[For this year’s post-Valentine’s non-favorites series, I wanted to follow up last week’s on scholarly books I’ve loved with a handful of scholarly ideas I don’t. Leading up to a perennial favorite crowd-sourced post, a collective airing of grievances of all types!]
Why I understand academic silos, why they still bug me, and why they’re also much more destructive than that.
I’m far from an expert in the multi-century (really multi-millenium) history of universities, but my understanding is that for a good chunk of that long history these educational institutions have been divided into disciplines and thus also into departments, communities of faculty who profess those disciplines. That’s certainly been the case for the whole history of American higher education at least, and despite all kinds of evolutions it largely remains the case in the 21st century. Which means that when these institutions hire new faculty (not nearly as common a practice as it used to be, tragically enough, but when they do), they almost always are hiring them to be part of one or another of those departments. Which means that in most cases the training of graduate students pushes them to identify as part of one or another of those disciplines. Which is one major set of factors—but not the only one by any means—that has led to the longstanding and continuing division of academia and thus often of scholarship more broadly into silos.
The thing is, I know from every stage of my own academic journey that those silos don’t and can’t capture many of us. I was fortunate enough to find an undergrad major, History & Literature, that was overtly interdisciplinary, bringing together not only those two titular disciplines but many others as well in an AmericanStudies approach (natch). I did then complete a PhD in one discipline/department, English, but my main advisor was also the founder and director of the American Studies program at that institution, and my work throughout grad school—and especially in my dissertation/first book—was thoroughly interdisciplinary. I’d say the same of my entire career since, which has been housed in an English Studies department but has featured (among other telling moments and details) my co-founding of an American Studies program at my university. And there’s a reason why I named this blog AmericanStudies—I believe deeply in such an interdisciplinary scholarly approach, and try in every aspect of my work to model and embody it.
And to make the case for it far beyond me, and far beyond academia as well. Because that’s the other and more important thing: while silos might have some practical value or at least necessity in academic institutions, they make no sense in the world beyond. Not only because nothing in the world is divided into distinct disciplines, although of course that’s true. But also and relatedly because the only ways to truly make sense of our world, and certainly the best models for thinking analytically and critically about it, are interdisciplinary ones. Which means, to circle back around to where I started, that even someone who majors in, is hired to be part of, spends a career working in, etc. a particular academic discipline or department will spend a good bit of their career and even more of their life practicing ways of thinking and reading and discussing and being that bring together multiple such disciplines and departments. If we’re going to make the case for higher education—a case that desperately needs making, now more than ever—we’ll need to include interdisciplinarity as a central component of that argument. Which makes me very much not a fan of silos.
Crowd-sourced post this weekend,
Ben
PS. So once more: scholarly ideas you’re not a fan of? Other things that gripe your cookies? Share for the weekend post!
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