Image
The Challenges of Building Interdisciplinary Ecosystems at Research Universities
A Keynote at the Launch of the Times Higher Education Global Interdisciplinary Science Ranking1
Edward Balleisen, Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies, Duke University
Washington, D.C., Nov. 21, 2024
Good morning!
Let me note at the outset that I am not a scientist. But I am a historian of modern institutions who has spent the last decade as Vice Provost for interdisciplinary Studies at Duke, working to foster a university ecosystem that supports interdisciplinarity, including interdisciplinary science. My reflections draw on that experience.
Calls for more investment in interdisciplinary research have increased steadily over past 50 years, with a more recent emphasis on transdisciplinary, or convergent, inquiry – the latter two terms conveying a greater focus on integrative analysis, and sometimes a focus on complex, societal challenges, often in partnership with entities beyond campus.2 It’s not hard to collect statements to this effect from thought leaders and government officials. You can see three typical observations below.
“Learning and practicing collaboration between and among disciplines are critical skills that investigators and teams need to develop.”
—Alicia Knoedler, NSF Office of Integrative Activities
“We need interdisciplinary teams that can apply AI to key problems and grapple with the societal impacts of AI.”
—Deirdre Mulligan, Principal Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer
“Interdisciplinary approaches encompassing all disciplines […] are essential to inspire renewed solutions to complex global challenges.”
—G7 Science and Technology Ministers’ Communique
These comments are rooted in a wide-ranging scholarly recognition that many intellectual puzzles require the crossing of disciplinary boundaries, and a related conviction that the same is especially true for the complex issues posed by developments like climate change, global pandemics, or the rapid deployment of artificial intelligence.
The tempo of interdisciplinary scientific inquiry has only accelerated in the past fifteen years, driven partly by the funding opportunities made available by government agencies and large foundations. Those funding avenues have become robust. Last week, I did a search in Pivot-RP, a database of current grant and fellowship opportunities, mostly in North America and Europe, using the keywords “interdisciplinary” and “science,” restricted to funding of $150,000 or more. There were 128 listings, over a third from US government agencies, about one-fourth from other national government agencies, roughly one-fifth from private foundations, and an additional smattering from international organizations.
Accelerated by such funding opportunities, interdisciplinary scholarship has witnessed extraordinary growth over the past four decades. Here’s a Google nGram, showing the appearance of key terms related to interdisciplinarity in English language books between 1960 and 2022.
The ProQuest scholarly database reflects a similar exponential trajectory for scholarship engaging with interdisciplinarity since the 1980s, and an even more rapid acceleration of references to “transdisciplinary” scholarship, up from 50 references in the 1980s to 26,000 in the 2010s, and on a pace to exceed 100,000 in the current decade.
Such rapid expansion of boundary-crossing scholarly activity has rested on a cluster of policies and investments that emerged gradually the 1970s through the 2010s, but that have cohered into what one can think of as “Interdisciplinarity 1.0.” In the first part of this talk, I’ll briefly describe the imprint of Interdisciplinarity 1.0 across university campuses, especially in North America. I’ll then identify a growing set of new challenges, and efforts to respond to them, that points toward what we might think of as “Interdisciplinarity 2.0.”
Let me begin with the key features of Interdisciplinarity 1.0.
One set of strategies has focused on faculty recruitment. Joint and secondary appointments have become commonplace at research universities. So too have cluster hires, which have been embraced at land-grant public universities like the University of Wisconsin and North Carolina State University for well over a decade, generating scores of recruitments on campuses across the United States. In recent years, more private research universities have emulated this approach. Duke’s Science & Technology Initiative, for example, has hired nearly 40 scientists over the past five years in the priority areas of computing and AI, materials, and biological resilience.3
At the same time, universities have taken many steps to encourage collaboration, as through a common decision to rethink the arrangement of physical space. Universities have reimagined assignments of labs and offices to encourage interactions across disciplinary boundaries, especially in new structures, like the Stanford ChEM-H and Neurosciences complex, or renovated buildings, like Yale’s refitted Klein Science Tower, which boasts extensive collision space and now hosts faculty and students across the quantitative sciences.
