University Experiments in Interdisciplinarity: Obstacles and Opportunities [1. Aufl.] 9783839426166

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Peter Weingart, Britta Padberg (eds.) University Experiments in Interdisciplinarity

Peter Weingart, Britta Padberg (eds.)

University Experiments in Interdisciplinarity Obstacles and Opportunities

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de © 2014 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover layout: Kordula Röckenhaus, Bielefeld Proofread and Typeset: Mo Tschache, Bielefeld Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar ISBN 978-3-8376-2616-2

Table of Contents

Interdisciplinarity Again … or Still?

Peter Weingart, Britta Padberg | 7

I.

Interdisciplinarity in Teaching and Research

Towards Interdisciplinarity by Design in the American Research University

Michael M. Crow, William B. Dabars | 13 Liberal Arts and Sciences in the Netherlands— Development and Relation to Interdisciplinary Education

Louis Boon | 37 Between a Program-Oriented Approach and Commitment to One’s Discipline: The Experimental Merger of Different Research Cultures at KIT

Armin Grunwald | 49 The Foundation of KIT within the Context of the Science System—A Provocation in Science Policy

Dennis Nitsche | 69 A Place Apart: Opportunities in Developing Leuphana University of Lüneburg

Sascha Spoun, Christian Kölzer | 81 The Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF)— Epistemic and Institutional Considerations

Britta Padberg | 95

II. Interdisciplinarity as a Guiding Principle for Universities “Cross the Border, Close the Gap”—Reinventing the University as an Interdisciplinary Enterprise

Wolfgang Marquardt, Thorsten Wilhelmy | 117 Opportunities and Obstacles of University Reforms: Cluster Building and its Problems—From the Perspective of University Leadership

Uwe Schimank | 135 Interdisciplinarity and the New Governance of Universities

Peter Weingart | 151 The End of Disciplinarity

Robert Frodeman | 175 About the Authors | 199

Interdisciplinarity Again … or Still? P ETER W EINGART

AND

B RITTA P ADBERG

Interdisciplinarity, the need for it, its uses, how to realize it, why it fails—these and related issues naturally concern the Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF) which is committed to promote it in its research program. When the 100th anniversary of its founder’s (Helmut Schelsky’s) birthday came closer and with it the question how to most fittingly commemorate it, we decided on an academic rather than a purely laudatory format; namely, to once again address problems of interdisciplinarity. In contrast to previous occasions when requisite meetings were concerned with the institutional conditions conducive to interdisciplinary research at universities and research institutes—or at the ZiF itself—this time we wanted to take a closer look at the organizational barriers to interdisciplinarity in universities and models that stand out for having overcome these barriers. The timeliness of this slight shift of focus is suggested by the fact that, e.g., in Germany in the wake of the so-called “excellence initiative,” the political call for interdisciplinary structures has met with reform efforts by several universities. Incidentally, a number of them consist of the foundation of interdisciplinary institutes for advanced studies. But also beyond the German experience the specific problem of organizational obstacles has been addressed in other countries as well, above all in the US

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where the National Academy of Science (NAS) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) have given considerable attention to the issue. Thus, this collection of essays is the product of a conference held in April 2012 under the title “Giving Meaning to Interdisciplinarity in the Organization of Universities—A Symposium on the Occasion of Helmut Schelsky’s 100th Birthday.” Contributions were thoroughly rewritten in reaction to comments at the meeting. Two, one by Armin Grunwald, another by Britta Padberg were solicited afterwards. This book stands in the continuity of two previous publications that were produced under the auspices of the ZiF. The first, “Interdisziplinarität,” edited by Jürgen Kocka and published in 1987, focused mainly on the special features of the ZiF and their relevance for interdisciplinary research within its own confines. The second, “Practicing Interdisciplinarity,” edited by Peter Weingart and Nico Stehr, assembled the contributions from two conferences, one at the ZiF in 1995 (Centers for Interdisciplinary Research—A Model for Institutional Innovation in Science in Europe) and the second (Practicing Interdisciplinarity) at the then newly founded Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at Vancouver in 1997. As the titles indicate, these conferences and books respectively focused on examples of the actual practice of interdisciplinary research at universities and institutes. This book, then, is the third, focusing on model institutions. The crucial questions almost two decades after the look at the practice of interdisciplinarity are now: to what extent scientific disciplines still play a dominant role in the structure of universities, how and under which conditions they can and are being replaced by new structures and what are the specific obstacles to the realization of interdisciplinarity at universities? The publication consists of two parts: In the first part, different models of interdisciplinary structures at German, American and Dutch universities are presented. Some of them comprise new structures for interdisciplinary education (Leuphana University Lüneburg, Maastricht University). Others are focused on interdisciplinary research (Karlsruhe Institute for Technology (KIT), Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF)) and the additional ones aim to implement interdiscipli-

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narity as a guiding institutional principle for the entire university (Arizona State University). The second part reflects on the context and effects of the growing importance of interdisciplinary structures at universities. How is the current development stimulated and regulated by science policy (Marquardt/Wilhelmy)? How can the university leadership deal with challenges resulting from new grown interdisciplinary structures within disciplinary universities (Schimank)? Are interdisciplinary structures more capable to face rising expectations by society than disciplinary structures are (Weingart)? And does the disciplinary mode of academic knowledge production come to its end (Frodeman)? This publication would not have been possible without the gentle support of the Marga und Kurt Möllgaard-Stiftung im Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft and the ZiF. We also thank Mo Tschache for preparing the texts for print and Marc Weingart for polishing editing.

Toward Interdisciplinarity by Design in the American Research University M ICHAEL M. C ROW

AND

W ILLIAM B. D ABARS

The establishment of Bielefeld University in 1969 as an interdisciplinarily structured new “reform” university reflects a vanguard approach to institutional design that contrasts sharply with the entrenchment of most American colleges and universities in conventional disciplinary academic organization. The Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Forschung (ZiF), or Center for interdisciplinary Research—modeled on the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, New Jersey, and comprising the nucleus of the university—has deservedly been termed the “premier example” of an interdisciplinary “think tank” (Klein 1990, 48). Its centrality within the institutional matrix underscores the incisiveness and foresight of Helmut Schelsky and his colleagues who perceived the transformative potential of an inherently interdisciplinary structure for knowledge enterprises. The prescience of their conception is further underscored by its precedence in relation to the groundswell of interest in the various forms of interdisciplinary inquiry and collaboration that would follow in succeeding decades, an impetus that too often would meet with inertia and resistance from an academic culture attuned to disciplinary processes and practices. The university they envisaged epitomizes the requirements for the optimal advancement of knowledge

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specified by Jonathan Cole, provost emeritus of Columbia University, in his important recent monograph on the American research university: “Almost all truly distinguished universities create a seamless web of cognitive influence among the individual disciplines that affects the quality of the whole” (Cole 2009, 5). With simultaneous pressures impelling scholarship toward increasing specialization on the one hand, and greater synthesis, integration, or convergence on the other, the implications of the organizational context of knowledge within the complex matrix of a research university are not always readily apparent. Insufficient focus is typically devoted to an appreciation of the reflexive relationship between knowledge and its organizational context and thus also the role of institutional design in the advancement of interdisciplinarity. Many would dismiss a critique of conventional academic organization, epitomized by an articulation of the limitations of the congruence between academic disciplines and departments, as mere quibbling over the disposition of the requisite bureaucratic substratum that undergirds epistemological superstructures. Organizational theorists John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid capture the essence of this disregard for organizational context: “In a society that attaches particular value to ‘abstract knowledge,’ the details of practice have come to be seen as nonessential, unimportant, and easily developed once the relevant abstractions have been grasped” (Brown and Duguid 1991, 40). Yet the implementation of any institutional platform is inherently the product of a sequence of decisions that cumulatively determine its structure and functions. Following the theory of “structuration” articulated by Anthony Giddens, we observe that knowledge, organizational structure, and social relations are intrinsically interrelated (Giddens 1984, 25). And to an extent insufficiently appreciated, organizational structure could be said to be determined by a “design process.” The concept of the “design process” is itself often overlooked or taken for granted. In his explication of the concept, the computer scientist Frederick P. Brooks paraphrases the definition of the verb “design” found in the Oxford English Dictionary to underscore its implicit im-

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perative for planning prior to implementation: “To form a plan or scheme of, to arrange or conceive in the mind for subsequent execution” (Brooks 2010, 4). The process of institutional design may thus be construed as “design science,” following the articulation of the concept of the “sciences of the artificial” by the polymath Herbert A. Simon. In his expansive usage, everyone is a designer who “devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.” While the natural sciences are concerned with how things are, as he puts it, the artificial sciences focus on with how things ought to be. Design determines the form of that which we build, whether tools or farms or our organizations and institutions (Simon 1996, 1-24). There is thus no reason why the design or reconceptualization of an institution or organization cannot represent a process as focused and deliberate and precise as the work undertaken by scientists, engineers, and other scholars. Despite broad consensus regarding the imperative for inter- or transdisciplinary approaches to inquiry and scholarship, the relationship between institutional design and the advancement of knowledge in the American research university is often regarded as nothing more than a mere perfunctory administrative decision. But inasmuch as the design of our knowledge enterprises is not merely adventitious to the advancement of knowledge, we contend that university administrators and academicians should balance consideration of the epistemological dimension of intellectual culture with its administrative and sociocultural dimensions. As the sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein points out, the academic disciplines are “three things simultaneously... intellectual categories—modes of asserting that there exists a defined field of study with some kind of boundaries, however disputed or fuzzy, and some agreed-upon modes of legitimate research. … The disciplines are in addition institutional structures that since the late nineteenth century have taken on ever more elaborate forms. … Finally, the disciplines are cultures” (Wallerstein 2003, 453). We must consider institutional structure as well as epistemological content in the academic process because optimal design, especially when construed interdisciplinarily,

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facilitates teaching and research. We must organize for collaboration across disciplines in order to establish the preconditions essential to discovery, creativity, and innovation, as well as constructive social and economic outcomes (Crow and Dabars 2013). An appreciation of the implications of the organizational context of knowledge derives from reference to more than a half-century of empirical study and theoretical analysis, beginning with pioneering work by Thomas S. Kuhn. The recognition that “science is a social formation amenable to sociological investigation” has been traced not only to Kuhn but such figures as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jean-François Lyotard, and Richard Rorty (Miller and Fox 2001, 668-669). Robert K. Merton provided a conceptualization of “socio-cognitive networks” that underscores the importance of a researcher’s milieu in understanding and contextualizing discovery (Merton 1973). Derek J. de Solla Price brought historical perspective to assessments of social networks associated with research frontiers as well as quantitative approaches to an analysis of the proliferation of scientific publications (Price 1986, 103134; 1965, 510-515). Because it would be superfluous here to attempt an exhaustive chronicle of the many possible paradigms for inquiry and organizational models, the mere few examples adduced must be taken to suggest the extent available from the sociology of science, organizational theory, and social network analysis. The context for our discussion of institutional design is the set of American research universities, which uniquely combine the functions of teaching, research, and public service. Roughly one hundred universities in the United States, both public and private, are classified as major research institutions in the categorization established by the Carnegie Foundation for Higher Education, while approximately one hundred additional with less extensive research portfolios comprise a second research-grade level.1 While the research sector is largely distinct

1

The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching designates institutions formerly termed “research-extensive” as either RU/VH (“research university/very high research activity”) or RU/H (high research ac-

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from higher education in many nations, the American research university integrates undergraduate and graduate instruction with its research enterprise. As exemplars of national systems with parallel and differentiated research sectors that compete with universities, Richard C. Atkinson and William Blanpied cite Germany, where the eighty institutes of the Max Planck Society, and France, where the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), respectively comprise each nation’s foremost research organization (Atkinson and Blanpied 2008, 41-43). Moreover, public and private universities in the United States alike enjoy relative autonomy and are free to shape their institutional identities as well as their respective mission, values, organization, operations, and practices. The U.S. Department of Education does not function in the manner of most state ministries in this context, which exercise the authority to determine policy as well as the allocation of resources for instruction and research (Paradeise et al. 2009). The decentralization and relative lack of regulation that has characterized the American approach thus stands in marked contrast to the centralized national administration of higher education found throughout much of the world.2 The reflexive relationship between knowledge and its organizational context is nowhere more critically instantiated than in the institutionalization of disciplinarity and inter- or transdisciplinarity in our research universities. Whether one focuses on disciplinary genealogies or interdisciplinary confluence, an understanding of the dynamics that determine their institutionalization and dissemination requires an appreciation of their institutional embeddedness.3 The traditional correlation

2 3

tivity). For a discussion of the methodology, involving both aggregate and per capita levels of research expenditures, see http://classifications. carnegiefoundation.org/methodology/basic.php (last accessed August 12, 2013). For a discussion of the model of the American research university in a global context, see Crow and Dabars 2012. For an extended discussion of the trajectory of the institutionalization of interdisciplinarity in the American research university, see Dabars 2008.

