Interdisciplinary action

“Why did the biologist, physicist and philosopher start a band? Because they wanted to explore the harmony of interdisciplinarity but couldn’t agree on a single key concept.”

Putting aside that this is more a reason for the band to break up, this offering from ChatGPT (I know, I must get out more) has a point as well as two rather lame punchlines.

There are plenty of reasons that researchers have traditionally stayed in their own lane, not least of which are the academic incentive structures reinforcing a linear approach.

But over the past decade or so, there has been a slow but steady shift to support interdisciplinarity, on the basis that combining expertise will help to solve the biggest challenges facing the world.

The case was made on a panel discussion I chaired at a Times Higher Education event in Singapore back in 2018.

Michael Spence, at the time vice-chancellor of the University of Sydney, described the institution’s Charles Perkins Centre, established to pioneer a cross-disciplinary approach to global health issues.

“We said the only metric [of success] was going to be the extent to which it changed Australian incidence rates [of disease] and led to better forms of treatment,” he said.

“It wasn’t that we stopped counting Nature papers, but we created different internal incentives that were outward-focused. That’s had a big cultural shift on the institute, and sort of made it more fun.”

Digging deeper into these issues, THE asked 200 university leaders back in 2018 whether they thought that research would still largely be discipline-based by 2030. The views were split almost evenly, with a slightly larger number disagreeing than agreeing with the proposition.

Four years later, we asked a different group – early career researchers – how interdisciplinarity was or was not being supported within their own institutions, and they were far less equivocal.

Nine in 10 of the 400 respondents felt that engaging with researchers outside their field would improve their research, but only one in five felt their institution was doing enough to encourage and reward interdisciplinary work. Two-thirds either disagreed with the statement that “Good interdisciplinary work is as easy to identify as good single-disciplinary work” or were undecided about it.

This mismatch between rhetoric and reality also extends to the content being taught to students, according to a new paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The study of 110,000 courses at 80 four-year colleges and universities in the US found that even in scientific fields where there is a clear graduate salary premium for those who have studied across disciplines, there were significant discrepancies between what was claimed in course catalogues, and the more linear, single-discipline approach apparent from the actual syllabuses.

All of which suggests that while there are tangible examples of new approaches and a general belief that interdisciplinarity should be encouraged and supported, barriers continue to persist – and that the structures and incentives that drive so much institutional behaviour are big ones.

This is why THE and Schmidt Science Fellows have joined forces to provide a new and sharper lens through which to scrutinise interdisciplinarity, and in due course to provide frameworks to measure success, which in turn will enable new incentive structures to emerge.

In a preliminary data analysis, we find further evidence that there is a gap between the talk about interdisciplinary approaches and the reality on the ground.

While there is much to be positive about among 700 universities in 100 countries that provided data for analysis, areas with lower scores – and often scant evidence – include actively measuring success in inter­disciplinarity, and rewarding it within tenure and promotion.

There will, no doubt, be those who are doubtful about interdisciplinarity being any sort of silver bullet when it comes to addressing global grand challenges – and it’s important to temper any assessment of its importance by acknowledging both that there will be areas where it occurs naturally, and that clumsily handled, top-down interventions can be counterproductive.

But as Evelyn Welch, now vice-chancellor of the University of Bristol, observed during that panel discussion in Singapore, if in higher education it is often said that “you get what you measure”, it is worth considering an alternative, more positive framing: that universities “respond very well to the right kinds of incentives, that allow us to keep our curiosity going”.

john.gill@timeshighereducation.com