UIS: University of Interdisciplinary Studies

The time has arrived for a University of Interdisciplinary Studies. This will be the University of Future, at least for Graduate and Ph D studies.

We keep reading of the need for an interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary approach to studying certain problems. Significantly, this need for interdisciplinary approach has enveloped both the natural and social sciences and humanities, as most phenomena are an amalgam of many facets of many factors. The realisation is there, the resources are there. It just needs organising.

This is a challenging task as universities are organised around specific subject-departments. It is not simply a matter of taxonomy (although this too is an issue) but budgets for projects, some of which may involve lab or field work. If the University of Interdisciplinary Studies has to succeed (assuming it is established), it will need a change in the way sponsoring agencies or organisations approach funding projects. Anyone who has even cursory knowledge of the functioning of academic and research institutions understands that this could be a Herculean task.

The challenge goes beyond this. The intellectual resources required for setting up such a future university are already available, whatever be the focus area. Let us take an example from the field of computing, specifically machine learning. Many students taking to the subject at Graduate studies seem to be ignorant of its foundation in Statistics and are on a discovery path for what are well-established concepts and methodologies. Or consider Natural language programming (or processing), organised under the department of computing in some universities or the department of language technology. The grounding of such a discipline is in the study of language and linguistics (which is not the same), both extremely developed disciplines (and continue to develop). The curious aspect is that many of them develop some ‘original’ work on language, when this is common knowledge among students of language and linguistics.

Much the same is true of the study of history, which, as many great historians have pointed out, now combines insights from several other disciplines such as economics, sociology, anthropology to mention a few. The historians of the future will also have to adept at technology. Or law for that matter – legal philosophy, to be precise.

In a sense, this will be a return to the past, when many disciplines were a whole before being sundered under various rubrics – from biology to cellular biology, molecular biology, synthetic biology, system approach to biology and so on. The rubrics will not disappear but the dimensions that get missed out can be salvaged from the beginning as an overhanging informing atmosphere. Someone might say this is what a systems approach brings in but we are talking of a single subject which proliferated into many.

It is certainly possible. It is a matter of organising the vast amounts of information and research along these lines. Historical evidence suggests that most intellectual breakthroughs tend to swing the pendulum from one extreme to another. With a conscious effort, we can control the pendulum from swinging too far away to waste prior intellectual development. We don’t have to repeat what has gone before. We can always be different.

(LinkedIn, March 26, 2020)

Takeaways

A Graduate university of interdisciplinary studies

Time has come

Resources for such an institution are available

Organizing is all that is required