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between academic disciplines and departments—or units termed centers, institutes, schools, and colleges—remains the basis for academic organization and administration in the American research university. In this context, James J. Duderstadt, president emeritus of the University of Michigan, perceives the “deification of the disciplines,” which through departmental structures “continue to dominate the modern university, developing curriculum, marshaling resources, administering programs, and doling out rewards” (Duderstadt 2000, 120-121). The sociologist Andrew Abbott similarly observes that because of their “extraordinary ability to organize individual careers, faculty hiring, and undergraduate education,” disciplinary departments appear to be the “essential and irreplaceable building blocks” of American academia (Abbott 2001, 126-128). The intrinsic impetus to advance new knowledge distinguishes research universities from other institutional platforms in higher education, but entrenched design limitations obstruct their potential to advance discovery and innovation. Rather than exploring new paradigms for inquiry, academia too often restricts its focus to existing organizational models. We seem to assume that our institutions have as a matter of course been optimally structured and moreover inherently calibrated not only to promote effective teaching and research but also to seek knowledge with purpose and link useful knowledge with action for the common good. Leaving aside urgent concerns regarding equity and access, the persistence of disciplinary partitioning in our estimation represents one of the most critical design limitations to the further evolution of research universities (Crow 2010b). Perpetuation of discipline-based departments corresponds to an academic culture that prizes individualism over teamwork and the discovery of specialized knowledge over problem-based collaboration. Institutional design to advance interdisciplinarity promises new ways of shaping and examining problems and advancing interaction between heterogeneous groups, programs, and initiatives, which also facilitates applied research initiatives that often require large-scale team efforts to address complex and intractable problems. The well-known call to

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action issued by the National Academies regarding the imperative for interdisciplinary collaboration and problem-driven research, Facilitating Interdisciplinary Research, envisions “scientists, engineers, social scientists, and humanists ... addressing complex problems that must be attacked simultaneously with deep knowledge from different perspectives.” The committees drafting the report called for new “structural models” to “stimulate new modes of inquiry and break down the conceptual and institutional barriers to interdisciplinary research that could yield significant benefits to science and society” and experimentation with “substantial alteration of the traditional academic structures or even replacement with new structures and models to reduce barriers” to interdisciplinary research (CFIR and COSEPUP 2005, ix, xi, 17). The differentiation of knowledge enterprises through their inter- or transdisciplinary reconfiguration facilitates their integration into coordinated and synergistic networks, thus expanding their potential to offer multiple solutions and exert greater impact across broader swathes of knowledge. If we are to advance knowledge on a requisite scale in real time toward desired social and economic outcomes, collaboration must be construed not only transdisciplinarily but also transinstitutionally and transnationally. Only an amalgamation of transdisciplinary, transinstitutional, and transnational frameworks has the potential to advance broader social and economic outcomes. When engaged transinstitutionally, the “Triple Helix” of university-industry-government innovation described by the economist Henry Etzkowitz (2008, 1) enables the formation of knowledge networks, which inevitably interconnect and leverage respective knowledge bases from diverse inherently multidisciplinary perspectives. The development of ties with business and industry and government agencies in turn invigorates national innovation systems (Niosi et al. 1993). The objective in all cases should be to engender “perpetual innovation” (Kash 1989). If the structure of an organization or institution is inimical to its purposes and functions, its design must be radically reconsidered. And if academic units commensurate to the resolution of a given challenge or problem do not already exist, appropriate new units must be configured.

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Novel interdisciplinary configurations—what are in a sense institutional “experiments”—possess the potential to reveal new paradigms for knowledge production, organization, and application. An amalgamation of researchers representing different disciplines or interdisciplines may even begin or remain resolutely multidisciplinary. But any such experimental formation has the potential to address complex challenges or even engender the speciation of differentiated new fields. In some cases the exhaustive reconceptualization of an institution undertaken in order to remediate design limitations requires “massive change,” a concept we adapt from the designer and design theorist Bruce Mau, who together with his colleague Jennifer Leonard invoke the imperative for interdisciplinarity and elaborate that “advanced design today is dominated by three ideas: distributed, plural, and collaborative” (Mau and Leonard 2004, 16-17).

SOME HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE ON INSTITUTIONAL DESIGN TO IMPLEMENT INTERDISCIPLINARITY The innovative character of the conception for institutional organization at Bielefeld University is attested by its emergence in near contemporaneity with the first international conference on interdisciplinarity, which convened at the Université de Nice, September 7–12, 1970, and to a remarkable extent largely established the contemporary context for subsequent discussion of interdisciplinary teaching and research. Organized by the Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) in collaboration with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the French Ministry of Higher Education (Ministère de l’Enseignement Supérieur et de la Recherche), the “Seminar on Interdisciplinarity in Universities” put the subject on the agenda of academic institutions. The conference proceedings were published in an influential report, edited by an interna-

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tional committee of scholars, from Belgium, France, and England (Apostel et al. 1972), the latter of which proved to be particularly receptive to its recommendations (Squires 1992, 205-210). While the Center for interdisciplinary Research (ZiF) is said to be modeled on the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton—Björn Wittrock, director of the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences (SCASSS), suggests other prototypes, including All Souls College, Oxford University, and the Collège de France (Wittrock 2002)—its lineage may be traced to other organizational and institutional sources conceived interdisciplinarily as well. Leaving aside the many historical exemplars of knowledge networks, organizations, and institutions that brought scientists and scholars from diverse disciplines together—one need only think of the networks of scholars that the pioneering seventeenth-century chemist and “natural philosopher” Robert Boyle termed “invisible colleges,” with reference to his peers in the Royal Society of London (Price 1986, viii–ix) to appreciate the extent to which historical prototypes for collaboration across disciplines abound—the formation of ZiF represents an important organizational development since it sought from its inception to advance the comprehensive institutional implementation of interdisciplinarity. Leaving aside as outside the scope of the present discussion the institutional accommodation of the disciplines and interdisciplines of the natural sciences and fields of technology, which certainly remain the enduring and overarching prototypes for interdisciplinary speciation and collaboration—one need only adduce the multidisciplinarity of the Manhattan Project to glimpse the extent to which scientific discovery and technological innovation serve as sources of inspiration in this context—the short list of organizational or institutional prototypes for interdisciplinary organization in contemporary academic culture in the social sciences and humanities begins as recently as the decade of the 1920s when, according to Abbott, the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) focused conceptually on the objective of “eliminating barriers between the social sciences.” He quotes the following passage from their 1934 ten-year retrospective report:

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The Council has felt a primary concern with the inter-discipline or interstitial project for the reason that new insights into social phenomena, new problems, new methods leading to advances in the scientific quality of social investigation, cross-fertilization of the social disciplines, were thought more likely to emerge here than from work in the center of established fields where points of view and problems and methodology have become relatively fixed.4

And in 1935, to cite a closely contemporaneous exemplar of this impetus, the president and fellows of Harvard University established the University Professorships, chairs intended for “individuals of distinction … working on the frontiers of knowledge, and in such a way as to cross the conventional boundaries of the specialties.”5 But frustration with disciplinary limitations had led to a more comprehensive organizational reconfiguration at another institution a decade earlier. Syracuse University established the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs in 1924 to offer graduate professional education in public administration and international relations and graduate degrees in the social sciences, including political science, economics, and history.6 Another leading example of interdisciplinary configuration in the social sciences and humanities is the celebrated Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, instituted in 1941 by then president Robert M. Hutchins. With “primary themes” of literature, philosophy, history, religion, art, politics, and society, “the Committee differs from the normal department in that it has no

4 5

6

Social Science Research Council 1934, cited by Abbott 2001, 131–132. According to the Harvard University General Catalogue: “By vote of the President and Fellows on June 19, 1935, a plan was adopted for the establishment of new professorships for individuals of distinction not definitely attached to any particular department, and these were to be known as University Professorships. It was proposed to reserve these new chairs for individuals working on the frontiers of knowledge, and in such a way as to cross the conventional boundaries of the specialties.” Official Register of Harvard University 14, no. 9 (August 29, 1991). http://maxwell.syr.edu/deans (last accessed August 12, 2013).

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specific subject matter and is organized neither in terms of a single intellectual discipline nor around any specific interdisciplinary focus.”7 A more recent aggregation of the social sciences, the short-lived Department of Social Relations at Harvard University, merging social anthropology, social psychology, and sociology, dissolved with the retirement of its founder, Talcott Parsons (Abbott 2001, 126). A number of institutions spearheaded some notable organizational configurations in the humanities during this period, including the formation of an avowedly interdisciplinary program for undergraduates at Princeton University in 1936 termed the “Special Program in the Humanities.” In 1937 Columbia University initiated its interdisciplinary freshman “sequence in the humanities” (“a reading list of literary, philosophical, and religious texts from Homer to Goethe”) (Marcus 2006, 16-17). But several more decades passed before the University of California would attempt a more comprehensive conceptualization in the humanities. From its inception in 1966 the Program in the History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz is said to have fostered interrelations between the humanities and the social sciences, natural sciences, and the arts, and advanced a “focus on problems rather than disciplines” with a curriculum predicated on methodological and theoretical issues and the integration of disciplines.8 During the same academic year, the Humanities Center at Johns Hopkins University began offering graduate degrees in both comparative literature and intellectual history. Program literature specifies “because of the interdisciplinary interests of some of its most distinguished faculty, Hopkins has fostered to a remarkable degree the free exchange between scholars and students across departmental boundaries.”9 In 1969 Stanford University established the doctoral program in Modern Thought and Literature (MTL). Deriving its methodological approach from the emerging field of

7 8 9

http://socialthought.uchicago.edu/page/about-committee (last accessed August 12, 2013). http://histcon.ucsc.edu/about/index.html (last accessed August 12, 2013). http://humctr.jhu.edu/about (last accessed August 12, 2013).

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cultural studies, the program sought to position itself “firmly and decisively within a rigorous interdisciplinary framework with fields such as science and technology, media and film studies, legal studies, race and ethnic studies, gender and sexuality studies, medicine, education, anthropology, and history and philosophy.”10 The decade that witnessed the establishment of Bielefeld University with ZiF at its core thus appears to have been particularly propitious to the formation of interdisciplinary academic configurations.