Internal financial support for interdisciplinary research communities has also mushroomed. In the past few years, I have served as a peer reviewer for major internal seed grants at the University of Miami, Washington University in Saint Louis, and the University of California, Davis. And there has been an explosion of boundary-crossing units devoted to interdisciplinary research. To cite two examples, the University of Chicago now boasts 140 institutes and centers; the University of Michigan nearly 200.4
In addition, just about every research university now has an office devoted to commercialization and translation, providing support to scientists and engineers who want to pursue patents related to their discoveries, and to create start-ups or partner with existing firms to bring those ideas to market.5
Alongside redirection of financial resources and the creation of units to catalyze interdisciplinary collaborations and foster entrepreneurial outcomes, many universities have sought to recognize interdisciplinary impact in tenure and promotion. More than two-thirds of institutions responding to the THES request for information related to the global Interdisciplinary Science Rankings described efforts in this regard.6
Unsurprisingly, all of this attention to interdisciplinary research has filtered through to educational programs. Across the landscape of research universities, interdisciplinary master’s programs and options for joint degrees have proliferated, especially in applied contexts like environmental sustainability. So too have certificate programs for graduate students and undergraduate students alike, mechanisms for interdisciplinary undergraduate majors, and vehicles for students to gain exposure to authentic interdisciplinary inquiry and design thinking. At Rice, for example, the Institute for Global Health Technologies gives undergraduates the opportunity to work with community partners in developing economies around problem identification, technological prototyping, development of business models, and the process of regulatory approvals.
Image
Thus Interdisciplinary 1.0 has pulled together an impressive set of strategies to foster interdisciplinary interaction and inquiry, with impressive impacts to match. Such endeavors to build vibrant interdisciplinary community require sustained attention. At my university, a 1988 strategic plan, “Crossing Boundaries,” initiated several decades of investments and organizational innovation.7
Image
But interdisciplinary science continues to have a high degree of difficulty. Collaboration between individuals trained in different epistemological premises and varying methodological approaches depends on effective communication, including translation of ideas across disciplinary frameworks of thinking, and constructive teamwork that takes full advantage of complementary expertise. The work of interdisciplinary teams, especially across the boundaries of departments and schools, can generate administrative dilemmas or run aground on the rocks of local, disciplinary expectations and cultures. The degree of difficulty is especially daunting, and the potential particularly exciting, in two interconnected areas:
- Facilitating truly convergent research, whether on the frontiers of quantum computing or with regard more applied contexts like identifying agricultural practices that would mitigate or foster resilience to climate change.
- Bringing interdisciplinary, experiential learning to scale, for students at all levels, from undergraduates through Ph.D. students. This goal is crucial for success in convergent research, given the important role that trainees play in larger-scale academic inquiry. It’s also an essential component of workforce development both outside and within academia, given the emphasis that so many employers are placing on the capacity to identify problems and opportunities, engage in creative design thinking, collaborate effectively, and demonstrate versatile communication skills.8
Applied convergent research typically depends on many additional features:
- Equitable co-creation of research undertakings with partners outside academia, which in turn requires sustained investment in long-term relationship building and creation of administrative mechanisms that facilitate such partnerships
- Commitment to a significant degree of intellectual humility, the capacity to listen to and learn from partners, and the willingness to embrace shared modes of decision-making about every phase of the research process9
- Integration of social science and humanistic expertise, along with science and engineering10
- Much more versatile modes of communication than those typically required for academic publication
The points about commitment to two-way communication, to hearing as well as professing or critiquing, seem especially important, given the declining public trust in science and experts of all stripes, and the growing divergence between so many cutting-edge areas of science and public understanding. Academic training in science understandably emphasizes intellectual depth, and as bodies of knowledge continue to expand, fields and sub-fields have tended to develop jargon and methodological shorthand that complicates understanding by non-specialists. The result has been an emphasis on equipping graduate students and postdocs to be able to converse with scholars in their specific area. One advantage of interdisciplinary collaboration is that it compels careful listening and explicit attention to the distinctive requirements to writing and speaking to different audiences – key skills to engage productively not only with other academics, but also broad publics and decision-makers.
