The New Generation of American Scholars

The quest for new kinds of knowledge tests disciplinary and departmental boundaries. To foster this pursuit, institutions need to rethink traditional ideas about faculty identity and support

By Cristina González, Debbie A. Nemeier, and Alexandra Navrotsky

In the past, most senior scholars saw themselves mainly as citizens of their departments and viewed other departments as separate countries with foreign languages and cultures. Indeed, letters of promotion praising faculty members for being excellent departmental citizens often exemplified and reinforced this view. Although senior scholars interacted with the rest of the university through senate committees and the like, their core intellectual and social relationships revolved around their own department and its counterparts at other institutions. This vertical structure was well suited for discovery of new disciplinary knowledge and was favored by granting agencies, which, for the most part, sponsored research in the traditional disciplines and organized their programs accordingly.

New Approach

Of course, not all senior scholars limited their activities to discovery of new knowledge in the traditional disciplines. Since the Manhattan Project, the early 1940s U.S. program aimed at developing an atomic bomb, interdisciplinary approaches have been used in industry and academia, but particularly in federal initiatives, such as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's lunar program. In the last few decades, many senior scholars have engaged in interdisciplinary work involving the integration of existing knowledge, or the creation of new knowledge, at the interface among the disciplines. As the web of scholars interested in interdisciplinary approaches to specific problems grew, such senior researchers established horizontal linkages with faculty in other departments and institutions.

In "At the Crossings: Making the Case for New Interdisciplinary Programs," an article published in the May-June 1990 issue of Change, Margaret A. Miller and Anne-Marie McCartan chronicled the growth of interdisciplinary programs to that point and described the obstacles facing such programs, including funding and organizational challenges. Although the number of interdisciplinary programs has continued to grow, little progress has been made in overcoming these hurdles during the last decade. It is against this backdrop that the new generation of scholars, with the support of their mentors, is coming to the fore.

While the new scholars were busy building their tenure and promotion dossiers, their uniqueness was not evident, except in the anecdotal ways mentioned above. Their institutional impact was limited mostly to their students. Their views, although often considered interesting and treated with respect by senior faculty, did not prevail. Members of the previous generation controlled the academic discourse and the financial resources of the university, whose basic structure remained unchanged. Additional interdisciplinary programs, centers, and institutes were created, but they barely created a ripple in the overall discipline-based orientation of the university. Sometimes, these interdisciplinary efforts simply distracted from more fundamental institutional changes that were needed.

Now, however, as the new generation of scholars comes of age, its impact on the university is beginning to be felt. When these scholars, who are now tenured and in their mid-forties, assume leadership positions in their departments, join senate committees, or are appointed to task forces on long-term planning, their views stand out from those of their older colleagues. Still interested in the problems that occupied their youth, such as the environment, health, and education, these new academics concern themselves with major societal issues, about which they often feel passionately. Their voices are beginning to be heard and joined by a chorus of other voices, including, first and foremost, those of the pioneering senior scholars who were their forerunners.

A New Academic Map

The new faculty are young enough to have been influenced by the interdisciplinary programs created by members of the previous generation. They also are sufficiently young to have been affected by new information technologies. Their thinking is multilayered, and they have high expectations. They do not want to limit their activities to traditionally delimited spheres of interactions. Rather, they prefer to operate within a network involving a home department and college, other departments and colleges, and interdisciplinary programs, centers, institutes, and other contacts within, and outside of, their home institutions. These are not physics professors talking to physics professors and English professors talking to English professors. They are physics and English professors communicating with professors of biology, sociology, engineering, and medicine about broad topics that cut across disciplinary lines.

These scholars tend to monitor major disciplinary advances in other fields as a way of identifying new tools of discovery to bring into their own fields, and many spend time in laboratories with a disciplinary thrust other than their own. For example, soil scientists today rapidly deploy new methods of DNA analysis in their attempts to identify the origin of dust particles, while geologists use the newest models of population dynamics to understand the impact of humans on watersheds. This approach differs from the recent past, when specialization was at its peak and peer-reviewed journals were the primary means of circulating information on discipline-based scientific breakthroughs and pioneering procedures. Today, a myriad of e-mail and Web-based associations connect faculty, and information moves quickly.

The new mobility of information means that scholars have immediate access to discipline-based expertise. At the same time, scholarly issues are becoming more complex, and many of the greatest intellectual challenges are at the intersections among the disciplines. To meet those challenges, scholars must be proficient in more than one area of study. The new scholars are multilingual and multicultural: they speak the languages, and understand the cultures, of other disciplines, and they want to move freely among them.

Recently, some in the academy have suggested making the borders separating departments and interdisciplinary programs, centers, and institutes more porous or even, perhaps, eliminating them altogether. The new generation of scholars, however, has little interest in blurring these boundaries. They know that boundaries always exist and that they change over time. They believe that disciplinary training is important. Yet they want a system that allows them to traverse disciplinary boundaries comfortably and at no cost to their academic careers or the well-being of their home departments. They want a new map for the academic landscape and a passport to travel.

Structural Problems

Many faculty members hired in the late 1980s and early 1990s have sailed successfully through the tenure and promotion process and now are heavily recruited by institutions throughout the country. The current group of assistant professors, or the postdoctoral fellows and graduate students who will soon join the junior faculty ranks, will probably not have problems with the tenure and promotion process, either. Yet many express frustration at the structural configuration of the university. These scholars want a new resource model to support their academic activities and those of the assistant professors, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students who share their interests.