A CASE STUDY IN INSTITUTIONAL DESIGN: TRANSDISCIPLINARY RECONCEPTUALIZATION AT SCALE IN REAL TIME During the past decade, the institutional implementation of interdisciplinarity has been one of eight explicit “design aspirations” of Arizona State University, the youngest major research institution in the United States and—with an enrollment surpassing seventy three thousand undergraduate, graduate, and professional students—largest university governed by a single administration. The reconfiguration of academic departments and disciplinary fields undertaken to advance interdisciplinary teaching and research, however, must be understood within the broader and interrelated context of the comprehensive and multidimensional decade-long institutional reconceptualization launched in 2002, which was conceived with the objective of establishing a foundational model for a “New American University,” an institution predicated on the pursuit of academic excellence, inclusiveness to a broad demographic, and maximum societal impact.11 Newsweek has termed

10 http://www.stanford.edu/dept/MTL/cgi-bin/drupal (last accessed August 12, 2013). 11 Michael M. Crow articulated the vision for a New American University when he became the sixteenth president of Arizona State University in July

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this institutional experiment at scale in real time “one of the most radical redesigns in higher learning since the modern research university took shape in nineteenth-century Germany” (August 9, 2008). An editorial from the journal Nature observes that questions about the future of the contemporary research university are being examined “nowhere more searchingly than at Arizona State University” (April 26, 2007). While institutional initiatives to advance interdisciplinarity are often fraught with extraneous theoretical justification, its conceptualization and implementation at Arizona State University has in practice been shaped largely through exhaustive trial and error, a number of course corrections, and the best efforts of administration and faculty at the application of common sense. ASU seeks to advance knowledge and human well-being through teaching and research conducted within a flexible organizational framework that maximizes collaboration and communication between the core disciplines, some of which remain departmentally-based while others are construed across departments, centers, institutes, schools, and colleges and new explicitly interdisciplinary configurations. These new academic entities (“new schools”) have been established to advance teaching and engender research, both fundamental and applied, which possesses the interdisciplinary breadth to address the large-scale “grand challenges.” Most colleges and universities in the United States define themselves in comparison to a set of elite institutions that comprise the “gold standard” in American higher education: the Ivies, the great

2002. For a more extended discussion of the New American University model, see, for example, Crow 2010b. Some of the discussion of institutional design in this chapter, and especially the case study of Arizona State University in this section, has been adapted from Crow, Michael M., and William B. Dabars. 2013. “Interdisciplinarity as a Design Problem: Toward Mutual Intelligibility Among Academic Disciplines in the American Research University.” In Enhancing Communication and Collaboration in Interdisciplinary Research, edited by Michael O’Rourke, Stephen Crowley, Sanford D. Eigenbrode, and J. D. Wulfhorst, 294–322. Los Angeles: Sage.

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land-grant universities, and those constructed on the foundations of private fortunes (Geiger 1986, 2-3). These fifteen institutions represent an elitist model that remains to a remarkable extent unchanged since the nineteenth century and inaccessible to the majority of students. By contrast, ASU has sought to meet burgeoning enrollment demand in Arizona, which is the setting of one of the megapolitan agglomerations emerging in the United States, the so-called Sun Corridor stretching from the Prescott area of central Arizona to the border with Mexico (Nelson and Lang 2011, 143-153). With an economy insufficiently diversified to accommodate population expansion, Arizona is confronted with major challenges associated with the environment, healthcare, social services, immigration, and the performance of P-12 education, all of which place implicit demands on the university. In metropolitan Phoenix, which is projected to increase in population from four million to eight million by midcentury, ASU remains the sole comprehensive research university. The unprecedented transformation of the regional demographic profile in one of the fastest-growing states in the nation has thus shaped the institutional “design process” undertaken to reconceptualize academic organization and operations. Rather than extrapolate from existing structure and operations or replicate historical models perceived to represent the putative gold standard, the design process has sought to create a distinctive institutional profile by building on existing strengths to produce a federation of unique transdisciplinary departments, centers, institutes, schools, and colleges (“schools”) and a deliberate and complementary clustering of programs arrayed across four differentiated campuses. In this “school-centric” conception, academic units compete for status not intramurally but with peer entities globally. In the process ASU has advanced interdisciplinarity through the consolidation of a number of traditional academic departments, which henceforth no longer serve as the sole institutional locus of a given discipline, including anthropology, geology, sociology, and several areas of biology. Transdisciplinarity thus trumps traditional academic organization and encourages team participation in projects that accomplish implementation and ap-

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plication. While more than two dozen new transdisciplinary schools were conceptualized and operationalized, some have been subsequently further reconfigured or merged. Although the correlation between discipline and department represents the conventional norm, in practice the interrelationships are sometimes complex and not always self-evident. One aspect of the design process was to clarify the relationship between core academic disciplines and the new interdisciplinary configurations that have emerged (identity), their disposition within the university (configuration), and their anticipated evolution (trajectory). A comprehensive unit-level assessment of the institutional status of disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity sought to articulate disciplinary identities and an examination of their interrelationships, including assessments of each in terms of its alignment with fundamental and irreducible disciplines, and the significance of its emergence in a novel interdisciplinary configuration. Assessments of configuration, which one may think of as positional embeddedness within institutional coordinates, examined disciplinary and interdisciplinary interactions and interrelationships, whether synergistic, symbiotic, or even antagonistic. Finally, the consideration of trajectory sought to reveal the status of an entity within its disciplinary continuum, its role in the emergence of associated interdisciplinary formations, and its relationship to emerging peer entities. The impetus to reorganize and recombine discipline-based academic departments had already gained a foothold at ASU before the full operationalization of the design process. An ambitious reorganization of the biological faculties to overcome disciplinary entrenchment epitomized the momentum. In July 2003, the departments of biology, microbiology, plant biology, and the program in molecular and cellular biology merged to form the new ASU School of Life Sciences (SOLS). While administrative efficiency was cited as an objective, the motivation for the creation of SOLS was largely to advance interdisciplinarity: “to facilitate collaboration across the range of disciplines covered by the school; ... and to exploit the fact that the key research challenges in the life sciences lie at the interface of sub-disciplines, often involving

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integration of knowledge from different levels of biological organization and across different kinds of organisms.” Its mission statement specifies that the school was conceived “without internal disciplinary barriers, allowing it to plan strategically at the seams of intersecting disciplines.” The school is currently organized into seven faculty groups: biomedicine and biotechnology; cellular and molecular biosciences; genomics, evolution, and bioinformatics; ecology, evolution, and environmental science; human dimensions of biology; organismal, integrative, and systems biology; and basic medical sciences.12 The arrangement allows more than one hundred life scientists, engineers, philosophers, social scientists, and ethicists to self-organize around the socially and environmentally relevant questions of the day. Among the new transdisciplinary schools conceptualized and operationalized during the past decade within the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences are the School of Human Evolution and Social Change; School of Earth and Space Exploration; School of Politics and Global Studies; School of Social and Family Dynamics; School of Social Transformation; and School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies. These schools complement initiatives such as the Global Institute of Sustainability (GIOS), which incorporates the first-of-its-kind School of Sustainability, and the Biodesign Institute, the premier multidisciplinary research center dedicated exclusively to advancing biologically inspired design to address global challenges in healthcare, sustainability, and national security. The research of this large-scale array of labs and centers is aimed at improving human health and the environment through interdisciplinary efforts in such areas as personalized diagnostics and treatment; infectious diseases and pandemics; and renewable sources of energy. The Biodesign Institute houses ten research centers that are leveraged in a highly collaborative, teamoriented, and synergistic manner to address complex problems. Work-

12 Arizona State University School of Life Sciences, Strategic Plan (April 15, 2010): 1–4. https://sols.asu.edu/sites/default/files/strategic_plan_april_2010 .pdf (last accessed August 12, 2013).

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ing in the broad domains of biological, nanoscale, cognitive, and sustainable systems, the transdisciplinary research centers of the institute are advancing our understanding of such areas as biosignatures, biosensors, bionics, and biofactories, ubiquitous sensing, optimized human performance, and environmental sustainability, as well as personalized medicine. Other transdisciplinary configurations include the Complex Adaptive Systems Initiative (CASI), a collaborative effort to address global challenges in health, sustainability, and national security through the creation of new technologies and novel solutions; Security and Defense Systems Initiative; Flexible Display Center, a cooperative agreement with the U.S. Army to advance the emerging flexible electronics industry; LightWorks, a multidisciplinary effort in renewable energy fields including artificial photosynthesis, biofuels, and next-generation photovoltaics; and initiatives in the humanities and social sciences, including the Institute for Social Science Research and Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict. The School of Earth and Space Exploration (SESE) epitomizes the limitless potential of new transdisciplinary configurations. SESE combines the conventional disciplines of astronomy and astrophysics; cosmology; Earth systems sciences; planetary sciences; and systems engineering to deepen our understanding of our planet and the universe. Within an inherently transdisciplinary framework, the school is advancing strategic research initiatives in a number of areas, including the origin and evolution of the universe; the emergence and function of planetary bodies; the origin, evolution, and distribution of life; the coevolution of Earth’s surface environment and human societies; and science and engineering education. The school aspires to methodological fluidity in a conceptual framework that recombines modes of inquiry to address some of the most profound challenges of the epoch. The broad theme of exploration represents a transdisciplinary conceptualization of the quest to discover the origins of the universe and expand our understanding of space, matter, and time. While the conventional disciplines of the earth and space sciences are predominantly historical, according

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to planetary geologist Ronald Greeley and his colleagues, the transdisciplinary conceptualization of SESE make it possible to “elevate both to predictive sciences” in order to address such questions as the ultimate fate of the universe.13 Established in July 2006 through amalgamation of the former Department of Geological Sciences and the astronomy, astrophysics, and cosmology faculties of the former Department of Physics and Astronomy—thereafter the Department of Physics—SESE boasts a faculty roster that includes theoretical physicists, systems biologists, biogeochemists, and electrical engineers. Affiliated engineers bring technological expertise that advances the development and deployment of critical scientific instrumentation on Earth and in space. The transdisciplinary fluidity of the school inevitably facilitates collaboration and communication between scientists and engineers, engaging researchers from other schools and institutes, including the Biodesign Institute and Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering. The wealth of subfields within given disciplinary areas suggests the breadth their recombination enables. Subfields within astrophysics and cosmology, for example, include computational astrophysics; physics of the early universe and the formation of large-scale structure; and the formation and evolution of galaxies, stars, and planetary systems. Subfields within Earth system sciences include biogeoscience; continental tectonics and structural geology; geochemistry; geophysics (including geodynamics and seismology); petrology, mineralogy, mineral physics, and mineral resources; surface processes (including geomorphology and hydrology); and volcanology and volcanic hazards.14 In 2005 ASU launched the School of Human Evolution and Social Change (SHESC), combining the major areas of anthropological enquiry, including archaeology, bioarchaeology, physical anthropology, cultural anthropology, linguistics, and museum anthropology, with such areas as mathematics and computer science, geography, political

13 Greeley et al. 2010. 14 Ibid. 3-4.

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science, museum studies, epidemiology, economics, and sociology. The new school boasts such transdisciplinary research centers as the Archaeological Research Institute, Center for Global Health, Center for Digital Antiquity, and Institute of Human Origins. The allied Consortium for Biosocial Complex Systems engages the Complex Adaptive Systems Initiative. Transdisciplinary collaboration allows SHESC scientists and scholars to address complex problems from comparative and holistic perspectives, whether the challenge is epidemics of infectious disease, sustainable management of natural resources, or adaptation to climate change. The quest to understand human origins, evolution, and diversity engages research in such areas as societies and their natural environments; biocultural dimensions of global health; culture, heritage, and identity; global dynamics and cultural interactions; and urbanfocused research on such as questions of how cities evolve and how we can ensure their sustainability. The school thus provides students with an integrated curriculum in the social, behavioral, and natural sciences focused on the evolution of our species and trajectories of human societies.15 To broaden the reach of engineering programs, ASU now offers students with varying levels of preparation two distinct learning platforms, the one theoretical and the other practical. The Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering are organized into five distinct researchintensive transdisciplinary schools, including the School of Biological and Health Systems Engineering; School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering; and School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment. On the other hand, the College of Technology and Innovation on the Polytechnic campus focuses on useinspired translational research, and offers students interested in direct entry into the workforce an experiential learning environment.

