By Rebecca Hains
Communications Department

Kristin Esterberg is the Provost and Academic Vice President of Salem State College.

The SOAS Communications Team gave a round table on interdisciplinarity this year on Opening Day.  The faculty in attendance noted that while there are various opportunities to do interdisciplinary work on campus, we also face a range of challenges. Would you mind sharing your thoughts on the opportunities for on-campus interdisciplinary work?

Although there are places where faculty do interdisciplinary work, it seems mostly they do it because they’re passionate about it and want to do it—not because institutionally we’ve created lots of spaces for that to happen. There are certainly spaces where faculty can do interdisciplinary work, such as the Faculty Learning Communities, the programs put on by the Council of Teaching and Learning, and our own Interdisciplinary Studies Department. But it doesn’t seem to me there are any other strong pushes for faculty to pursue, say, interdisciplinary teaching. The ways in which we schedule and coordinate courses, and the ways in which we give credit to departments and faculty members, all make it harder for faculty to work together—rather than easier.

The faculty at our round table actually commented that they wished there were more opportunities and structures in place for interdisciplinary teaching, such as team-teaching and cross-listed courses. Are there any plans in the works to address that?

Yes. I’m working with Amie Goodwin to support faculty who want to propose and offer interdisciplinary team-taught courses next year. A challenge right now is that if you do offer team-taught courses, the chair who was counting on one of those team members to cover something else can be left holding the bag. So we’re hoping to set aside a small pool of money so that the chair’s staffing needs are covered.

I know people would appreciate that kind of opportunity.

Frankly, some of my most interesting team-teaching experiences were courses I team-taught with a historian. It had never occurred to me that you would structure a course chronologically, rather than thematically. The two of us had to struggle over this: How do we teach these materials that we think are really critical, given that we have two wholly different orientations towards the intellectual body that we’re teaching? It raises interesting intellectual challenges for the faculty and the student.

Related to that is the issue of cross-listing courses. When I was doing my doctoral work at Temple University, it was pretty easy to get permission from, say, Journalism and Women’s Studies to cross-list a course, with 15 seats for students from each department and two course numbers. But that doesn’t seem to happen here.

That seems challenging here, and truthfully, I don’t know why! At my previous institutions, it’s always been possible. It’s a way to help students find courses they might not otherwise take. For example—to haphazardly pluck two disciplines out of the hat—while an English major might not normally sit in a Psychology course, if one were cross-listed, they might enroll and find things of common interest.

In subjects like Sociology and Psychology, it’s even clearer that if we could cross-list some of those courses, a student might be able to take the cross-listed course and use it in ways they hadn’t anticipated. It might also allow courses that would have a smaller enrollment to fill, and it would provide a really interesting classroom mix for the faculty member.

At the same time, I do believe that solid interdisciplinary work is built on strong disciplines. So whenever I talk about interdisciplinary work, I’m pretty careful. I don’t want people to think, “Oh, we’ll just throw everyone into one large department and have interdisciplinary soup.” I know at the advanced level, there are times when you want students in a particular concentration to focus very intensively, and it can be a challenge if you’ve got someone in the class who doesn’t have the disciplinary background.

In my own field, sociology, boundaries are really so fluid. But I know that’s not the case for all fields. So it’s not a model I think all departments and all fields have to take, but it is useful for some programs. I think advanced students in Psychology and Sociology oftentimes share enough common ground that they can benefit from being in the same course. At the same time, you don’t want a capstone to have folks from all over the place, if you assume students enrolled will need a certain technique or skill or common intellectual experience.

I think the balance for any campus is to try to figure out, “Where are the right places for those interdisciplinary spaces?” And I don’t think we’ve done enough of that here.

Now, something else came up on Opening Day: We discussed the intrinsic value of presenting at conferences, especially for tenure-track faculty—but recent budget cuts preclude some conference travel. It’s becoming harder.

It is harder.

Given these circumstances, to what extent do administrators like yourself value faculty participating in opportunities on campus like Graduate Research Day and the faculty First Lectures that the SOAS Communications Team sponsors, and, related to that, publishing opportunities on campus like ASpect and Sextant? How do those weigh out?

Those are important, and I do look at them.  I think it’s also important for scholars to test their ideas and thoughts elsewhere, as well.

Every faculty member really does need to have the opportunity to go elsewhere to present. I know the professional development money the union contract provides isn’t much, and we doubled that—which doesn’t say much, because the base is so small. But I’ve been working to ensure that junior faculty, especially, are able to travel, because that’s how we participate in the professional life of the discipline—or the inter-discipline. Faculty still need to travel, to present, to hear what people are saying in person. It’s important.

I agree. Getting off campus, getting peer reviews elsewhere—for example, at conferences presentations—really helps me prepare my work for publication.

Exactly. And it helps you to better see how an idea fits into a developing field. When you only present on campus, the chance that there are even two or three other scholars working in the same area who’ll see your presentation is so small. You won’t necessarily get the same feedback that someone working in your own field, on a similar intellectual problem, will give you.

So while I do weigh what happens on campus—I think the Sextant, for example, is a really marvelous publication, of very, very high quality—we need to see how those ideas test outside of Salem State’s boundaries.

There’s certainly value in sharing research here and then moving on, to get additional perspectives.

Or, for faculty to take their work elsewhere and then bring it here, so that we get the very best here—that’s another model.

Ah, good point. Do you have any further thoughts or insights on interdisciplinarity that you’d like to share?

Usually, we stay in our departments and we keep our heads down, and we might only seek out those few who might have an interest in our area—or maybe whose offices are nearby. As we go through this academic planning process over the next year and a half, it will provide a more structured way for faculty to look at what folks in other programs are doing. I hope faculty will be very excited by what they’re reading—so if I as a sociologist read about what you’re doing in Communications, for example, we might find there’s a whole body of things in which we share interests.

If the program review reveals that there is a cluster of faculty in one area working on a specific interest, and another cluster of faculty elsewhere have similar interests rooted in a different discipline, we can look towards a faculty hire that would stimulate some kind of cross-disciplinary work. But to set up hires that would bridge disciplines in that way, faculty must really understand what other faculty in other disciplines are doing. New faculty will always have a disciplinary home, of course—not only because of the contract, but also because faculty have tenure someplace. But a faculty search committee might bring in folks from two disciplines and say, “Folks with these qualities will spark the kinds of discussion that we want to have going forward.”

It occurs to me that centers might be a good place for that type of interdisciplinary bridging. I know there are several on campus, but it’s very hard to find or learn what’s going on in them.

They’re very hard to find, and this is one area in which I’ve asked the deans to do some work: helping to define what a center is. We don’t have official policies in place for establishing centers or disestablishing them, and we don’t really have a consensus about what they are. How do faculty come together to form one?

Getting them more structured and better promoted might be a great way to foster interdisciplinary connections.

Exactly. So I think there are more opportunities here than anything else—which is a good thing. While IDS has very vigorous interdisciplinary programs, there’s even more we can and should do. That’s how really interesting ideas build. That’s how students learn. That’s how we as scholars learn. That’s how, in the real world, we solve problems.

This article is part of ASpect’s December 2009 issue on interdisciplinarity.