In "The Academic Department: How Does It Fit into the University Reform Agenda?" published in the September-October 1999 issue of Change, Richard Edwards writes that, as presently configured, the university is not well suited to support the new scholars' academic activities. Faculty members are housed in departments, which, in turn, are located in colleges. Funding flows from the provost to the deans and from the deans to the department chairs, and faculty lines are the coin of the realm. The main measure of success for deans and department chairs is how many faculty lines they obtain for their areas. Deans cannot afford to lose faculty, because their success is perceived as depending on their ability to at least maintain, and preferably increase, the number of faculty lines in their colleges. Departments cannot afford to have faculty teach courses in other areas, because their budgets depend on student numbers credited to them. Fewer students taught are likely to translate into fewer faculty lines in the future.

These days, departments are often seen as barriers to change. Many are bursting at the seams with people looking for ways to do work in other areas. We believe that such faculty members are now hampered more by an antiquated resource model than by an old-fashioned cultural model. Departmental culture has changed in the past ten years. Many departments now hire faculty with diverse educational backgrounds. Sometimes, even the terminal degree may be outside the direct disciplinary focus of the hiring department. Similarly, students often come from varied educational backgrounds. Faculty do not always have the same doctoral credentials as those their students will receive upon graduation. Thus, both faculty and students have a diversity of intellectual interests.

Are departments obsolete? It has been suggested that interdisciplinary programs, centers, and institutes might replace departments. The future is unlikely to be that simple. No single administrative unit, no matter how interdisciplinary, can meet the needs of the new faculty, who have complex and fluid webs of professional relationships. The departmental structure, which is the backbone of the university, will probably not be replaced by a single structure of any kind. It also is unlikely to disappear, because it is an eminently practical arrangement. Departments are good at the discovery of fundamental knowledge, and the need for such knowledge is not going to go away. Departments are also good at teaching the fundamentals of a discipline, and this kind of training continues to be critical. That is why many new scholars want a cultural home in a discipline-based department. What is needed is a way for the university to accommodate the interests of these scholars in the broader problems they are trying to address.

Some might say the present system already provides this possibility. After all, both the new generation of scholars and their forerunners have managed to undertake a remarkable variety of first-rate interdisciplinary activities. They have done so, however, on an ad hoc, individual basis. For the most part, the present interdisciplinary structures—programs, centers, and institutes—still lack adequate resources. In addition, although these structures incorporate different disciplines, their scope is not always sufficiently broad. A few areas cut across disciplines and require particularly broad, horizontal swaths of expertise. These broad focuses need to be deep, both in disciplinary coverage and numbers of faculty. At any time, many faculty members from various disciplines should be associated with these swaths, working on specific research topics.

The Environment

Recent conversations about the future of environmental studies at the University of California, Davis, revealed that numerous faculty members, including many from the younger generation, wanted a large and flexible superstructure to serve as a locus for dialogue among scholars working in environmental issues. Such a superstructure would not force scholars to choose between a disciplinary home and an interdisciplinary one. It would cut across traditional colleges, without replacing them, and would be led by an administrator reporting directly to the provost, in order to ensure the long-term stability of the campus's vision of environmental scholarship and teaching.

Those involved in the discussions came from the university's professional schools as well as from physical sciences and engineering, biological sciences and agriculture, social sciences, and arts and humanities. They decided against recommending the creation of a college of the environment with full-time faculty appointments, precisely because that would have forced them to choose between the college and their home departments. Instead, they proposed a graduate school for the environment, which would offer part-time faculty appointments only, thus providing its members with maximum flexibility.

Blending this broad, overarching, horizontal superstructure into the vertical structure of the university was considered critical for three reasons. First, it would institutionalize the interdisciplinary community that had developed surreptitiously over the years, without rending asunder the core disciplinary strengths critical for creating and integrating new knowledge. Second, it would nurture and safeguard the faculty's broad intellectual activities by providing a stable forum for vigorous study of issues of great interest to them. Finally, it would reconnect the university to society with an explicit promise of service, evidenced through a powerful, sustainable, and visible organization dedicated to one of its most pressing problems.

Some might see superstructures of this kind as introducing a new and undesirable layer of bureaucracy into the system. Without campuswide coordination, however, broad initiatives involving faculty from many different areas will not prosper. These new superstructures should not replicate traditional colleges or replace departments or interdisciplinary programs, centers, and institutes. Instead, they should connect such units in new and productive ways, while preserving the individuality and integrity of each. Giving the new scholars the freedom they need requires that universities revisit and redefine their resource models. Younger faculty do not want to have to pick a single home and to feel constrained at the most fundamental level by current budgetary policies.

Faculty members should, for example, have the option to commit variable portions of their time to work in cross-disciplinary areas, as their career interests evolve. Such participation could be achieved through the transfer of faculty lines to a cross-disciplinary superstructure, which could use the funds to buy faculty time as needed. Departments whose faculty make contributions to these campuswide enterprises should be compensated, recognized, and rewarded.

The new scholars want strong departments that serve, in effect, as their countries of origin and give them cultural roots. What is needed is a new organizational framework that allows and encourages the increasingly multilingual and multicultural citizens of academia to travel to other countries, to be active members of their region, and to be fully engaged citizens of the academic world. To succeed, this new organizational framework must have a stable yet flexible resource base. The budget is the policy: it reflects and embodies the university's attitude toward the new enterprise. If the new model is more complex than the old one, so be it. Complexity is here to stay.

Note

Cristina González is senior adviser to the chancellor; Debbie Niemeier is a professor of civil and environmental engineering; and Alexandra Navrotsky is a professor of chemistry, materials science, and geology at the University of California, Davis.

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