15 Arizona State University School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Seven-Year Program Review (2005-2011) (http://shesc.asu.edu/; http:// casi.asu.edu/ [last accessed August 12, 2013]).

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The design aspirations are intrinsically interrelated, and the interplay between interdisciplinarity and efforts to advance sustainability as a core value is representative of their dynamic. With the establishment of the Global Institute of Sustainability (GIOS) in 2004 and the firstof-its-kind School of Sustainability (SOS) three years later, ASU has positioned itself in the vanguard of interdisciplinary research on environmental, economic, and social sustainability. The institute brings together scientists and engineers with government policymakers and industry leaders to share knowledge and develop solutions to pressing real-world problems. With research in areas as diverse as agriculture, air quality, marine ecology, materials design, nanotechnology, policy and governance, renewable energy, risk assessment, transportation, and urban infrastructure, the faculty members affiliated with GIOS are addressing some of the most critical challenges of our time as well as training future generations of scholars, scientists, and practitioners. To prepare students capable of integrating a broad range of disciplines in a rapidly changing knowledge economy, the School of Sustainability offers both undergraduate and graduate degree programs. The school is educating a new generation of leaders through collaborative, transdisciplinary, and problem-oriented training that addresses environmental, economic, and social challenges. Teaching and research seeks adaptive solutions to such issues as rapid urbanization, water quality, habitat transformation, the loss of biodiversity, and the development of sustainable energy, materials, and technologies. In order to engender an institutional culture of sustainability, moreover, ASU offers sustainability-themed courses in fields as diverse as anthropology, architecture, biology, economics, engineering, industrial design, law, philosophy, nonprofit leadership, and urban planning. Along with such guiding principles of modern societies as human rights, sustainability is an epochal question that must be addressed by the citizens of a planet with a population that already exceeds six billion and is projected to approach ten billion. Entrenchment in disciplinary silos undermines the capacity of our institutions to advance research that can provide us with the means to balance wealth generation

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with continuously enhanced environmental quality and social wellbeing. Interdisciplinary research and teaching associated with sustainability is representative of the ASU effort to design a prototype for the evolution of the American research university (Crow 2010a).

TOWARD COMPREHENSIVE KNOWLEDGE ENTERPRISES TRANSDISCIPLINARILY CONSTRUED At many institutions to this day, the institutional implementation of interdisciplinarity remains piecemeal and restricted to mere recombinations of individual academic units. The comprehensive conception of Bielefeld University with the Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Forschung constituting its core thus represents a prototype that deserves recognition and emulation. While institutional reconceptualization of this order is clearly essential for other universities, the broad consensus or collective sense of urgency that would transform analysis into action is little in evidence. In a keynote address to the American Council on Education, Gordon Gee, president of Ohio State University, expressed with particular eloquence the imperative for “radical reformation” for our colleges and universities: “The choice, it seems to me, is this: reinvention or extinction” (Gee 2009). Although universities throughout the world have long been transformational catalysts for innovation and societal advancement, what remains to be determined is whether they can sufficiently lend direction and purpose to the artistic and humanistic insight, social scientific understanding, scientific discoveries, and technological adaptations that are the product of an academic culture that represents our best hope as we negotiate the backdrop of encroaching complexity in the coming decades.

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R EFERENCES Abbott, Andrew. 2001. Chaos of Disciplines. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Apostel, Léo, Guy Berger, Asa Briggs, et al. (eds.). 1972. Interdisciplinarity: Problems of Teaching and Research in Universities. Paris: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and Centre for Educational Research and Innovation. Atkinson, Richard C., and William A. Blanpied. 2008. “Research Universities: Core of the U.S. Science and Technology System.” Technology in Society 30: 30-48. Brooks, Frederick P. 2010. The Design of Design: Essays from a Computer Scientist. Boston: Addison-Wesley. Brown, John Seely, and Paul Duguid. 1991. “Organizational Learning and Communities-of-Practice: Toward a Unified View of Working, Learning, and Innovation.” Organization Science 2 (1): 40–57. Cole, Jonathan R. 2009. The Great American University: Its Rise to Preeminence, Its Indispensable National Role, and Why It Must Be Protected. New York: Public Affairs. Committee on Facilitating Interdisciplinary Research (CFIR) and Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy (COSEPUP). 2005. Facilitating Interdisciplinary Research. Washington, DC: National Academies Press. Crow, Michael M. 2010a. “Organizing Teaching and Research to Address the Grand Challenges of Sustainable Development.” Bioscience (August) 60 (7): 488-489. Crow, Michael M. 2010b. “The Research University as Comprehensive Knowledge Enterprise: A Prototype for a New American University.” In University Research for Innovation, edited by Luc E. Weber, and James J. Duderstadt, 211-225. London: Economica.

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Crow, Michael M., and William B. Dabars. 2013. “Interdisciplinarity as a Design Problem: Toward Mutual Intelligibility Among Academic Disciplines in the American Research University.” In Enhancing Communication and Collaboration in Interdisciplinary Research, edited by Michael O’Rourke, Stephen Crowley, Sanford D. Eigenbrode, and J. D. Wulfhorst, 294-322. Los Angeles: Sage. Crow, Michael M., and William B. Dabars. 2012. “Knowledge Without Borders: American Research Universities in a Global Context.” Cairo Review of Global Affairs 5 (Spring): 35–45. Dabars, William B. 2008. “Disciplinarity and Interdisciplinarity: Rhetoric and Context in the American Research University.” PhD dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles. Duderstadt, James J. 2000. A University for the Twenty-First Century. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Etzkowitz, Henry. 2008. The Triple Helix: University-IndustryGovernment Innovation in Action. New York: Routledge. Gee, Gordon. 2009. “Colleges Face Reinvention or Extinction.” Chronicle of Higher Education (February 9). Geiger, Roger L. 1986. To Advance Knowledge: The Growth of American Research Universities, 1900–1940. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Giddens, Anthony. 1984. The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Berkeley: University of California Press. Greeley, Ronald, et al. 2010. Academic Program Review for the School of Earth and Space Exploration (SESE), November: 1-7. Tempe: Arizona State University. Kash, Don E. 1989. Perpetual Innovation: The New World of Competition. New York: Basic Books. Klein, Julie Thompson. 1990. Interdisciplinarity: History, Theory, and Practice. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Marcus, Steven. 2006. “Humanities from Classics to Cultural Studies: Notes Toward the History of an Idea.” Daedalus 135 (2) (Spring): 15-21.

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Mau, Bruce, and Jennifer Leonard. 2004. Massive Change. London: Phaidon Press. Merton, Robert K. 1973. The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Miller, Hugh T., and Charles J. Fox. 2001. “The Epistemic Community.” Administration and Society 32 (6): 668-685. Nelson, Arthur C., and Robert E. Lang. 2011. Megapolitan America: A New Vision for Understanding America’s Metropolitan Geography. Chicago: American Planning Association. Niosi, Jorge, Paolo Saviotti, Bertrand Bellon, and Michael M. Crow. 1993. “National Systems of Innovation: In Search of a Workable Concept.” Technology in Society 15: 207-227. Paradeise, Catherine, Emanuela Reale, Ivar Bleiklie, and Ewan Ferlie. 2009. University Governance: Western European Comparative Perspectives. Dordrecht: Springer. Price, Derek J. de Solla. 1986. Little Science, Big Science, and Beyond. 2nd edition. New York: Columbia University Press. Price, Derek J. de Solla. 1965. “Networks of Scientific Papers.” Science 149: 510-515. Simon, Herbert A. 1996. The Sciences of the Artificial. 3rd edition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Squires, Geoffrey. 1992. “Interdisciplinarity in Higher Education in the United Kingdom.” European Journal of Education 27 (3): 205-210. Social Science Research Council. 1934. Decennial Report, 1923–1933. New York: Social Science Research Council. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 2003. “Anthropology, Sociology, and Other Dubious Disciplines.” Current Anthropology 44 (4): 453-465. Wittrock, Björn. 2002. “Institutes for Advanced Study: Ideas, Histories, Rationales.” Keynote Speech on the Occasion of the Inauguration of the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki (December 2).

Liberal Arts and Sciences in the Netherlands Development and Relation to Interdisciplinary Education L OUIS B OON

I NTRODUCTION In the Netherlands, much of your future in higher education is decided at quite a young age. When you are 12 years old you are sorted into two lanes in high school, either on your way towards university in a school type comparable to the German Gymnasium or in the direction of vocational training. Sure, there are spots where you can cross over between these highway lanes, but you will lose time if not your life. Then at 18, you again face a grave decision when you enter university. As you have had the benefit of thorough high school training you will now, of course, know exactly what discipline you will want to enroll in: Law, economics, physics, French, mathematics, sociology. Dutch university programs have had a long tradition of mono-disciplinary training. Students are funneled into disciplinary tracks, with ruts between them so deep that shifting to another track is not easy.

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When, in the 1970s, so-called interdisciplinary programs started, this did not really change things, as all these programs were conceived within the traditional single funnel system. In other words, these programs from the start behaved as if they were disciplines on the make. All of this became worse when, in a classical political move that was advertised as an innovation but really amounted to a serious budget cut, the Dutch government shortened university programs from 6 to 4 years. The illusionary carrot was the promise of a two tier system of 2- to 3-year Master programs built on these 4-year curricula. Needless to say, in the austerity of the 1980s, these promises were as vacant as the Indian treaties of the American government in the 19th century. Void before the ink had dried. After living with a 2-year propedeutic+2-year Master system for almost 2 decades, another innovation was foisted on the Dutch universities, and again it had the allure of a honey trap: the Bachelor-Master system, which lengthened the first phase with a year culminating in a Bachelor’s degree, and added more independence and depth for Master programs. The honey in the trap was the illusion that 2-year Master programs would be possible, if there were cogent arguments for it. Sure, everybody held their duckling discipline for a swan eligible for the more prestigious 2-year Master phase. This move also had a European dimension, as all EU countries were to adopt it. It was in a funny little way a simile to the present day Euro crisis: countries like Germany or the Netherlands kept their 4-year confines, but Southern European countries had no problem with 5- or 6-year university curricula. I have sketched these points in some detail, as it gives an idea of the odds against the quick rise of liberal arts and sciences curricula in the Netherlands. In the precious 4 years allotted to a university curriculum for both BA and MA, academics argued, there was no time for a broad general education along the lines of American liberal arts and sciences colleges; there also was no need, as our high schools were so much better than those in the shallow American school system. Classical academic reflexes also were at work: we did it this way for ages, no change is necessary; if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. This was the situation

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in the late 1990s. Now, 15 years later, there are 6 liberal arts programs and two similar programs for natural science and engineering. It has been a singularly rapid success for such a fundamental academic innovation to take root. How did this happen?

