When I used to think about interdisciplinarity, especially last semester, I would think of it with vast enthusiasm. Though I didn’t have a term for it back then, I remember being floored each time I connected one course to another. I felt that I was accumulating a wealth of transcendent knowledge as some themes didn’t seem to be able to contain themselves to one discipline, but instead were woven throughout them all.
With the mysticism of my realizations dissolved and a newfound term to understand these inter-class connections, I was no less enamored with interdisciplinarity this semester than I was last semester. But I’m coming to realize that being irresponsibly enamored with a connection between disciplines can be just as dangerous as we have learned it to be with other human beings.
My enamor comes from my lack of understanding of interdisciplinarity, especially its drawbacks. In Interdisciplinarity, Moran quotes Hal Foster who writes, “To be interdisciplinary you need to be disciplinary first – to be grounded in one discipline, preferably two, to know the historicity of these discourses before you test them against each other” (167). This idea sparked my memory about a fundamental idea behind Graff’s and Birkenstein’s “they say / I say” model—that to give an argument in context, we first need to fully understand the reasoning we are building off of. If not, our assertions are random, unthoughtful, and un-disciplined.
Discipline is an important quality for students to cultivate. Without discipline, we cannot finish work on time, do well on assignments, or effectively reflect on what we’ve learned. Having a specific discipline, or major, allows us to pursue it to an end, as it were (though every student knows that academia is endless) and forces us to specialize and master one area of thought. When we spend disciplined time mastering one major, we will be much more knowledgeable in our responses about our discipline than if we spent our time split amongst several disciplines. Just as we cannot respond to an argument we don’t understand, we cannot think we have the knowledge to effectively discuss and fully understand across disciplines.
It seems that interdisciplinarity is in style. I recently stumbled across someone’s Instagram whose bio read ‘jack of all trades, master of none’, and it seemed there may be something liberating about such an easygoing way of being. Maybe interdisciplinarity has always been in style. ‘Renaissance man,’ certainly, is no new term, and the world frequently praises those who know a little about a lot more than they who know a lot about a little (read: hyper-specialized professors whose work can be understood only by a few).
Interdisciplinarity is an important facet of academia and it is difficult to deny its need in a university setting. Without it, disciplines are more susceptible to hierarchy, learned intellectuals are ignorant about the world past their discipline, and there is empty space where healthy and informative cross-conversation should be taking place. However, romanticizing interdisciplinary study is dangerous. It allows students to believe they understand the canons of other disciplines, to speak from a place of ignorance about the world, and to make false assumptions—which is arguably the most dangerous aspect. I’m beginning to learn that romanticizing interdisciplinarity is dangerous because it leads me to think that perhaps I am a jack of all trades when in actuality I am a budding amateur of one.