Interdisciplinary

An open university is very careful to avoid what Ortega (1930) calls “The Barbarism of ‘Specialisation.’”  While a learner does need depth of learning in their specific discipline, they also need a wide breadth of knowledge, and an open university with its abilities to deliver in multiple modes and variability of faculty in alternative structures, can best deliver such.  Interdisciplinary study does not simply refer to offering general education courses. Interdisciplinary requires modeling interdisciplinary thinking at an institutional level.  It features courses team taught across disciplines as well as programs of study that cross lines and siloes.  This is not only an academic advantage, but in this millennium, a requirement. As John Kao (2007) notes in Innovation Nation, the world today faces “Wicked Problems.”  These are problems which require the thinking and approach of multiple disciplines.  An issue like world population is social, political, scientific, agricultural; in short, virtually every discipline has a place in confronting the challenge.  A student locked into one discipline may not be able to understand the relationships of complex solutions, or be able to participate in their development.  Multiple thinkers cited over the course of this work, ranging from Thorp and Goldstein, Kao and James Duderstadt (2002), all agree that the higher educational institution of this millenium must be interdisciplinary.

Werner Hirsch sees interdisciplinarity as being a key to higher education assuming its appropriate place in the world; however, they will have to take the appropriate actions and make the appropriate cultural modifications to make that happen.  He writes: “Universities will have to perfect new mechanisms, at times even to adjust their structures to become effective participants and even more pivotal key players.  Particularly they must provide incentives to facilitate and nourish creative collaboration in teaching and provide opportunities for cross-fertilization.  At the same time, they must create an understanding among their students of the merits and efficacy of an interdisciplinary education” (Hirsch 2002).  The State University of New York already has this mechanism in the form of Empire State College.  The college facilitates and nourishes creative collaboration in teaching.  The School for Graduate Studies, in its program development has focused specifically on cross fertilization by developing in regions of overlap to build on faculty strength, and then hiring into those cross-fertilized areas allowing a further step in development and evolution to build on those strengths and then to gradually expand and continue into new areas and follow new paths.

The interdisciplinarity which Hirsch addresses ties back to Kao’s ideas on wicked problems and innovation noted at the start of this section; Hirsch writes: “as challenges facing society become increasingly complex, multidimensional, and multi-faceted, education must stimulate horizontal, thematic thinking and exploration.  Emphasis on interdisciplinary curricula and research is thus in order.”