E ARLY

DAYS

The bulk of responsibility rests on the shoulders of one man, Hans Adriaansens, founder of University College Utrecht. After a substantial time as dean of the faculty of social sciences at Utrecht University, he was in a sense facing a bit of slack. From the sidelines he had been involved in the introduction of the Bachelor-Master structure in the Netherlands, and he underwrote the policy goal of a more broad, multidisciplinary Bachelor phase to be rounded off with a specialized Master. Well, everybody agreed with him, as long as they would get 2 years for the Master. Adriaansens thought this was exaggerated. It was, he believed, possible to give students an excellent foundation in a broad 3-year program, and still get them admitted to excellent Master programs. It was just the conceit of the professors on their high horses of disciplinary schooling that implied this was impossible. And they would prove the folly of it by simply refusing to enroll anyone, who had not been steeped for three years in a single discipline, in their disciplinary Master programs. This entailed that a broad Bachelor’s program had to be a fully international program if it would prove anything. The reasoning was that, if a student with such a broad BA is admitted at say, Oxford or Princeton, this will show how completely out of touch and provincial Dutch universities were. As the contours of the University College Utrecht took form, other issues that were anathema in the Netherlands were addressed. For instance, the idea of an academic community, a notion long lost in the mass higher education that overwhelmed universities since the late

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1960s. Students will do better in a tight intellectual community with intense contacts with staff. So, small classes were also part of the project. Much of the dropout rate at universities is due not to a lack of chances to pass an exam, but to an excess of these. Students can resit examinations endlessly and hence will postpone serious study. Give them one chance only, and their behavior will change. However, at the same time, let them compensate good results with the occasional failure. As long as the average is okay, they can continue. This was and is another unspeakable creature, as it entails that a student can graduate without a pass in someone’s field. The horror, the horror. Hans Adriaansens merrily sinned against most of academic policy virtues in his new program. A lot of these ideas were popular within the ministry of education. For example, the BA/MA structure was expected to eliminate a range of narrow disciplinary programs, and hence make a contribution to greater cost effectiveness in universities. They were very supportive of a program that set out to just do that. Getting its graduates admitted to good Master programs abroad would also silence the whining of traditional disciplinarians on their Master’s hobby horses. And so University College Utrecht was born pretty painlessly given the arduous nature normally besetting a new academic course in the Netherlands. As a showcase for the reigning policies, it was awarded, on the basis of a technicality, the top rate for financing higher education programs. There was one more ingredient in this educational soup that determined its flavor. In the wake of “higher education for all,” any and all focus on excellence was erased from policy. Selection of students, grading them into different categories of achievement was anathema. All students were deemed equal. But again, in the late 1990s, things began to change and very hesitantly selection and excellence became topics to be openly discussed, though often in a muffled voice. University College Utrecht was brazenly going to select its students and limit enrolment numbers to 200 a year, thus keeping the total number of students small enough to create a viable community.

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But was this at all legal in the Dutch democratic university? No it was not. It was totally out of bounds. UCU could get away with it, because the program actually did not exist at all. Officially, that is. Students officially enrolled in one of three existing programs in the humanities, social sciences or natural sciences, and upon enrolment were selected for UCU, as a special track. This was legal. It also gave Hans Adriaansens room to innovate in other respects that would have been difficult if not impossible otherwise.

UCU’ S P ROGRAM Students at UCU selected courses from a broad catalogue of courses offered by staff from the various schools and faculties of the university. Classes were limited to a maximum of 24 students. After a year, students opted for one of three streams: humanities, social sciences or natural sciences, and from then on took on a more special array of courses. The level of courses was ratchet up by limiting the number of introductory courses a student could take, and setting a minimum of advanced courses. To help students choose and create an appropriate selection, to challenge their choices, to assess their strengths and weaknesses, all students were linked to an academic advisor which they met on a regular basis to discuss progress and pitfalls. UCU accentuated its special nature by becoming a campus community. Students lived on a campus, where all their teaching was also concentrated. Staff came to the college campus to teach, and students had all their classes in close proximity to their lodging and dining facilities. A classical College set up. The college quickly became a success. It attracted enough students interested in waging their academic future on the uncertain proposition of a liberal arts education. The college had unprecedented retention and completion rates and started to graduate students that went on to pres-

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tigious Master programs abroad. In the Netherlands, the BA/MA structure was still a few years away from implementation, so students from UCU who wanted to remain in the Netherlands for their Master’s degree could be annoyed by useless obstacles to prove the point of the establishment. In some cases, students lost a full year on compulsory hoops they had to jump through before being admitted to the holy ground of the final phase of a traditional university program. After three years, UCU students were bestowed with a Bachelor’s degree. But didn’t I just note there was as yet no Bachelor-Master structure? No problem, the degree was completely outside the legal bounds anyway. I was first convinced of the future of liberal arts colleges in the Netherlands when I was present at a graduation ceremony of UCU and the Dutch minister of education, a government representative, was there in person to hand out diploma’s that did not yet exist. Now, this was support one could not ignore.

U NIVERSITY C OLLEGE M AASTRICHT At that point I had been setting up the second Liberal Arts and Sciences College in the Netherlands. This college would have to be different. Lacking being embedded in a large traditional university it would not be able to draw on the full array of disciplines. In the sciences especially, it would have a limited number of fields to offer courses in. Also, in the humanities, it lacked the full range of language studies present in Utrecht. To make up for such prima facie deficiencies it would give students even more freedom to choose courses from a catalogue that would span the disciplines. The curriculum would be based on what in the American liberal arts context was called the “open curriculum,” a set up that has no clear majors or minors and allows students to choose courses that interest them and that they believe build up to a good jump off point for a Master’s. As in the case of Utrecht, such a system, leaving students all freedom to select courses, needs a

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system of academic advising to guide the students through the process of choosing courses, while keeping their sights on Master programs they are interested to enroll in. Of course, there were other differences with the Utrecht College. For one, this was really the first program of its kind officially approved by the government. There were no existing programs it could be shielded behind. This also meant Maastricht had to stick to the law. No selection of students, for instance. So Maastricht invented an invitation process, which advised students strongly not to come, but if they insisted, they could not be barred from enrolment like in the case of UCU. Both for principled and practical reasons, it was not a campus college although it acquired a dedicated building, which was refurbished and renovated to suit the aims of a close-knit academic community. The college enrolled its first students in September 2002 and the first years were very much an uphill struggle. Financing was lower than for Utrecht; the deans of the various faculties were not all enthusiastic, and they were all on a supervisory board that even had problems with hiring dedicated staff for the college. Students were enthusiastic, but enrolment figures were lower than planned. The planned enrolments were higher than reasonable because the deans wanted to spend as little money on the new venture as possible. To help their moods remain positive, projected student numbers were upped and virtual income increased. Hence it took much longer before the college was “financially neutral.” The quality of the program and of its students did help its survival. And, of course, UCM was helped greatly by increasing support of the notion of liberal arts colleges. As Utrecht and Maastricht turned out to be successful, attracting excellent students who graduated in excellent Master programs, other universities initiated their own colleges. Often against the same opposition: selection is bad, vying for a higher grade of students is elitist, money should be spent on the masses, not on a talented minority. The minister of education, now from the socialist party, called university colleges’ playgrounds for spoilt rich brats.

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But it was too late to do away with them. Hans Adriaansens set up a franchise of his Utrecht program in the town of Middelburg, using the Utrecht accreditation, but in a setting where a flanking university was missing. Well, of course, this was exactly why the province and local burghers were so supportive: the Roosevelt academy, as the new college was called, was hoped to be the beginning of a real university. A bit later Tilburg University followed with a college, and more recently Leiden University and the two Amsterdam universities followed suit. Rotterdam University will launch its college in 2013.

L IBERAL A RTS

AND INTERDISCIPLINARY

T EACHING

So far I have outlined some of the main features and developments in Liberal Arts and Sciences degree programs in the Netherlands. The topic of the relationship between this form of academic training and interdisciplinary endeavors will now be addressed. Even if the importance of interdisciplinarity did not necessarily play a major role in initiating liberal arts colleges, the effects, of course, were clearly supportive of crossing disciplinary boundaries. At liberal arts colleges, students find themselves in a learning environment where disciplinary fences are to a large extent lacking, or at least will not be rigidly enforced. Students are encouraged in these colleges to sample courses from across the disciplinary matrix, to build up their interest in topics and themes rather than immediately specialize within the confines of a single discipline. On top of that, in some colleges, general education requirements mandate students to cross disciplinary boundaries. In Maastricht, for instance, students must do 2 courses outside the area in which they concentrate most of their courses. These areas or concentrations are in themselves broadly defined as “humanities,” “social sciences” and “sciences,” and hence conducive to interdisciplinary border-crossing. The general education requirement buttresses the importance of acquiring at least some expertise in the dif-

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ferent academic families, and hence stimulates a trans-disciplinary perspective. Interestingly, a lot of the urge for a more interdisciplinary program comes from students’ growing interest in a topic. Topics like international relations or Europe, brain and cognition, or the current economic crisis that are of importance or interest to students stimulate them to cross disciplinary boundaries. Even if their interest is initially narrow, as their interest grows they start to notice a topic has broader ramifications. Students with an initial interest in, say, international relations will be prone to pick up courses in political science and sociology, but then find out that legal and economic aspects pertain to their interests. Guided by their academic advisor or on their own powers, they set out to acquire knowledge in these areas. As, increasingly, advanced research is embracing several traditional disciplinary fields the uncertainty of whether they are admissible to the Master program of their choice makes students into interdisciplinarians. Take cognitive neuroscience, one of the most intriguing and interesting fields today. A traditional training in psychology will not form the best preparation for entering research here. Most traditional psychology programs simply do not contain enough biology, physics, informatics or mathematics. Of course, a student at a liberal arts and sciences college will never be able to do as much narrow disciplinary psychology as a student enrolled in a traditional program. However, their freedom to choose courses gives them opportunities to gain expertise in biology or informatics and mathematics that make them even better candidates for Master programs in cognitive neuroscience than traditional psychology students. Academic interest and a calculating approach to maximize admission in a Master program conspire to create combinations of fields and topics of an interdisciplinary nature. Liberal arts colleges by their nature focus less on vocational aspects than their disciplinary neighbors. By default, research is much more the focus of such programs than entry in a particular profession. Students will have an interest in law, but less in becoming a lawyer than students who immediately after high school enroll in a program of

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the faculty of law. As it is in modern research par excellence that interdisciplinary perspectives have become so essential, the curricula at University College Maastricht and some of the other colleges in the Netherlands put great emphasis on acquiring familiarity with and experience in research. Research-based learning forms a substantial part of the curriculum in Maastricht. Students will work in small groups on topics that require an interdisciplinary approach and cooperation between different disciplinary perspectives. Such projects are latched to real research projects of staff. The background idea is that researchbased learning might also make a presence in undergraduate teaching more interesting to excellent researchers, who often consider any time spent on undergraduates as time lost to more important things. So clearly students will be encouraged to develop an interdisciplinary identity at liberal arts and sciences colleges. What about staff? The interesting thing here is that a college does not necessarily require a commitment to an interdisciplinary approach among the teaching staff. Courses can be thoroughly disciplinary, and staff may well be staunch adherents of a traditional disciplinary approach to learning. It is the students who create the interdisciplinary palette in their studies. Of course, some staff will themselves be convinced of an interdisciplinary approach to a topic, and some of the courses offered, for instance, in Maastricht will reach across disciplinary boundaries, but it is not a must or guideline for staff. Historians may teach classical courses in history, and it will be the students who combine these with courses in law or economics to form an innovative range of skills and knowledge of an interdisciplinary nature. The establishment of Liberal Arts and Sciences Colleges in the Netherlands has clearly contributed to a climate where interdisciplinary learning is fostered, both among students and among staff. As students have been bringing their intellectual perspectives into play in their Master’s and later on PhD programs. The graduates of these colleges have also had an impact on such programs. The further spread of liberal arts education in the Netherlands will only strengthen this.

