Rackham Graduate School - University of Michigan

adj. Of, relating to, or involving two or more academicdisciplines that are usually considered distinct.– The American Heritage DictionaryThe idea of lowering the barsbetween disciplines is notnew, but in many ways it’solder than the idea of separatingknowledge into disciplines inthe first place. “More and more, aswe move into the late modern age,we’ve come to realize that somehowit’s time to put the pieces backtogether.” says Earl Lewis, Dean ofthe Graduate School. “There havealways been little nodes within theacademy where people came togetherto wrestle with questions. You see itin scholarly journals—eight peoplepublishing a common article.”What differentiates the Universityof Michigan from its peers in thisregard is the extent to which interdisciplinarityhas been not onlyembraced but also institutionalized.The list of programs, courses and initiativesthat formally incorporatesome degree of multidisciplinaryresearch and teaching is a long one,including women’s studies, African-American studies, bioengineering,neuroscience, the American culturedoctoral program, a joint program insocial work and the social sciences, anew interdisciplinary mathematicsprogram, a master’s program infinancial engineering that straddlesthe College of Engineering and theBusiness School, the RackhamInterdisciplinary Lectures, and theRackham Summer InterdisciplinaryInstitute.6“External reviewers always notethe range of interdisciplinarity onthis campus and how unique it is,”says Lewis. “The University ofMichigan probably stands at the endof the spectrum in terms of the numberof faculty and even graduate studentswho are interested in someaspect of interdisciplinary training,teaching and research.”An historian himself, Lewis findsdeep roots for this phenomenon.“Part of it has to do with the makeupof the various departments where,structurally, it has been possible tohave joint appointments,” he says.“In the history department, my owndepartment, half the faculty havejoint appointments with other units,and some of us with more than one.Throughout LS&A, you see moreand more faculty with joint appointments.That increases the likelihoodthat faculty and graduate studentswill live in more than one space oncampus, and that they’ll invite colleaguesfrom outside the university toinhabit those spaces, too, as guestlecturers and so on. There’s also thissense here that we want to rewardgood ideas and opportunities thatforce faculty and students to thinkout of the box, and that also encouragesa certain kind of interdisciplinaryapproach.”Dr. Jonathan Metzl has been out ofthe box for some time now. Heearned a bachelor’s in English as wellas his MD in a six-year program atthe University of Missouri-KansasCity, picked up a master’s in humanitiesduring his psychiatry residencyat Stanford, then came to U-M topursue a doctorate in the Program inAmerican Culture, meanwhile seeingpatients two days a week and teachingin the women’s studies program.He was also co-director with CarolHorn, Associate Professor of Nursingand Women’s Studies, of theRackham Summer InterdisciplinaryInstitute.“There’s just the atmosphere herefor creating those kinds of links,” hesays. “That’s not to say there aren’tgreat bureaucratic hurdles to getover, especially dealing with bodiesas diverse as the Medical School andLS&A, but people’s open-mindednessto that is really remarkable here,and it’s also institutionally supported,which makes a huge difference.Everybody everywhere is ‘interestedin interdisciplinarity,’ but putting astructure in place where people arerewarded for it and encouraged to doit makes it a much more valid undertaking.My sense is that, at otherinstitutions, the message is that interdisciplinarityis something you cando after you’ve gotten tenure and aresafely tucked away some place.That’s when you can dabble in otherthings. Treating it as a from-theground-upundertaking makes it amore powerful discourse and morebroadly interactive.”