Barriers to multidisciplinary engaged work
Early last week we had a workshop in which about 30 faculty and administrators talked with each other about barriers—real or perceived—to multidisciplinary and civically engaged work. The two are, of course, closely connected, since as someone has said, "Universities have disciplines while society has problems."
In addition to the standard obstacles to multidisciplinary research (dangers to promotion and tenure of probationary faculty, lack of professional recognition in the discipline, shortage of funding, etc.) I pointed out two that became clear to me from my service in the Graduate School.
The first obstacle is the strong influence of the National Research Council (NRC) rankings on departmental behavior. If their disciplines are ranked by the NRC, as are most in the core arts, sciences, and engineering, departments may be reluctant to have their faculty's effort (publications, research grants, dissertation guidance) diverted to collaborative efforts such as interdisciplinary graduate programs.
The second obstacle is recruitment and support of graduate students. Again, this is largely a departmental function. Departments tend to provide financial support—mainly in the form of teaching assistantships—to graduate students who enter the departmentally-centered graduate program. Interdisciplinary graduate programs have trouble finding such financial support for the students they are trying to recruit. The Graduate School can try to help, but (at least at Minnesota) has limited resources.
When we look for barriers to more engaged scholarly work in research universities, we find them deeply embedded in values and practices that we too readily take for granted.