Just a quick one today because the expanded HESA Towers opened yesterday and there’s been a lot going on.  It’s about an experiment that I wish more institutions would undertake, upon building a new university (it has to be a new university, for reasons which I think will be obvious): that is, to allow the institution to offer degrees on any basis it wishes except that of disciplinarity.  No history degrees.  No physics degrees.  Kill disciplinarity, at least as it pertains to undergraduates, and replace it with programs that focus on themes that interact more directly with how the real world thinks about and solves problems.

For instance, why not have a university which has just 17-degree programs: one for each of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals?   A degree in poverty eradication would necessarily take in courses in history, politics, sociology, anthropology and economics; one in clean water and sanitation courses in science, engineering, and almost certainly political science and economics as well, life below water would require something similar along with more biology, etc.  Or, if we’re just sticking with Arts faculties here for a moment, why not just thematic degrees that line up ideas along lines of major social problems or issues?  Why not degrees in Trust, Persuasion, or Equality, or Cities – all themes to which a large number of different disciplines could offer important and differing perspectives.

One could imagine achieving this in different ways.  After introducing some disciplinary basics in first year, one could imagine most courses being designed to relate specifically to the theme and be co-taught by professors from different disciplines.  Or one could imagine each discipline creating certain courses to be taught to be taught in each stream (so, a degree in Persuasion might have English classes which looks at particularly stirring oratory, history classes like 20th Century Propaganda, Psychology classes on…well you get the idea.  Quest University orientates their degree around “The Question,” which is selected by a student. There need not be a single approach to this kind of thing.

Now this doesn’t mean that all classes have to be themed in this way.  You just have to offer enough classes this way that coherent degrees can be constructed.  But for everything else…sure, keep the disciplinary classes.  Students are probably still going to want to do learn discipline-specific things like Impressionism, or Phenomenology, or the history of the de-colonization of Africa, or others.  Not every course has to be 100% focused on a problem or a theme: rather, the important thing is that the link between disciplinarity and degrees be broken because while disciplinarity is a useful way or organizing knowledge and inquiry, it’s a sub-optimal way of putting knowledge into practice at most anything below the doctoral level.  If you want to build institutions for the 99% of students who don’t go the doctoral route instead of the 1% who do, then breaking this disciplinary focus might not be such a bad idea.

A lot of proposals for radical change in higher education focus on the idea of not having “departments” because these are bureaucratic entities which are not only costly in themselves (or so goes the theory), but which have a tendency to generate higher costs because of the way they often serve as a means to generate ever-more specialized sets of programming with ever-smaller enrolments, and thus decrease the efficiency of teaching.  It would certainly be possible, if one were arranging a university around SDGs or some other thematic degrees, to do away with departments as well.  But I am not convinced this would be necessary: there’s nothing wrong with organizing and supporting professors along disciplinary lines provided it is well understood that, effectively, every department provides service to the wider institution (also, there are benefits to having disciplinary departments when it comes to organizing hiring and research). 

I doubt an existing institution could go this route, simply because too many people inside the academy are too conservative/defensive about disciplinarity and would resist every sacrilegious thing suggested above to their last breath.  Certainly, there are many scholars who are deeply committed to interdisciplinary programs, but they are often forced to contend with strong and established disciplinary boundaries and silos. But at a new university, absent the rigidities of traditions and possessed of a mission to make a new kind of degree work, it might be possible. 

(Note to provincial governments: the lesson here is that if you genuinely want to see radical change in degree structures, you should open a new university every decade or so with one or more experimental missions.  Serious change at existing institutions is so close to impossible as to barely be worth trying: the only clear way to get the academy to shift is by actually demonstrating new models in practice.  You may find this annoying and expensive: it is nevertheless true.)