Lubomir:

 

As always, I appreciate your posts because you tend to look at things from a
broader perspective than most. 

 

While some seem to have labeled your call for a new organization of science
("In brief, I would mention that one approach is to organize science not by
disciplines and then search for a way to stick them, but to organize science
around problem situations.) a pie in the sky, it is actually something that
is being undertaken at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  There seems to
be a general acceptance on campus that the traditional "disciplines" are
outmoded, but that instead of creating new disciplines and killing old
disciplines, it might be better to kill the system and create a new system
(which I think is what you are calling for).

 

Someone I do not recall suggested this illustration, which I have tailored
to the situation:

Old academia defines success by how deep you drill, regardless of how small
your hole is.  New academia defines success by how well you have been able
to show ways that the contents of the hole that you have dug add to the
larger picture of understanding about what is buried.  This tends to
encourage wider, shallower holes that overlap other people's holes.

 

Much of the discussion lately has seemed to address identity and what
happens to that identity as scholars begin to work multidisciplinarily.  On
campus here, rather than creating new departments for what seem to be
emerging disciplines, scholars often keep their administrative identities
within an academic unit closest to their training, while they develop a
scholarly identity within the "new" discipline that is organized as a
cluster or center.  That means that when working on a multidisciplinary
problem as a designer or design researcher I do not have to become an
anthropologist or a chemist to work with scholars with high expertise in
other fields.  Identity is at two levels - by your relationship to a
"problem situation" and by your relationship to your "traditional"
discipline.

 

While this may still sound like a pie in the sky to some, it becomes a lot
more real when an institution has the intellectual resources and money to
make a go of it.  Among other things, the University of Wisconsin's research
foundation holds key patents for genetics research, which generate an
incredible amount of resources.  Wisconsin also grants a huge number of
PhD's (and they are not easy to get here), so whatever culture exists on
campus is being spread across the world.

 

Just one example is a new interdisciplinary Wisconsin Institute for
Discovery that is getting ready to break ground, started with $150 million
in funding for the building and facilities.  A call for startup grants for
researchers  says the goal is "Creating a foundation for fundamental
understanding and transformation of biological and biomedical research as
informed by physical sciences, arts and humanities, social sciences and
biological sciences is a key objective of the seed grant initiative."
http://pubs.civc.wisc.edu/12524

This represents major resources being expended to create a critical mass of
researchers who can organize around your "problem situations" rather than
traditional disciplines.  

 

Note also that "Arts and Humanities" is part of the target population of
researchers for the Institute for Discovery.  While engineers might have
been able to fabricate a typewriter relatively quickly, there are more and
more people acknowledging that creative ideas comes from those who are
trained to create ideas.

 

 

Pardon what may sound like boosterism to some, but even someone as cynical
as me is impressed by any serious attempt to change the entire culture of
academia.  

 

MSC

 

 

M.S.C. Nelson

Assistant Professor

Environment, Textiles and Design

University of Wisconsin-Madison

Room 235

1300 Linden Drive

Madison, WI 53706

608-261-1003