Image
Similarly, scaling educational opportunities for applied convergent inquiry requires a distinctive approach to teaching and learning. Among the requirements:
- Mechanisms to facilitate authentic experiential learning through applied projects, with partners beyond campus. This complicated undertaking requires strong connections to those partners and careful vetting to ensure that projects align with student capacities and provide benefits to partners.
- Effective scaffolding for teamwork, since few individuals instinctively know how to facilitate joint decision-making or conflict resolution, identify complementary roles, develop flexible project plans.
- A strategy that leverages near-peer mentoring, whether by postdocs, graduate students, advanced undergraduates, or some combination thereof, to deepen opportunities for learning at all levels.
- A different approach from faculty, characterized by less didactic delivery of content and a coaching sensibility that fosters teamwork and creativity.
So, what are the prospects for an Interdisciplinary Science 2.0 that builds genuine capacity to undertake convergent research and scales exposure to applied convergent inquiry within curricular and co-curricular frameworks?
The good news is that one can point to many examples of scholars and universities undertaking the hard work to understand the prerequisites for this kind of research and education, and making the necessary investments to develop supporting infrastructure for it.
I’ll focus briefly on just a few examples.
Three years ago, I did not know of a single other university besides Duke that had established an office of interdisciplinary affairs within its Provost Office, dedicated to issues like ensuring appropriate recognition for interdisciplinary research in tenure and promotion, reducing administrative hassles created by interdisciplinary collaborations, facilitating faculty connections across disciplinary boundaries through a set of university-wide institutes and centers, and expanding avenues for interdisciplinary, community-engaged education. Now, however, several research universities have followed suit, including Washington University in Saint Louis, NC State, Georgetown, Notre Dame, Case Western, and Temple.
Across the United States, more private research universities are refining their missions, emulating the longstanding impulses of public universities to foreground the impulse of partnering with their local communities to furnish public goods. At Duke, we are in the process of launching a Center for Community Engagement to facilitate such co-created research that addresses community-defined priorities. There has also been important scholarly work to identify best practices in convergent research, as evidenced by the Guidebook to the Engaged University, produced in 2022 by a consortium of scholars from American and European universities, and a burgeoning set of online resources, like those provided by Duke’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute.
Image
In the realm of interdisciplinary education, every semester brings new initiatives designed around applied collaborative research projects, with many universities finding ways to scale these experiences. The most common contexts are practicums and capstone in professional master’s programs like Engineering Management or Environmental Sustainability.
Even more ambitiously, dozens of universities are embracing the idea of interdisciplinary applied teams that involve undergraduates as well as graduate and professional students, and faculty. At Duke, the Bass Connections program is running 78 year-long interdisciplinary teams this year, many blending science and social science and most connecting with community partners, whether in North Carolina or across the globe.11 Clemson’s Creative Inquiry Program involves every school and department, touching 4,000 students a year. And the Vertically Integrated Project Consortium has now reached 50 universities in countries across the world, in some cases, like at Georgia Tech, with nearly 2,000 students receiving academic credit for participation on collaborative research teams annually.
Image
To give you a flavor of what these teams entail, consider “Earthquake Early Warning in Kathmandu,” an interdisciplinary project team that ran for two years recently at Duke, in partnership with the Institute of Engineering at Tribhuvan University in Nepal. Faculty and students at the two universities collaborated on the development of smart sensing network technology to detect early warning signs of earthquakes, while also engaging with governmental officials and partnering with primary and secondary schools to teach students about earthquake safety. Teams like this require not just technological prototyping and data science, but also economic analysis, interaction with institutions of public policy, and engagement with educators.
Image
Another important example on my campus resides in our Pratt School of Engineering. At Duke, all first-year engineering students, approximately 400 in all, now begin their curriculum with a project-based design class, in which small groups tackle authentic design challenges teed up by project sponsors, which include many local community organizations.
