“becoming interdisciplinary involves training in more than one intellectual tradition; becoming interdepartmental means dealing with a lot of stodgy, stultifying bureaucracy”

You got it! Departments serve some important functions, but you don’t want those functions taking up all of the time you want to devote to intellectual pursuits. I suspect departments could cover relatively arbitrary areas and still be effective as long as they don’t change all the time and you only need to be tied to one.

On a more general note, thanks for this discussion. Many of the online criticisms of Taylor’s piece are exactly like my own: the sciences sure are not suffering from these issues. Not much more to say after that. I’ve tried to find humanists offering perspective, and this blog and comments have the provided the most insight I’ve found. Thanks!

Also, it is highly moralized.

Yes, it’s very interesting how often arguments between people from different disciplines are phrased in moral terms.

A discipline that studies human beings usually has a shared understanding on what is and is not OK to do to a human subject. In cross-disciplinary work, you need to get each other up to speed on what considered acceptable, and what the IRB will let you do. (e.g. in psychology, it is completely standard to deceive your study participants about both the true purpose of the experiment, and about the experimental set-up)
I don’t have much of a problem with these restrictions being described in moral terms.

But the moral framing goes further than that e.g., what effect will publishing the research have, what will it be used for etc. When talking outside your own discipline, you find yourself making explict ethical constraints that, internally, are left unsaid.
(And some of this is probably boundary-defense masquerading as ethics).

Why is it not?

anon @ 13: any kind of alternative perspective or method is really sort of a threat to the discipline itself—because what are the norms for if they are not the right norms and a discipline needs norms, doesn’t it?

Bingo. That, plus the fact that the alternative perspectives call into question the very lives and careers of your cabal, gives you the territorialism for which academe is justly famous. (You also have to be dealing with people who have trouble with the idea that norms can change over time.) I can’t count the number of times I have heard people argue that X is not an appropriate candidate for Y job because s/he doesn’t attend the right conferences, and I always think, O Moloch, life is surely too short for this shit.

Anonymous @ 13 reminds me of something written about the great interdisciplinarian Gregory Bateson by his biographer: “Gregory posted himself to the margins of not one, but multiple disciplines from which he secluded and then absented himself” (David Lipset, 2005, Anthropological Quarterly 98.4:911). Of course, what this particular quote fails to record (though Lipset has written much on the subject elsewhere) is that Bateson was a founder of many of the disciplines he touched – cybernetics/systems, anthropology, communications theory and family systems therapy among others – or at least had a huge influence on taking them forward. The role of what I’ve called a cyborg researcher is an uncomfortable one but can be hugely important in taking disciplines forward. Innovation comes at the margins of established bodies of thought, not at their centres.

Some departments are dysfunctional. So would they be if you called them something else.

This sounds like such a crazy hypothesis, now that I read it. I’d like to know some other explanation. Like I said, I haven’t thought about this much.

One thing I’ve always been curious about is whether all disciplines do this intense policing with deep scorn for those who violate what are perceived to be the appropriate boundaries. Is this what disciplinarity is, at heart? Clearly, it is a tradition, as you say. Does protection of tradition there mirror the patterns found in the protection of social traditions?

I’m inclined to think that it’s a good idea to be regularly exposed to other academics who think your own discpline’s basic assumptions are false or ridiculous.

Me too, which brings me to yet another thing I’ve been complaining about (quietly) for ten years: the idea (again, especially prevalent in cultural studies) that you should want to have interdisciplinarity in one person. (Sometimes, that interdisciplinarity turns out to be “literature and film.” Spanning the globe!) It’s much more instructive—and sometimes fun—to have interdisciplinarity in ten or twelve people, and get them going around the seminar table. My best experience of this? The year the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities took “cities” as our theme, and our Fellows ranged from literature to architecture. If only I’d managed to get some undergraduates involved in that as well. . . .

And on that point, while I believe that much of what Rorty did post-P&TMON was, sort of, philosophy, I’m not infrequently struck by people in other disciplines who say that what they are doing is philosophy, or ethics, and who neither seem to have much grasp of ethics/philosophy as a discipline, nor seem to have sought out people who actually do those things to talk to. Me, I have never done any actual social science, I simply consume it for the purposes of what I actually do, but it never occurred to me that I could consume, let alone do, it, without a great deal of study and a fair amount of discussion with people who do it.