Defining and Teaching Interdisciplinary Studies

Recent articles on the nature and prospects of liberal learning in American higher education have increasingly called attention to the crucial role of interdisciplinary studies in any ideal vision of the Academy. This insistence 011 the need for understanding the relationships between and among disciplines seems to arise as much from practical considerations as from any traditional belief that knowledge is somehow all of a piece and deserves to be exhibited as such. Gresham Riley, for example, in his essay on the goals of a liberal education, claims that "never more than at the present time has there been a need for citizens to be able to focus the insights of various disciplines on the problems and issues which beset our collective existence."' Underlying such calls for an interdisciplinary component to liberal education is the recognition that interdisciplinary studies encourage breadth of vision and develop the skills of integration and synthesis so frequently demanded by the problems of a culture in the midst of a profoutld transition. The apparent movement away from interdisciplinary studies and other socalled "frills" in the early 1970s has obscured the creation of new inrerdisciplinary departments and even colleges in the lasr decade. The newly formed Association for Integrative Studies has members from over 100 colleges and universities, and a 1977 directory of interdisciplina~y studies in the humanities lists over 2300 programs in senior in~titutions.~ Another listing shows over 5000 faculty who teach interdisciplinary courses in environ~nental studies alone.3 Despite these impressive numbers, it is an unusual institution of higher education where many of the faculty do not view the interdisciplinary program on their campus with skepticism, if not hostility. They typically suspect that the program has little substance, and that what substance it does have merely duplicates the offerings of disciplinary departments. While much of this discrepancy in perspective can safely be attributed to less than noble motives, such as protection of 'turf,' a residue of well-placed criticism remains. There are courses claiming to be interdisciplinary which are academic froth, or merely serial presentations of disciplinary material. But the lack of legitimacy accorded sound and genuine programs may stem from causes much more basic than these. We see four fundamental issues which must be resolved before interdisciplin-