The Interdisciplinary Approach

In college I was a major advocate for the interdisciplinary approach. It is silly to believe life acts in the same isolation as a college major. In studying economics we did not stoop to consider human behavior or psychology, in studying public speaking we did not discourse on the morality of truth and deception, in political science we did not discuss natural resources.

I remember trying to work out with my school administration a program that would take a current events topic and present it before a panel of academics from various disciplines so they could offer a picture of how their like-minded peers would see the problem and then broaden the discussion to how those of the panel working in a cross-disciplinary manner could brainstorm a solution. I graduated before the project went anywhere.

Today I read an article where a professor suggested grad school become more interdisciplinary with students taking on a more broad and inclusive focus for their studies. Funny how I can admire an interdisciplinary approach to problem solving, yet I still hold to the value of specialization. In our current world we have an abundance of information, to expect each person to specialize in it all is unrealistic. I do not mind human beings splitting up the work to focus on parts. There is a certain fear that in looking at too small a piece of a picture you cannot find a real solution, the same way NASA has outsources pieces of its shuttles only to bring them all together to find it cannot make a working rocket. But as humans, I think we can be privy to coordination and specialization, I like to call the plan "society by posse".

If we can aggregate groups of experts targeted to specific problems with the open-mindedness to respect each others professional expertise, we can still have people with finely detailed knowledge but an overall collective which can problem solve towards the big picture. I think the National Science Foundation in its reports does a good job of this type of aggregation. It is just like I envisioned back in college. We do not need people to become generalists, we need people to communicate and coordinate, but that comes with certain costs arising from the difficulty of organization and as such must be arranged by an outside source. So those who don't want to specialize can be among the big picture generalists who aggregate specialists.

So, I have to disagree with the author of the article who wants all graduate education to become broad. After all it was a woman collecting the cute little pterapods of the sea for some completely unrelated scientific experiment who noticed they were all killed in transport due to the acidification of the small container's water with the output of their own CO2. It was she who in reporting that occurrance discovered how current CO2 emissions could acidify the ocean to the point where these creatures, the food base for the whole food chain of the sea would disappear. And that's just one of the many examples of how a focused and seemingly obscure scientific interest has re-directed the course of knowledge by accident! I simply cannot say if a group of generalists would have been able to discover that at all.