Interdisciplinary Administration

The modern university has generally developed with a disciplinary structure. This makes it difficult to create or administer interdisciplinary teaching programs or research centres. Yet the success of interdisciplinary teaching and research depend critically on appropriate administrative structures and practices.

Several recent books and articles have addressed issues of university administration. We provide here an overview of the advice provided in these various works:

What Works and What Doesn't

Some Administrative Guidelines

Considerations for Institutional Evaluation and Strategy

Hiring and Career Progress

Transformative Strategies

Barriers and Facilitating Strategies

Facilitating Research Collaboration

We intend over time to add pages with narrower foci, such as "advantages and disadvantages of cross-appointments," "managing interdisciplinary research centres," and "managing interdisciplinary research grants."

Julie Thompson Klein, "The state of the field: Institutionalization of interdisciplinarity," Issues in Interdisciplinary Studies 31 (2013), surveys the present state of interdisciplinary institutionalization. She discusses the need to make interdisciplinary structures explicit. She also urges universities to appreciate institutionally the more complex nature of the contemporary academy. She surveys the efforts to professionalize interdisciplinarity through the efforts of AIS and several kindred organizations.

Jamila Razzaq, Tony Townsend, and John Pisapia, "Towards an understanding of interdisciplinarity: The case of a British university, Issues in Interdisciplinary Studies 31 (2013) " report that administrators and professors are often confused about the nature of interdisciplinarity and thus how best to institutionalize it. [We hope this website and the works it introduces will reduce this level of confusion and thus support better institutions.]

Julie Thompson Klein provides a Coaching and Training Module for Transcending Institutional Barriers, and also a Coaching and Training Module Regarding Tenure and Promotion.

Didier Wernli and Frédéric Darbellay, "Interdisciplinarity and the 21st century research-intensive university" (November 2016), a League of European Research Universities Position Paper, provides numerous recommendations for interdisciplinary administration. See: https://www.leru.org/publications/interdisciplinarity-and-the-21st-century-research-intensive-university

Dan Stokols and colleagues had a blog post for i2S in February 2019 that described critical institutional supports for team science. https://i2insights.org/2019/02/19/team-science-ecosystem/