholarship lay with the system rather than the individual.

As interdisciplinarians begin to understand their potential collective leverage, they can use this influence to create new academic markets and reward structures. Interdisciplinary scholarship will never replace entrenched disciplinary interest, so their only hope is to expand the market. Interdisciplinarians must grow the market by creating their own professional organizations, journals, conferences, courses, and funding sources. In short, interdisciplinarians must learn to use the playbook the disciplinarians have used successful during the past 150 years. From within the system, interdisciplinarians must institutionalize their research and teaching programs to secure adequate and sustained levels of financial support.

Structural Options

Hurst (1992) argued that there are two main organizational alternatives available to academia to encourage cross-disciplinary research: 1) allow cross-disciplinary research to function as an ad hoc component "within the existing disciplinary department structure (decentralized approach) or (2) create specialized research units by topic (e.g., Organized Research Units) to gather together researchers and facilitate their work (p.29, parenthetical items are the reviewer's additions) ." ORUs typically engage in cross-disciplinary projects, they may vary from free standing, self supporting campus units to ad hoc entities devoted to a single purpose. For example, the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan is an ORU which may employ social scientist, policy experts, mental health professionals and statisticians to study domestic abuse or violence in the workplace. ORUs allow institutions of higher education centralize research programs which may cut across department activity.

Hurst (1992) offered us a limited view of the organizational structures that support cross-disciplinary work. Although cooperative research between faculty in different colleges may be rare, it is possible. If the funding sources are available and academic administrators have a strategic interest, new configurations are possible. For example, the Space Physics Research Lab at the University of Michigan combines engineering, atmospheric science, and biological science to produce remote sensing equipment to study Earth systems. The faculty and researchers affiliated with this lab typically hold joint appointments in traditional departments. Thus, cross disciplinary research is supported by both the traditional academic unit and the specialized research unit.

The cooperative arrangement between ORUs and traditional academic departments allows both organizations to leverage their resources. For example, academic departments may not be able to afford a full compliment of full-time faculty. By sharing the cost of supporting faculty with the ORU the academic department can reduce its cost, and thus get greater bang for the buck.

Another arrangement that encourages interdisciplinary activity is allowing faculty to have joint appointments within different departments. For example, in the School of Public Policy faculty have joint appointments. Indeed, the faculty receive the bulk of their salary and tenure in other colleges. This arrangement enhances the leverage of participating departments, and it generates interdisciplinary scholarship.

Improving the Climate for Interdisciplinarity

Faculty are affected by the institutional context, but it tends not to be their primary motivator. Faculty tend to be self-motivated by internal standards of performance. Institutional policies which will have the most impact will naturally resonant with faculty needs. At research universities, faculty need to do research that most interest them and teach courses which have greatest research synergy. Institutions can spur interdisciplinary activity by lower the risk of participation, recognizing unit and faculty efforts, and honing interdisciplinary skills and attitudes. All of these initiative must be accomplished within the context of faculty autonomy.

Institutions can encourage interdisciplinary research and teaching by enabling faculty to have greater flexible in setting their research agenda and by helping faculty hone the skills they need to be accomplished interdisciplinarians. Lattuca observed that institutional leaders have a number of strategies which could be used. She says this,

Course development funds or release time ease the burden of creating interdisciplinary courses and programs. Funds for travel to interdisciplinary workshops and conferences allow faculty to meet with individuals who are knowledgeable about their subject matter, perhaps even with pedagogical strategies for presenting interdisciplinary material. Sponsorship for interdisciplinary teaching forums, where faculty can discuss concerns, strategies, and problems associated with interdisciplinary teaching can also be a sign of administrative support.

It is not uncommon for interdisciplinary programs to disintegrate shortly after the visionary faculty deplete their energies or decide to move on to other projects. To maximize the investment in interdisciplinary programs, institutions must act to preserve program memory, learning, and culture. But how does an institution work to preserve a program culture? Culture is composed of the norms, behaviors, traditions, and sense-making algorithm of a group. Culture may exist independent of external validation, but such validation can precipitate expansion of a culture's influence and popularity. The actions and rhetoric of university and college administrators can validate interdisciplinary programming. University and college administrators can communicate their support for interdisciplinary programs by providing seed money, shepherding promising proposals through curriculum committees, financially supporting graduate assistants, and providing release time to key curriculum developers (e.g., the planning team).

Institutions may encourage interdisciplinary activity by facilitating discussion among disciplinarians in the context of a promising theme or issue. The university could create panels, which might be locally televised, to discuss issues such as global warming, welfare reform, democracy, and multiculturalism. These panels would bring together expert from a variety of fields to analyze and posit solutions to society's most vexing problems. Through these conversations and presentation faculty from a variety of disciplinary areas could lay the foundation for interdisciplinary research and teaching.

Team Building

If institutions are interested in increasing the level of interdisciplinary activity it is important that they improve the ability of teams to function within the institutions. Teams are at the heart of disciplinary work. Teams are groups that are organized to accomplish a specific set of goals and objectives. To accomplish goals and objective, the team must coordinate and collaborate over time.

Institutions can encourage team building by providing incentives for faculty to participate in teams which are devoted to the development of an interdisciplinary curriculum. The planning team, the nucleus of the group, deserves extra support from their departments. Because developing a course can be time consuming, faculty in planning groups should be recognized and rewarded.