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In the present context, it may be interesting to note that University College Maastricht, the second oldest liberal arts college in the Netherlands, has from the beginning, and continues to do so today, exercised a deep attraction to a substantial number of German students. Their subsequent training in Germany will hence undoubtedly further stimulate interdisciplinary perspectives in their home country. Of course, that is not a substitute for liberal arts undergraduate education in Germany. It is a happy circumstance that I can close these brief remarks on Liberal Arts in the Netherlands by mentioning that the University of Freiburg will indeed start such a program in 2013, a first for public education in Germany. Hopefully this will start a happy future similar to the one we have seen in the Netherlands.

Between a Program-Oriented Approach and Commitment to One’s Discipline: The Experimental Merger of Different Research Cultures at KIT A RMIN G RUNWALD

1. I NTRODUCTION

AND

O VERVIEW

The Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) was created in 2009 by the merger of the previous University of Karlsruhe (the oldest technical university in Germany, having been founded in 1825) and the Research Center Karlsruhe of the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centers (founded in 1956 to facilitate the technological utilization of nuclear energy; see the paper by Nitsche in this volume). This merger had to (and still has to) deal with the situation that different science cultures distinguished the institutions that preceded KIT, and that these cultures corresponded to the institutions’ different tasks and the different boundary conditions and structures of the organization of science. In particular, the role of scientific disciplines and interdisciplinarity was very different at the two institutions and molded the organizational structures in different manners (Sect. 2).

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The process of fusing the two institutions faced the task of creating both the structures as well as the narrative providing the structural framework to guide this initially heterogeneous situation into a converging development. In this paper, I would like to pursue the questions of the roles that a program-oriented approach, interdisciplinarity, and the dynamics inherent in disciplines have played and continue to play, and of the expectations that have been and are tied to the organizational measures that are part of the merger. I will attempt to document the following theses: •

•

•

•

•

The merger that created KIT faced the primary difficulty of having to join two different research cultures, in each of which the status of interdisciplinarity was markedly different. Correspondingly, the gulf separating organizational structures based on different and heterogeneous principles of classification had to be bridged (Sect. 2). Different phases of experimentation with integrative and interdisciplinary formats can be discerned in the subsequent efforts at implementation (Sect. 3). The classical principles of classification oriented on disciplines appear increasingly to provide less of the structural framework. In the course of the merger, new institutional constellations have been created whose fundamental conception is indebted to interdisciplinarity 2.0 (see the introduction to this volume). At present no clear trend can be observed, however, as to whether scientific disciplines will become mere resources for challengedriven research or whether and to which degree their immanently structuring strength, especially based on teaching and the levels of academic qualification, will win out (Sec. 3.2). The future must show whether the tension between a programoriented approach and commitment to an academic discipline is constructive in the sense of leading to productive infighting. This tension can express itself, for example, in conflicts between the largely discipline-oriented criteria of excellence and the relevance criteria of challenge-driven research, such as characterizes pro-

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gram-oriented research within the Helmholtz Association (Schiller et al. 2006). The analyses and thoughts presented here do not stem from an external and systematically elaborated perspective of an observer. I was and am, on the contrary, intimately involved in the discussions at KIT about strategy and organization, for example, as member of the KIT senate, as spokesman for the KIT focus “humans and technology,” and as the initiator of the Institute for Technology Futures. The fact that I am the head of the Institute for Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis (ITAS, which belongs to the Helmholtz part of KIT) and spokesman for the Helmholtz Technology, Innovation, and Society program implies furthermore that I have a specific perspective on interdisciplinarity and the merger process, specifically one which would make one-sided perceptions appear less than improbable. This is hopefully somewhat mitigated by the fact that I am familiar with the daily routine at the university part of KIT and with its self-conception, having been professor at KIT’s Institute of Philosophy since 2007.

2. T HE I NITIAL S ITUATION The institutions that preceded KIT had a mixed history as neighbors. Besides the early and successful joint undertakings such as in climate research and nanotechnology, there were also neighborhood feuds and a mutual lack of awareness of one another. This lack of awareness and partially even lack of understanding extended—and despite all progress this is sometimes still the case today—above all to the institutional boundary conditions of the other party, to its governance structure, and even to its daily scientific routine. The different statuses of scientific disciplines and of interdisciplinarity in the different institutions surely play an important role in this.

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2.1 The Research Center Karlsruhe as a Helmholtz Center The Helmholtz Association (see www.helmholtz.de), in accordance with its mandate, works on large and urgent social, scientific, and economic issues. The social aspect is apparent from the name of fields of research such as energy, earth/environment, health, and traffic/space. This mandate was also the force behind the establishment of the research center, when in the 1950s the task for several of today’s Helmholtz centers (including KIT) was to make nuclear energy technologically manageable and economically utilizable. Since 2003, the research conducted at the Helmholtz centers is organized in the form of programs (Schiller et al. 2006). This programmatic research is based on the fact that research is conducted in scientific programs and that it refers to targets set by the research policy of the funding sources (federal and state governments). The Helmholtz centers participating in a program jointly draft the application. It contains especially the substantive and strategic focus of the program, the goals of the research, the intended concrete work, as well as verifiable milestones for the 5-year term of the program. Also enclosed is extensive material confirming the competence of the institutions submitting the application and of the principal investigators (which takes the form of data on the more or less classic indicators of scientific quality). The research plan is then subject to an elaborate international review to determine whether it is worthy of being funded. The review examines whether the plan satisfies the criteria both of scientific excellence and of the social relevance of the targets set by research policy (see Schiller et al. 2006; Grunwald 2011). This two-track approach regarding the criteria has over and over again been difficult for reviewers to understand and made it difficult for them to conduct their work. This is ultimately due to the classic tension between excellence as usually measured by scientific disciplines and topic-related relevance as judged by the work’s contribution to mastering challenges (Schiller et al. 2006; Grunwald 2010).

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In accordance with this constellation, research at the then Research Center Karlsruhe was arranged in a program-oriented manner, just as is the case today at the large-scale research sector (Großforschungsbereich) of KIT. Full-time program directors with their own staff were (and are) generally responsible for the administration, public relations, and internal coordination. The actual research was (and is) conducted in institutes that as rule are not solely oriented along the lines of disciplines. Designations such as Institute for Technical Chemistry and Institute for Nuclear and Energy Technology make it apparent that scientists from different disciplines are integrated in these bodies and work jointly on technical projects. These institutes are frequently organized around technical procedures, families of procedures, or large plants. As such, forms of “minor interdisciplinary work” take place as taskrelated collaboration between neighboring disciplines. ITAS poses an exception in the spectrum because it—in accordance with the requirements of technology assessment (Grunwald 2009)—as the sole institute of the then Research Center Karlsruhe also integrated competence from the areas of the humanities, economics, and social sciences. 2.2 The University of Karlsruhe as a Technical University The then University of Karlsruhe was structured as universities usually are, namely by faculty, which were oriented around disciplines (e.g., economics or architecture) or groups of related disciplines (e.g., the humanities or the social sciences): • • • • • • • •

Architecture Civil engineering, geo- and environmental sciences Chemistry and biosciences Chemical and process engineering Electrical engineering and information technology Humanities and social sciences Informatics Mechanical engineering

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• • •

Mathematics Physics Economics and business engineering

This structure, with a dean, a dean’s office, and a faculty council, continues to characterize the university section of KIT. Within the faculties, institutes comprise the typical unit of organization. These are either oriented immediately around disciplines (such as philosophy or sociology) or, if we are dealing with more-differentiated subjects in Karlsruhe, even around sub- or subsubdisciplines, as in mechanical engineering or economics. In the faculty of mechanical engineering, for example, there are institutes for automation technology, vehicle system technology, fluid mechanics, applied materials, human and industrial engineering, microstructure technology, product development, engineering mechanics, and production science. This structure is aligned on the classic classification scheme of scientific disciplines and their further differentiation. As is common at universities and especially at technical universities, a certain degree of interdisciplinary research was and is part of the work. This part was and is, first, rather tied to a specific occasion and is project-oriented and, second, took place primarily between neighboring disciplines (small interdisciplinarity). This has not become the basis of a structural framework, although the occasional very intensive cooperation with industry has created a relatively strong outward orientation in at least the technological subjects. Third-party funding of research has let industry play a large role in defining the research agenda, with the consequence that often the determination of topics is by no means made within the scientific autonomy of one discipline.

3. M ERGER

AS AN

E XPERIMENTAL P ROCESS

After 2006, the merger of the two institutions was initially considered with caution, yet then was pursued with commitment and, in view of

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the difficulties that had to be overcome, surprising speed. Considering the substantial legal problems (e.g., specific laws had to be drafted and adopted to clear the way to respecting the strict division of competence between the federal and state governments in education and research, on the one hand, while, on the other, making a jointly sponsored institution possible, see Nitsche in this volume), the steps toward merger in 2009 were taken rapidly as have those in the further going integration since 2012. The success in the first round of the federal German government’s Excellence Initiative was both a motivation boost as well as an obligation. 3.1 Challenges to the merger The merger of the two institutions, each of which taken by itself was already complex, represented and represents a Herculean task. From an administrative point of view, even the incompatibilities were (and are) difficult to overcome. They shaped the first phase of the merger process, for example, with regard to the merging of the computer infrastructure and of the administrative units. Yet this does not interest us further. In the medium term, if not even in the long term, the different research cultures briefly suggested in Sect. 2 might represent the larger challenge. These cultures will be the topic in this paper with regard to the different functions of disciplines and interdisciplinarity. Of particular importance in this context are: 3.1.1 The different significance of academic conventions The university section of KIT is characterized, as is the case at other universities, by disciplines and thus also by the conventions of these disciplines and in particular by reputations. Ultimately, it is the tenured professors whose reputation is highest. Both the postdoctoral and doctoral qualifications have the level that they would customarily enjoy in academic affairs. There is hardly any nonprofessorial academic staff, at

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the most in project positions and in the relatively few positions of academic councilor. In contrast, academic reputation means far less at the large-scale research part. Admittedly, it has increased in the past 10 years. While earlier some directors of large institutes did not have an academic qualification other than being a qualified engineer (DiplomIngenieur), this practice has died out as a consequence of the policy of joint appointments with universities. Yet there is a strong nonprofessorial academic staff with tenure, who frequently acts just as independently as professors at universities with regard to identifying topics for projects, to acquisitions, and to collaborating in scientific networks. Traditionally, the dissertation as an academic qualification had little meaning in this context. During the latest review of the Helmholtz program Technology, Innovation, and Society, one of the reviewers thus expressed his amazement that there were principal investigators with great responsibility but without a doctor's title. Even though this has been increasingly subject to change in recent years, the science culture of the strong nonprofessorial academic staff in the large-scale research section continues to be rather foreign to the professors in the university section. 3.1.2 Academic freedom of research versus the Helmholtz program Program-oriented research follows a different dynamic than disciplineimmanent research. This is particularly apparent in the manner in which research topics are determined. In university activity, the principle of academic freedom to conduct research is maintained and shapes one’s self-understanding, even though in many cases in the daily routine of conducting research this freedom is being subject to pressure precisely at technical universities as a consequence of the increasing pressure to obtain third-party funding and of the dependence on partners. In contrast, in program-oriented research, the orientation around the topics to be resolved, the grand challenges, poses a limitation in the selection of topics. The topic-driven Helmholtz programs are not pre-