For especially intrepid institutions, there has been an even deeper integration of applied convergent research into core educational structures. At Worcester Polytechnic Institute, more than two-thirds of courses are designed around project-based learning. This impulse is becoming a common strategy in entirely new universities, like Olin College, in Massachusetts, the London Interdisciplinary School, or Inteli, in Sao Paolo, Brazil. Curricular commitments of this sort have an enormous impact on intellectual culture, since they influence faculty hiring, commitments to train faculty in project-based teaching methods, and measures of faculty success.12
How, then, might we accelerate a transition to Interdisciplinary Science 2.0, and especially a deeper investment in applied science as a pivotal complement to curiosity-driven interdisciplinary scientific inquiry? What steps, by which institutions, can make the biggest difference now?
Funding agencies can certainly play a role, as with the recent emphasis by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation on co-creation of research priorities with community partners.13 That focus on convergent research can have profound impact on the imagination and capacities of scientists and engineers. Just this week, I had occasion to learn about how the participation of a Duke coastal ecosystems expert in an NSF ENGINE grant led to extensive engagement with eastern North Carolina community organizations, government officials, and business executives, as well as social scientists and community college leaders. This environmental scientist has come to think very differently about the possibilities for leveraging scientific research and connecting it to regional assets, as well to shape research agendas to reflect the priorities of regional communities.
There is a need for concerted efforts to share best practices, whether through accessible writing by academics for academics, such as the Guidebook for the Engaged University, or through convenings like this one. Meetings that bring together academic leaders, faculty, funders, associated non-profits, and business executives can deepen networks and accelerate the diffusion of approaches and practices. Duke ran a symposium on Collaborative Project-Based Learning last year, which brought together more than 100 scholars and administrators for discussion and strategic planning. Participants came from every type of higher education institution: community colleges, regional comprehensive universities, minority-serving institutions, liberal arts colleges, R2s, and R1s. That effort generated a great deal of brainstorming and sharing of ideas, as well as a robust set case studies about a wide variety of programs, which will soon be available on an open access basis.
Image
University rankings, like the one launching today, can galvanize strategic rethinking on campuses, encouraging investments and organizational focus. But I would encourage The Times Higher Education Supplement and Schmidt Sciences to broaden the criteria that inform the rankings, especially if the goal, in part, is to recognize the value of universities seeking to foster applied science that addresses major societal problems, and to equipping their students with the habits and skills required for convergent inquiry of any type. In particular, it would be helpful to include measures of the following:
- Commitment to equitable, community-engaged and policy-engaged research
- Capacity to integrate applied scientific research with social science and ethics
- Provision of vehicles for interdisciplinary experiential learning by students at all levels, including not just professional master’s students, where such opportunities are most common, but also undergraduates and Ph.D. students14
Let me end there so that we have a bit of time for questions or comments.
Notes
1 This text is slightly revised for online readers, rather than in-person listeners.
2 For a useful set of definitions distinguishing “disciplinary,” “interdisciplinary,” “multidisciplinary,” and “convergent” or “transdisciplinary” research, see the 2022 Report by the Interagency Working Group on Convergence, the Federal Coordination in STEM Education Subcommittee, and National Science & Technology Council’s STEM Education Committee, Convergence Education: A Guide to Transdisciplinary STEM Learning and Teaching, available at: https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Convergence_Public-Report_Final.pdf.
3 On the emergence and growth of cluster hires, see: Colleen Flaherty, “Cluster Hiring and Diversity,” Inside Higher Ed, April 30, 2015, available at: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/05/01/new-report-says-cluster-hiring-can-lead-increased-faculty-diversity. By itself, cluster hiring does not ensure significant collaboration among hired faculty. See the findings in Quinn Bloom, Michaela Curran, and Steven Brint, “Interdisciplinary Cluster Hiring Initiatives in U.S. Research Universities: More Straw than Bricks?” The Journal of Higher Education, 91 (2019: 5), 755–780. https://doi.org/10.1080/00221546.2019.1688615.
4 Universities often find it easier to create interdisciplinary units than to assess, reorganize, or sunset them. For the outcome of a major review of Duke’s university-wide interdisciplinary organizations, see “Final Report of the Ad Hoc Duke Interdisciplinary Priorities Committee: Overarching Analysis and Recommendations for Academic Council,” 2021: https://interdisciplinary.duke.edu/sites/default/files/interdisciplinary-priorities-committee-report-duke-ac.pdf.
