second set of questions

Louis Menand’s The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University (W.W. Norton, 2010) is, in my view, a key resource. Harvard professor of English and staff writer for The New Yorker, Menand contributes to the series on ideas that matter in the new millennium edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. In keeping with the intent of the series to re-examine hand-me-down assumptions, Menand’s third chapter, “Interdisciplinarity and Anxiety” (95-125), concentrates on the Humanities, the reasons why interdisciplinarity is a “magic” word, and the backstory of disciplinary history and current context. His writing is clear, accessible, and widely informed. He was involved in the reform of the undergraduate curriculum at Harvard.

I especially liked his insistence on the fact that interdisciplinarity is not new, nor is it in itself “subversive or transgressive or transformational” (96). It doesn’t solve “the problem of disciplinarity” because it is “simply disciplinarity raise to a higher power, . . . the scholarly and pedagogical ratification of disciplinarity” (96-7). In answer to the second question, it seems to me in the library sources listed insufficient attention is paid to the truth that disciplinarity is the beginning of interdisciplinarity. Truth rather than shibboleth, I hope. In practice, as Menand observes, interdisciplinarity “tends to rigidify disciplinary paradigms” (119). Disciplinarity can also be “fetishized” and “Balkanized” (120). “Professors are still trained [yes, he uses this word, not ‘educated] in one national literature or artistic medium or another. In an interdisciplinary encounter, they just shout at each other from the mountain tops of their own disciplines” (120-21). His point is that the forms of knowledge production must change before any change will occur in knowledge dissemination. The “boundary-suspicious conception” (117) of scholarly inquiry has lots of potential, but it needs to be understood as quite different from an escape from disciplinarity. The promise of interdisciplinarity, as yet unrealized, is that “it will smooth out the differences between the empirical and the hermeneutic, the hard and the soft, disciplines. ‘If we could just get them in the same room together’” (118).

Although Menand doesn’t really address digital scholarship, there are many openings of opportunity in his argument. First, he maintains that one of the impediments to establishing interdisciplinary initiatives locally is the lack of interdisciplinarity nationally. Surely, with many examples to hand, digital interdisciplinary scholarship creates virtual communities. Second, his insistence that “a work of art is both an aesthetic object and a commercial good” (123) underscores the value-added, economic importance, and, as Stan would say, the enrichment, of the cultural sector. Third, digital scholarship can provide the meeting place of the empirical and the hermeneutic. That sounds rather grand, but in programming, design, aims, and accessibility, it can be a truly collaborative, inter-disciplinary undertaking. Fourth, it can connect us with “the reality checks outside the university.” He remarks: “we want to contribute to the culture and the society that is being created and lived all around us, and we are a little sick of the institutional armature we once may have desired to secure us” (124). Sustainable, interdisciplinary, collaborative, creative-commons digital work connects us to a larger society of interested interlocutors, challengers, and potential champions. Fifth, interdisciplinarity brings into our box “the dissonance and the struggles of competing interests, the risks of innovation and experimentation” (125). The “beasts of commercial and political interests . . . make the fight real.” Capacious, generous, even embryonic interdisciplinarity can be the administrative name for entering the wide field, for enlarging the box.