Barriers and Facilitating Strategies

Klein, Julie Thompson; Schneider, Carol Geary (Foreword by). Creating Interdisciplinary Campus Cultures: A Model for Strength and Sustainability. Hoboken, NJ, USA: Jossey-Bass, 2009. p 106 provides a host of practical advice:

· Addressing the special challenges of cross-appointments

· Advising interdisciplinary scholars on how to annotate their cv

· Recognizing that faculty development is of particular importance for the interdisciplinary scholar and suggesting various ways this might be achieved

Klein also provides

Barriers and Disincentives to Interdisciplinarity

Organizational structure and administration:

· Rigid one-size-fits-all model of organizational structure

· Discipline and department-based silos of budgetary and administrative categories

· Territoriality and turf battles over budget, ownership of curriculum, and research

· Ambiguous status of ID programs, centers, and institutes

· Piecemeal approaches

· Lack of experienced leaders

· Resistance to innovation and risk

· Dispersed infrastructure

· No clear and authoritative report lines for ID units

Procedures and policies:

· Inflexible guidelines that inhibit approval of new programs and courses

· Rigid and exclusionary degree requirements

· Lack of guidelines for ID hiring, tenure and promotion, and salary

· Inadequate guidelines for grants management and research collaboration

· Unfavorable policies for allocation of workload credit in ID teaching

· Unfavorable research policies for sharing indirect cost recovery from external grants and allocating intellectual property

Resources and infrastructure:

· Inadequate funding and ongoing support for ID units

· Inadequate number of faculty lines for interdisciplinary studies (IDS) and IDR

· Restricted access to internal incentives and seed funds for ID research and curriculum development

· Competition for funds and faculty between departments and ID units

· Inadequate or no ID student assistantships and fellowships

· Inadequate space and equipment and inflexible allotments of use

· Weak or no faculty development system

· Ignorance of ID literature and resources in national networks

· Insufficient time for planning and implementing program and project infrastructure

· Insufficient time to learn the language and culture of another discipline

· Insufficient time to develop collaborative relationships in team teaching and research

Recognition, reward, and incentives:

· Invisibility and marginality of ID research, teaching, service, advising, and mentoring

· Reliance on volunteerism and overload

· Weak networking channels and communication forums

· Ineligibility of ID work for awards, honors, incentives, and faculty development programs

· Lack of support at department, college, or university levels

· Negative bias against ID work

Facilitating Strategies and Mechanisms for Interdisciplinarity

Organizational structure, administration, and policies:

· Alternative administrative structures:

· Program-level control of budget and infrastructure

· Report lines with designated responsibilities

· Procedures for course and program approval, research management

· Policies for hiring, tenure and promotion, salary, and merit

· Policies for research and teaching evaluation, program review, learning assessment

· Openness to innovation and tolerance for risk

· Alignment of interdisciplinarity with strategic plan themes

· Timely interface between new research developments and the entire curriculum

· Inventory of activities, structures, and interests

Leadership, advocacy, and stewardship:

· Top administrative support at the level of president, provost, and deans

· Central oversight body for ID research and education

· A central ID website

· Annual forum for directors of programs, centers, and institutes

· Strong and experienced leaders

· Unit-level advisory boards of internal and external stakeholders

Funding:

· Baseline funding for IDS and IDR units

· Dedicated tenure-track faculty lines and stable appointments in programs and centers

· Cross-department budgeting mechanisms

· Flexible resources at the department level

· Seed funding through internal special initiatives and regular programs

· Systematic identification of external sources

· Equitable credit allocations for team teaching, indirect cost recovery on external grants

· Alignment of interdisciplinarity with capital campaigns at both campus and unit levels

Infrastructure support:

· Dedicated space for IDS and IDR units

· Pooling and sharing of space, facilities, and equipment

· ID design principles for new buildings and remodeling projects

· Communication system for collaboration and information flow

· Release time for program and project development in teaching and research

· Faculty development programming (including graduate students and postdoctoral fellows)

· Resource banking of ID resources and literatures

Recognition:

· Visibility on central ID website

· Visibility in the public face of a campus (for example, materials, advising, and recruiting system)

· Counting service for committee work, mentoring, and thesis and dissertation advising