5 AUTM, formerly known the Association of University Technology Managers, dates back to the 1970s, and now has a membership that includes staff members with this set of responsibilities in nearly 800 universities.
6 The creation of university-wide standards that signal value for interdisciplinary research in tenure and promotion, of course, is just the first step in any such process. A practice of valuing interdisciplinary research requires additional elements, including: 1) directions to candidates about the importance of describing the rationale for their crossing of interdisciplinary boundaries, clarifying their specific roles with regard to any collaborative efforts, and providing evidence about the excellence of any public-facing scholarship; 2) mechanisms for establishing interdisciplinary representation on tenure and promotion committees; 3) attention to the selection of letter writers to ensure engagement with the full breadth of relevant research; and 4) clarity in the instructions provided to those letter writers (as with directing focus toward the areas of work closest to a given letter writer’s area of expertise).
7 For an overview, see Edward Balleisen, “A Short History of Interdisciplinarity at Duke through the Lens of Strategic Planning,” 2021, available at: https://web.archive.org/web/20230324093912/https://sites.duke.edu/interdisciplinary/files/2021/06/evolution-interdisciplinarity-duke-ac.pdf
8 Kevin Gray, “The Key Attributes Employers Are Looking for on Graduates’ Resumes,” Jan. 16, 2024, National Association of Colleges and Employers, available at: https://www.naceweb.org/talent-acquisition/candidate-selection/the-key-attributes-employers-are-looking-for-on-graduates-resumes
9 See for example Jason Delborne, Adam Kokotovich, and Kathleen Barnhill-Dilling, “Engaging Community with Humility,” Science 362:6414 (Nov. 2, 2018): 532-33. DOI: 10.1126/science.aav4987; Lindsey Reynolds and Salla Sariola “The Ethics and Politics of Community Engagement in Global Health Research,” Critical Public Health 28:3 (2018): 257-68 https://doi.org/10.1080/09581596.2018.1449598
10 To take one example that has received extensive attention over the past few years, the impact of transformational vaccines will be constrained by the willingness of people to receive them. Rachel Piltch-Loeb and Ralph DiClemente, “The Vaccine Uptake Continuum: Applying Social Science Theory to Shift Vaccine Hesitancy,” Vaccines 7:8 (2020), 10.3390/vaccines8010076.
11 The Bass Connections program has developed resources for faculty and students around many key elements of applied, community-engaged, experiential learning, including guides to team charters, team structure, near-peer mentoring, and project management.
12 On the tendency of new universities to embrace interdisciplinary frameworks and team-based, applied experiential learning, see Noah Pickus and Brian Penprase, The New Global Universities: Reinventing Education in the 21st Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022).
13 See for example the 2024 NSF solicitation for Regional Innovation Engines: https://new.nsf.gov/funding/opportunities/nsf-engines-nsf-regional-innovation-engines/nsf24-565/solicitation; or the expectations that the NIH’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences has for community engagement: https://ncats.nih.gov/research/research-activities/ctsa/projects/community-engagement.
14 We could also benefit from more research assessing key elements of convergent science, such as the practices that foster effective collaboration on interdisciplinary teams, whether involving fundamental or more applied research. The “Science of Team Science” community has provided a growing literature on such issues as scientific team formation and modes of organizing teams. See Kara Hall et al., “The Science of Team Science: A Review of the Empirical Evidence and Research Gaps on Collaboration in Science,” American Psychologist 73:4 (2018): 532-48. By the same token, careful assessment of the learning outcomes of student participation on interdisciplinary research teams can offer important guidance for colleges and universities contemplating recalibration of curricular requirements or creation of programs or other resources to support this approach to experiential learning. For an example of such analysis, focusing on undergraduate participation in Duke’s Bass Connections program, see: Edward J. Balleisen, Laura Howes, and Erik Wibbels, “The Impact of Applied Project-Based Learning on Undergraduate Student Development,” Higher Education 87:4 (2023): 1-16.
Categories
Interdisciplinary Studies History