Graduate Education

The vast majority of the graduate programs in the United States prepare disciplinary specialist. Davis (1995) argued,

Graduate programs control their product [graduate students], and for nearly one hundred years the product has been a disciplinary specialist with highly developed research skills, unhampered by any formal knowledge of teaching, students, or the institutions where graduates will work. . . [graduate students] become strongly socialized to the cultures of their specialities through a process that make them especially dysfunctional for interdisciplinary team teaching (p. 147).

These are strong words, but like strong coffee, it is designed to remove any illusion that change will happen from the bottom up.

If the academy is ready for systemic change, signs of this change will be evident in the job market followed by changes in graduate schools programs. As the number of interdisciplinary general education programs increase, institutions of higher education may create a market for graduates of interdisciplinary programs if they begin selecting new faculty with this training. Graduate programs may respond to this demand by creating and strengthening interdisciplinary academic programs, however, I think this scenario is my wishful thinking. The condition of the market for graduates with interdisciplinary training is not unlike it was 11 years ago when Saberg et al (1986) wrote

It is uncertain that the academic market is ready to employ a graduate of an interdisciplinary program. Rather, the preference might well exist for a discipline specialist who has an appreciation for interdisciplinary work. Several university officials indicated that interdisciplinary research and affiliation may make the students subject to the suspicion of shallowness of research and less than solid competence in the fields involved.

Using Technology to Reduce the Start-Up Cost

At the nucleus of interdisciplinary teaching and research is the actual communication between scholars of different disciplines. Presently, the investment that faculty have to make to keep abreast of developments in other fields and design and implement collaborative research and teaching projects is substantial. Reading journals, meeting with colleagues, attending seminars and conferences, writing proposals, and developing syllabi and teaching interdisciplinary courses all require huge investments of a faculty member's scarcest resource, time. It stands to reason that if the cost of engaging in these activities decline, faculty will be more inclined to look for opportunities in this area. Difficulties communicating with colleagues, and conducting research and teaching over long distances may be deduced through by using innovative computer technology.

New technologies have the potential to decrease the high cost of collaborative research and teaching. The Internet, intranets, and Java Chat Box have made it possible for scholars, separated by geographic distance, to dialog, teach, and conduct research. Data exchange, computer processing, and teleconferencing allow scholars to collaborate on various teaching and research assignments.

Fiber optic networks carrying distance learning programs can support teaming teaching arrangements. Professors of different disciplines who want to collaborate now have the opportunity to do so even if they are teaching at different institutions. Scholars can also use these networks to communicate with industry scientist, government workers, military personnel, and grade school teachers to conduct research or teach students.

The Coming Tsunami

Davis (1995) catalogs a large number of exemplary interdisciplinary courses which are taught throughout North America. Davis posits that this collection of courses may be part of a larger intellectual movement which have created new forms of knowledge, understanding, and inquiry. These new knowledge domains are using unique constellations to voyage through the seas of human understanding and experience. Old methods are being reconfigured to guide new lines of inquiry. The affects of such interdisciplinary concepts as postmodernist and deconstructionism the disciplines may foreshadow the future of interdisciplinarity.

Davis (1995) reported that the disciplines gained their elevated statue through institutional organizational structure, professional associations, and graduate education. The prosperity of interdisciplinarity will depend, in great measure, on the same triad employed by the disciplines. The ideal interdisciplinary course has dependable outside support or it is embedded in the academic structure.

Professional Organization

In recent times several professional organizations have sprung up to support interdisciplinary scholarship. These organizations (e.g. Association for Integrative Studies and the National Association for Core Curriculum) support the dissemination of research and teaching methods through conferences and journals. If these organizations continue to turn out high quality scholarship and scholars the reputation of the interdisciplinary will grow.

Conclusion

The organization structures of traditional postsecondary institutions are primed for supporting disciplinary and professional academic programs. These programs carry the lion's share of the burden of preserving, creating, and disseminating knowledge for human civilization. In the past, the disciplines have created tremendous advances in science and technology. In spite of these benefits, critics have called attention to the cost of rigid disciplinary structures.

The most vexing problems in our society do not come in neat packages, instead they are thorny complex issues which require solutions derived from a variety of disciplines. Interdisciplinarians have created teaching and research programs that focus on themes, issues, time periods, and conditions which bridge the disciplinarian gaps. The diversity and scope of these interdisciplinary programs vary significantly, nevertheless, they have in common higher education structures which must be overcome to implement and to sustain interdisciplinary activities. In this paper I have explored the literature to understand the dynamics of interdisciplinary activity and the organizational issues which affect it.

The literature is replete with descriptions of many impediments which make it difficult to for interdisciplinary programs to grow and to function. Interdisciplinarians have difficulty securing institutional resources, obtaining venues for publication, communicating with colleagues, being evaluated by disciplinary standards, and learning juxtaposed disciplines-based concepts. Although disciplinary communities have significant influence on how knowledge is created, the primary issues for interdisciplinarian are local. Institutions of higher education suffer from "learning disabilities" which limit their capability to properly leverage their interdisciplinary positions. These problems are significant, but they may be solvable if interdisciplinarians can expand the market for scholarship.

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