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pared in academic freedom: “For the program being formulated is subject to an aspiration that does not stem solely from the internal dynamics of a specific branch of science” (Schiller et al. 2006, p. 10). Program-oriented research means that science waives some of its autonomy in determining its topics (Grunwald 2011). This is exacerbated in the case of Helmholtz research by the fact that the goals and even some of the objects of research are specified by the targets of research policy determined by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (or by the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology for research on traffic and space). Even though these targets are not simply prepared at the ministry and then communicated to the Helmholtz Association, but are developed in a dialogue, it is nonetheless easy to recognize that this constellation provides reason for the university side of KIT to be concerned that this poses a threat to the freedom of research, which will be aligned conform to research policy. 3.1.3 Different relationship to university teaching While the self-definition of the university part depends strongly on teaching, while teaching makes up a large portion of an academic’s self-understanding, and while the demand for specific courses of study can decide the continued existence of institutes, all of this hardly plays a role in the large-scale research sector. Here, teaching is a rather voluntary offering (except for the minimum teaching load required of qualified prospective professors to maintain their status as Privatdozenten, adjunct professors, or professors according to the Jülich model) and is frequently limited to highly specialized seminars on the fields of research of the instructor. The members of the university, in contrast, carry the burden of the undergraduate courses of study, including offering the introductory mass events. Attempts to have the members of the large-scale research sector participate in teaching to a greater degree, e.g., by those referred to as KIT professors, have so far largely failed. This was probably and at least partially due to the resis-

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tance of the faculties of the university field that saw its monopoly and autonomy endangered. 3.1.4 Unsuitability of the traditional structures of organization for the merger Neither of the established structures of organization—disciplines and faculties in the university sector, programs in the large-scale research part—are suited to achieve a comprehensive integration. The programs of large-scale research clearly do not include all of the disciplines that exist in the university sector and that are necessary there. For example, mathematics and architecture would hardly have any place in the program-oriented system. Conversely, the Helmholtz system of programoriented research cannot simply be pressed into university structures. Even the attempt to assign institutes to faculties fails in many cases. For example, only parts of ITAS could be assigned to the humanities or social science faculty; other parts would go to the economics faculty, the faculty of civil engineering, the geo- and environmental sciences, and mechanical engineering. Disregarding the fact that imposing the structures of organization of one party on the other always also would encounter psychological and thus internal problems of acceptance, there are also strong substantive arguments against such an approach. This means, however, that new structures of organization have to be created. The thesis presented in the next section is that the relevant development in the past few years can be conceived as an experimental and incremental process in multiple phases. 3.2 Phases of the merger and the role of the disciplines The plan for the merger of the university and large-scale research sectors can first be found in the plan for the future that the then University of Karlsruhe submitted in the competition surrounding the first Excellence Initiative of the federal German government. Using this idea, the

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university succeeded in its first attempt at making the (to most people surprising) leap into the premier league of German universities. As the integrating structure, this plan envisaged an orientation around competence, which is still in force (phase 1). In a further phase, centers and focal points were founded, which were dedicated to the important fields of research at KIT (phase 2). Currently (phase 3), the institution is pursuing a double strategy, consisting in an administrative department structure and a strategic concentration on fields of research. I will now undertake a detailed description of these phases, which I would like to interpret as the stages of an incremental and experimental learning process in a real-life laboratory. Phase 1—Comprehensive Depiction of Programs and Faculties in a Competence Portfolio: The competence portfolio at KIT was developed as a form of structure encompassing all the programs and faculties. The goal was for each scientist at KIT to be able to locate himself based on his specific competence. The idea was that each individual would register in only one field of competence and exercise his right to vote there (see below), but could also register in up to two further fields without a right to vote, which permits a very high degree of flexibility in specifying one’s position. The competence portfolio consists of 30 fields of competence, which are grouped in six areas (http://www.kit.edu/research/7737.php). Fields of competence are discipline-independent forums of thematically related scientific competence. Competence areas group thematically related fields of competence. For example, the competence area “applied life sciences” unites the fields of competence of biotechnology, toxicology and food science, health and medical engineering, and cellular and structural biology. It includes both basic and applied research in cellular and structural biology, biochemistry, optimization of microbiological production processes, and the use of information and communication technology in networked health care. By means of communicative and coordinative processes, competence areas are supposed to promote the identification of new projects and even the opening of additional sources of financing. Elections of a spokesman take place in the fields of compe-

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tence, one of whom is then selected to be the spokesman for the competence area. Their primary task is to promote the internal communication and cooperation. To promote cooperation, especially between scientists at the university and large-scale research sectors, subsidies have been provided to start-up projects for several years, whose relatively small financial input has achieved a positive effect on networking. It is apparent that this model—employing fields of competence and competence areas—is based relatively closely on scientific disciplines. Yet by making an opening toward areas of application and neighboring fields of competence, it makes possible the integration of areas from the large-scale research sector that are less oriented toward scientific disciplines. This is a construction emanating from the principles of classification and the traditions of the university sector that, by dropping a very tight attachment to scientific disciplines and by offering flexibility in personal identification, is supposed to permit the integration of the large-scale research sector. Phase 2—Establishment of Strategic Centers and Focal Points: It quickly became clear after the competence areas were established that while they are able to fulfill their intended rather internal functions, they are difficult to present to outsiders. As a counterweight or a supplement, the KIT centers and focal points were founded starting in 2008 as another superstructure. They are supposed to constitute, as is repeatedly said, the lighthouses of research at KIT. While the competence areas are supposed to cover everything that is done at KIT, the centers and focal points are selective units in which KIT bundles research projects. They are supposed to heighten the thematic profile of research at KIT and support the strategic planning of research at KIT. As such, in one dimension they describe the reality of current research while in another they exert a normative influence on the future orientation (http://www.kit.edu/research/kit_centers.php). The following KIT centers have been established: energy, nanomicro, elementary particles and astroparticle physics, climate and environment, and mobility systems. COMMputation, humans and technology, optics and photonics, and anthropomatics and robotics are focal points. The energy center

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(http://www.energy.kit.edu/index.php), to name one example, is supposed to support Germany’s energy about-face and the transformation of its energy system by pursuing the priorities of energy efficiency and renewable energy, energy storage and networks, electro mobility, and the expansion of international collaboration in research. Some of the centers and focal points are focused on societal challenges such as energy, the environment, and traffic, modeled after the Helmholtz system of research, but they also include areas related to basic research such as elementary particles and photonics. Individual disciplines obviously play a strong role in the latter areas, yet a lesser one in the challengedriven centers and focal points. Each center and focal point has a science spokesman, a steering committee of participating scientists, and an office. Temporary measures to promote startup activities and cooperation were planned, as was done for the competence areas. Their internal structure is oriented on a structural feature of the Helmholtz programs: related research activities are grouped in the form of topics, for which a topic spokesman is responsible. The topics of the energy center, for example, are energy conversion, renewable energy, energy storage and distribution, efficient utilization of energy, fusion technology, nuclear technology, and energy system analysis. Some of them are identical with the Helmholtz programs of the same or similar name, which suggests that this form of organization and public representation of research stems from the tradition of the large-scale research sector. Phase 3—Duality of Strategy and Organization: The loss of the first-class membership in the second round of the Excellence Initiative led to disillusionment, which—while it resulted in vehement discussions—did not lead to any fundamental questioning as to whether the merger made sense (see Nitsche in this volume, but that is a different topic). Neither did these discussions and related uncertainties exert a visible influence on the internal debate on the future organizational structure of KIT. In the present phase, which is characterized by increased pressure to achieve integration, a two-track course of development is being pur-

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sued, which leaves many issues open with regard to the organizational status of interdisciplinarity in research. The future research strategy, on the one hand, and the organizational structure, on the other—both of which were developed in parallel last year, were approved by the respective committees, and are now in the initial stages of implementation—attribute scientific disciplines quite different roles. KIT’s future strategy for research will be characterized by five fields, according to the most recent decisions of the executive board, senate, and supervisory board: energy, the environment, future technologies, fundamental issues, and society & technology. Two of these, namely energy and the environment, can be immediately linked to the “grand challenges” and the Helmholtz objectives. After all, two of the Helmholtz areas of research are designated “energy” and “earth/environment,” even if the fields of research involved at KIT go beyond those included in the relevant Helmholtz programs. The field of future technologies (which includes nanotechnology and large segments of materials research) can appear plausible because of requirements raised outside of science. This is also where we find the programmatic context, consisting of the Helmholtz research area “key technologies” and the high-tech strategy of the federal government, behind which is ultimately the need to secure the innovativeness and competitiveness of the German economy. The proximity of these three fields of research to challenge-driven Helmholtz research is immediately obvious and can be clearly demonstrated with regard to nonscientific issues. Scientific disciplines constitute a mere—yet very necessary—resource for handling such issues, and the disciplines must cooperate in an interdisciplinary and topic-oriented manner to do justice to the task. The field “society and technology” is supposed to deal “with social relevance and to consider future developments of society and technology and assess them.” The focus in this was on studies in economics, the humanities, social sciences, and jurisprudence in which at any rate the orientation on scientific disciplines took a backseat to topic-driven interdisciplinary research. A precursor is the focus “humans and technology,” which has existed at KIT since 2009. It studies the interac-

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tions in both directions between humans and society, on the one hand, and science and technology, on the other. The research activity takes place in intradisciplinary and interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary projects along the following main thematic lines: work and technology, health and technology, culture and technology, environment and technology, economics and technology, and knowledge and technology. Transverse to these fields of research, the emphasis is on crosssectorial topics of sustainable development, innovation processes, and the design of technology. The introduction of this focus was a response to criticism by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) during the first round of the Excellence Initiative that the strategic role of the humanities, social sciences, and economics at KIT was unclear. The fifth field of research, the fundamental issues, refers to basic research in mathematics and the natural sciences, making this the sole field of these five that is aligned to particular disciplines. This means that the future research strategy at KIT is unmistakably primarily aligned on a problem-oriented and challenge-driven approach, which demonstrates a strong reference to the world of the Helmholtz Association and the Federal Ministry of Research and Education. The KIT centers and focus areas can be considered a precursor of this orientation and as a field for experimentation. Since this strategy has just recently been adopted, it is impossible to say anything about how stable these fields are with regard to the disciplines and how they will be made institutionally secure, such as by means of budgets and evaluations. The operational organization of KIT will at any rate be oriented on a different principle. The decision was made to establish five departments, each of which will be headed by a chief science officer (CSO) who is responsible for its budget and staff or who delegates this responsibility to institute directors. The fundamental idea is that the institutes are the scientific home of KIT staff, and this is equally true of the university and the large-scale research sectors independent of the great difference in size between some of the institutes. Every CSO will thus

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be responsible for a considerable number of institutes (approximately 20–40) and in particular handle structural and budget issues and supervise proceedings to fill management positions. At the same time, a CSO is supposed to represent the interests of his department in the executive board. The structural idea behind the concrete specification of a department is that a department groups together related units or at least existing ones that do not lie very far apart. The designations of these departments are: • • • • •

Biology, chemistry, and process technology Information science, economics, and society Mechanical engineering and electro technology Natural and built environment Mathematics and physics

It is not difficult to recognize that these departments were developed out of the faculties. The comparison of this list of five departments with that of faculties given in Sect. 2.2 shows precisely what has been combined here. The competence fields and areas no longer play any perceptible role. At the most we can assume that their existence for several years will exert an influence on how the institutes of the largescale research sector—which do not belong to faculties—will be integrated into this new structure. It is planned to let the institutes choose, which in individual cases may well lead to debates and tensions within an institute. We can say that this organizational structure is clearly more closely oriented on university traditions than on the program structures of the large-scale research sector. The Helmholtz programs consequently do not have a firm place in the new structure but can be spread over several departments. As a consequence of this situation, decision-making, e.g., on future research agenda of the Helmholtz programs will have to use distinguished procedures bringing together responsible persons from different organizational units. This is not necessarily a disadvantage because it provides open space for negotiating and taking into account a larger diversity of interests and KIT stake-

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holders compared to a strict top-down system—however, it increases complexity which must be handled carefully in order to avoid inefficiency and frictions.

