One of my current projects has me thinking a lot about the university of the year 2040. And my conclusion right now is that universities, as institutions, may be up for as big a re-think as anything they’ve faced in the last hundred years. Specifically, there is probably going to be a need to re-think the role of disciplines in organizing higher learning.
Disciplines and institutions sit uneasily against one another. The original universities might have had individuals who might have specialized in different “arts” (music, arithmetic, rhetoric), but these were not considered to be “disciplines” in a modern sense. Disciplines didn’t really start to emerge until after the scientific revolution and didn’t solidify into their current form until the period 1870-1915. The marriage between institutions and disciplines was not inevitable, but the two institutions benefitted one another. Two centuries ago, universities were looking pretty useless as a social institution, and making an alliance with the sciences enhanced their prestige; conversely, disciplines saw universities as a more efficient way to replicate themselves, to get access to money, space, laboratories, etc.
But the key part of the deal between universities and disciplines was this: each discipline at each university gets its own bureaucracy – what we now know as departments. And more than that: the basic function of the university – to grant degrees – had to be organized around disciplinary ideas. No more Bachelor’s of Arts or Science – now it has to be a Bachelor of Arts in History, or a Bachelor of Science in Physics. (Occasionally, some certain types of anti-disciplinary movements like women’s or LGBTQ2 studies show up, but by design these tend not to lead to a replication of disciplinary forms or loci of power such as having their own departments – for more on this see the Louis Menand’s excellent The Marketplace of Ideas).
But, as one of my interlocutors on this project said to me a few days ago: “Societies have challenges and problems. Universities have departments”. And so, it has historically been difficult for universities to focus themselves on the questions that matter to the societies that support them. They simply haven’t historically been organized to respond to the challenges that matter to societies.
Now, that does not mean things can’t change. Maybe the biggest change that I have seen in research cultures over the past fifteen years or so is a gradual shift – still in its early stages but gaining momentum – away from the organization of research and even away from simply inter-disciplinary approaches into what might be called “challenge”-based research. The rapid and widespread acceptance of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals as organizing principles for university activity (both reflected in and hastened by the Times Higher Education’s development of “University Impact Rankings” based around the SDGs) has been quite striking. Slowly but surely, we are – in research at least – learning to define areas of specialization not in terms of disciplines, but rather but by what might be called “domains”. It is still in its early days, but it might just be the biggest change in the organization of research since the Second World War.
The question is: if we know how to do this in research, what is preventing us from organizing undergraduate teaching this way as well?
Because here’s the thing: while disciplines are a necessary part of academia (it’s useful to have multiple coherent and consistent ways of thinking about the world), they are alienating to many young people. Young people for the most part want education that will lead them into a path which can help them make a difference in the world. And precisely because disciplines are about approaches to problems (rather than about the problems themselves), they are at one step removed from the ways in which students tend to think about their futures.
What if, for instance, instead of offering undergraduate degrees in biology, or history, or whatever, you just offer a degrees in domains like, say, “Oceans”: which might have courses in biology, geography, political science, mechanical engineering, etc. Or a degree in “Persuasion”, with courses in English, history, sociology, psychology. Or one on “Children”, with courses in anthropology, linguistics, social work, education…you get the idea. Not only would students likely be able to understand the link between the content of their degrees and their imagined working futures (something which, it is well established, is positively correlated with student retention), but the specialists we get as a result would have a much broader perspective on the challenges they want to solve than do today’s students.
You don’t have to get rid of departments to make a change like this. I mean, first of all, they’d never wear it, and second of all, you probably do want to keep some kind of discipline-based degree at the graduate level. But what you do instead is largely prohibit them from offering undergraduate degrees: make every department a service department towards domain degrees. Make every department chair work out which “domains” their faculty can contribute towards. They might even still offer unaffiliated courses as electives: they just wouldn’t count towards a degree in that field.
While it is not all that hard to imagine a university organized this way, it is hard to imagine being some university somewhere being the first ones to take a step like this. Higher education is a deeply conservative industry with a tendency towards isomorphism and there is a very big potential penalty for being the first to do something.
But on the other hand, there are also potentially great rewards for being the first institution to try something that everyone subsequently thinks is genius – just ask the folks at Waterloo.
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Alex, your second paragraph is spot on, as are all your blogs, but there is much more to the domain-discipline issue than you describe. Two hundred years ago universities were indeed regarded as largely useless social institutions, that is, until von Humboldt created in 1809 the University of Berlin, the world’s first research university. Research was conducted at the undergraduate level in the context of a domain, much like you describe it and as defined in Wenger’s Communities of Practice theory. Faculty and students together mined for knowledge within a domain they chose to explore, and they learned what they needed to learn along the way in order to properly conduct that exploration. In 1876, the first American research university, Johns Hopkins, screwed up that concept by compartmentalizing research exclusively into graduate studies and dividing undergraduate programs into disciplines, similar to what you describe. Since then, learning within a domain has been overshadowed – at least in North America – by learning within a discipline. As Wenger and now you espouse, we need to get back to learning within a domain at the undergraduate level. Germany rose from the ashes of defeat in the Napoleonic wars thanks to this approach, and Canada post-covid could do it as well. There is an excellent book on this topic, William Clark’s Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University – a must-read for anyone who wants to know anything about the history of universities.
While not applied to majors, many schools do offer interdisciplinary and thematic minors that follow this model.
Two thoughts:
1. This plan seems to separate teaching and research at the undergraduate level in a way that belies the whole idea of a university.
2. It’s hopelessly teleological. What do we do with forms of knowledge which don’t obviously meet a social need? Or do we insist that everybody teach to social goals? What social challenge is addressed by reconstructing a lost work of literature from hints in other texts, or learning a dead language, or puzzling over the existential dread of Macbeth? This seems a good reason to expunge whole regions of the life of the mind, as not serving an external goal. And that’s the opposite of what universities ought to do.
I teach university transition and career development courses at two teaching-intensive institutions and have been experimenting with the SDGs in my courses. In my view, the SDG framework has enhanced interdisciplinary learning (the courses attract students from Arts, Science, Business, and Design), and as well, inspires students to think beyond their aspired professions by identifying global problems they can help address using their skills and talents.
In addition, I use the SDGs as a way to form student discussion groups so that they can break out of their natural inclination to engage only with students in the same program. For example, earlier this year, I had students from Business, Psychology, and Science who were in the Zero Hunger SDG cluster, and as we know, complicated problems require multi- and interdisciplinary approaches to generate solutions. I’d love to see the SDG framework (or whatever its next version is beyond 2030) be incorporated at program and institutional levels.
Two coincidental observation of relevance to domains and disciplines:
In Ontario and Alberta performance based funding is blind to domains and disciplines. It operates entirely at the institutional level, not just here in Canada, but everywhere. Whether the reforms suggested here are good ideas or not — I would say good — they need financial incentives to get them off the ground or at least not get in their way. Such incentives are not found in provincial funding schemes, nor in most university budget models, which tend to internalize government funding formulas. Here is an idea: in counting enrolment for funding and budgeting purposes, fund universities on the basis of convocation results: the credentials students graduate with instead of the programs to which they are admitted or where they organizationally receive instruction. At one time Ontario’s funding formula had a “blended” income unit based on convocation results for programs that were “undifferentiated.” Maybe what’s past should be prologue.
Second observation: The debate about domains and disciplines is not new. In 1972 Diana Crane with much insight injected the term “invisible college” into the discussion. Later (1983) Burton Clark introduced “academe” – not university — in his famous triangle. Peter Blau (1994) in describing “academic work” introduced the concept of a social culture to explain and disaggregate institutional behaviour.