4. C HALLENGES

AND

O PPORTUNITIES

The founding phase of KIT, beginning with the preparations for the first Excellence Initiative, can be understood as a phase of experimentation with different structures whose common goal consisted in bridging the different types of organizations and traditions. Viewed from this perspective, KIT has been a “real-world lab” since 2007, in which at a very early stage a duality began to become apparent—the duality of research strategy and organization. This experimentation initially took place solely by means of the simple addition or superimposition of new structural levels and elements. Existing structures were not abolished; at the most they were stripped of some competence. The levels of the competence fields and areas with their elective procedures as well as the KIT centers and focus areas with their managing offices were introduced without infringing on other structural features such as faculties and programs. This leads to an excessive structuring with problematic effects, which also triggered criticism internally. So while research can always only be conducted at one spot, i.e., ultimately in an institute, in the course of the merger process research had to be advocated and also presented in more and more display windows, each time in a different manner. ITAS, for example, had to present its research conducted in the Helmholtz program “Technology, Innovation, and Society” in the KIT focal point “humans and technology,” in the topic “energy system analysis” of the KIT center “Energy,” in the topic “technology-based material flows” in the KIT center “Climate and Environment,” in the humanities and social science faculty and in the KIT focal point “robotics and anthropomatics.” Correspondingly, in each of these forms of organization

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there are committees to be served, positions of spokesperson to be filled, workshops to be organized, public events to be supported with information and personal commitment, and reporting duties to be met to the administrative position that is responsible as part of assessments or presentations of achievements in the various structures. Even just with regard to the last point, it was not always easy to retain an overview.1 This is true also for several, sometimes strongly overlapping functions of individual persons. Take me, for example: director of ITAS at the large-scale research sector, elected member to the KIT senate, elected spokesman for the competence field “interaction between science, technology, and society,” scientific spokesman of the KIT focal point “humans and technology,” spokesperson of the Helmholtz Alliance ENERGY-TRANS, spokesperson of the Helmholtz School on Energy Scenarios ESS, and spokesman of the topic energy system analysis of the KIT center “Energy.” That is a host of hats that usually conceal the same substance and adds considerably to what usual university professors have to take care of. That this system is intransparent, redundant, and thus surely in a certain sense inefficient is easy to recognize. I concede that each of the structures mentioned has, in theory, an own and specific idea behind it and a mission to fulfill; in practice, however, the issues to be discussed are more or less the same. Nonetheless, it is possible that the phase of excessive structuring is a necessary intermediate step on the route to a functioning structure that bridges the differences between university and large-scale research sectors in a transparent and efficient manner yet does not flatten everything. It appears senseless to try to find a good solution to this problem independent of practical reality, as it

1

It could be highly probable, if not inevitable, according to a comment by Peter Weingart, for challenge-driven research to get into this situation. Scientifically, the work is only done once, yet if we want to prove research to be a contribution to overcoming nonscientific challenges, one would have to present it in different display windows. This connection may not, however, be employed to legitimate inefficient structures.

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were, especially since there is no role model and thus no blueprint for the merger of a university and a Helmholtz center. Learning by doing, i.e., experimentation in a real-world lab is difficult and requires the use of considerable resources, which then are missing at another spot. Yet it may be that there is no alternative to this experimental learning from experience and involving a large number of actors. So far, the clearly visible interim result of the development described in Sect. 3 is that the structure of the earlier university that is oriented on scientific disciplines continues to be predominant, at least with regard to the administrative organization of research in the new departments. The organization of teaching and thus of the scientific qualification remains a task of the faculties. In the public image and the research strategy, in contrast, the topic orientation is dominant. It is an open issue whether the disciplines will now become simply a resource for the grand topics in the medium and long term—to whose handling they are supposed to contribute—or whether the topic-related programs of the Helmholtz Association can be utilized by the disciplines as a resource in financial or also topical regard. It is probable that neither the one nor the other extreme will come to pass. On the contrary, this tension between the two structural principles of research strategy and organization could be a tension that cannot be resolved since both the disciplines and the programs have a specific and nonconvertible unique feature. According to its assignment, KIT has two missions: university and large-scale research center. Both of these missions presumably must constantly be balanced and repeatedly put into new balance when there are conflicts. If the pendulum swings too strongly to one side, the other will suffer, and vice versa. If this diagnosis is accurate, the further development of KIT will confront the substantial challenge of having this tension rooted directly in its founding resolution and of not being able to get rid of it, but rather to live with it and to “process” it. This can lead to constructive and creative tensions but also to internal struggles that are destructive and use up resources. The future is open, and the author remains optimistic.

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R EFERENCES Bechmann, Gotthard and Günter Frederichs. 1996. “Problemorientierte Forschung: Zwischen Politik und Wissenschaft.” In Praxisfelder der Technikfolgenforschung, edited by Gotthard Bechmann, 1-27. Frankfurt: Campus. Coenen, Reinhard. 2001 (ed.). Integrative Forschung zum Globalen Wandel. Frankfurt: Campus. Grunwald, Armin. 2011. “Programmforschung als inter- und transdisziplinärer Arbeitsprozess.” In Systemforschung. Politikberatung und öffentliche Aufklärung, edited by Reinhard Coenen and KarlHeinz Simon, 104-122. Kassel: Universität Kassel. Grunwald, Armin. 2010. “Evaluierung als Dauerzustand: Fragen nach Metrik, Macht und Maß.” In Die bedingte Universität. Die Institution der Wissenschaft zwischen „Sachzwang“ und „Bildungsauftrag“, edited by Christian Adam, Jan Müller, René Thun, and Willem Warnecke, 93-111. Stuttgart: Schmetterling Verlag. Grunwald, Armin. 2009. “Technology Assessment: Concepts and Methods.” In Philosophy of Technology and Engineering Science, Volume 9, edited by Anthonie Meijers, 1103-1146. Amsterdam: NH Elsevier. Grunwald, Armin. 2007. “ Transdisziplinäre Forschung in der Helmholtz-Gemeinschaft.” Gaia 16, 1: 69-71. Krauch, Helmut. 1970. Die organisierte Forschung. Neuwied: Luchterhand. Luhmann, Niklas. 1990. Die Wissenschaft der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Schiller, Johannes, Reiner Manstetten, Bernd Klauer, Philipp Steuer, Herwig Unnerstall, Heidi Wittmer, and Bernd Hansjürgens. 2006. Herausforderung Programmforschung. Konzeption, Organisation und Evaluation problemorientierter Umweltforschung. Marburg: Metropolis-Verlag. Weingart, Peter. 1997. “Interdisziplinarität—der paradoxe Diskurs.” Ethik und Sozialwissenschaften 8: 521–529.

The Foundation of KIT within the Context of the Science System— A Provocation in Science Policy D ENNIS N ITSCHE

S YSTEMATIC L ACK

OF

C LARITY

Germany has never had a homogeneous science system. Especially since the early 19th century, in the wake of incipient industrialization and specialization, the traditional universities were added numerous new institutions which mainly converged in today’s technical universities or universities of applied science. From imperial times onward, entirely new types of institutions came into being in which, for the first time, the unity of research and teaching was severed: The institutes of the Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft, today’s Max Planck Society, the successive establishment of (specialized) research institutions in the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic, respectively, and their concentration later in the Helmholtz and Leibniz Societies, as well as the creation of a variety of federal institutions conducting research, and the establishment of Fraunhofer institutes. All these as well as a veritable boom in newly founded universities have imposed upon the system a considerable degree of complexity. Frequently, the division of functions among these types of institutions is

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based more on feeling than on factual or systematic grounds. A considerable lack of clarity in the system became apparent, at the latest, when a (limited) research function was entrusted to the universities of applied science, coupled with their wish to be granted the right to confer doctorates, when extra-university research institutions made efforts to support post-graduates and, finally, when private universities were admitted. Research and teaching functions, and successful innovation processes, did not and do not necessarily correlate with the allocation of funds. In particular, strength in research of universities covers a very broad spectrum, and also extra-university research has not always met expectations based on its funding and, in particular, on the absence of the teaching functions incumbent upon universities. More complexity arises from the interaction of the federation and the federal states in financing the science system. While universities come under the responsibility of the federal states, except for building and project funding (which has grown considerably), the other research organizations are financed under a variety of systems always incorporating contributions by the federation and the federal states.1 However, the expected fundamental discussion of the different roles played in the system simply did not come about for a long period of time. Both collective and individual players concentrated on acquiring additional rights, leeway and resources for their particular institutions. There were hardly any battles about borderlines to be drawn. Latent tensions came to light only as a result of the (restricted) award of a research contract and the resultant claim by the universities of applied science to be allowed to confer doctorates, which was broadly refused by the universities. That many universities of applied science changed their names, or had to change them under state university laws, added to the confusion, especially abroad where German “Fachhochschulen” like to be referred to as universities of applied science. However, also persons and companies interested in academic studies again and again were irritated, for instance, by a “university of applied science” located

1

Cf. Rüttinger/Nitsche 2011, 87-94.

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only a few blocks away from a university which called itself “technical university.” A first remarkable crossover of these systems occurred when the University of Applied Science of Northeastern Lower Saxony and the University of Lüneburg were merged into Leuphana in 2005. By and large, however, all these institutions had settled in their respective identities, albeit with nebulous definitions. Pillarization (“Versäulung”) or encrustation (“Verkrustung”) of the science system were slogans of the day. However, over the years, the distinction between universities of applied sciences strong in research and universities weak in research became more and more blurred, while extra-university research institutions sought contacts with universities not only to recruit young staff, partly even jointly appointing executives, and reaching out into the early promotion of interest in science and technology in children and young persons.

T HE E XCELLENCE I NITIATIVE AN I NSTANT OF S HOCK

AS

Even though the idea of competition had been developed and cultivated for decades especially in the proposals by the DFG, the EU, and numerous German ministries, the Excellence Initiative for Universities devised by the then Federal Minister for Education, Edelgard Bulmahn (SPD), can only be considered a shock for the entire system. It was not so much the rather small-scale graduate schools and clusters of excellence, but the competition for institutional strategies of the respective institution which clearly revealed that there are high performers and less-high performers among universities, and that they can be clearly named. Yet another shock rattled the system: What would happen if one’s institution, despite being a highly renowned university, was not strong enough in itself to face competition? The Excellence Initiative was the necessary catalyst in this respect which drew clear attention to the “pillarization” of the science system as well as its latent negative

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impact on performance both on an institutional and on a personal level and clearly questioned the status quo.2 The universities, being the only institutions with the right to file proposals in the Excellence Initiative, responded to the shock in a variety of ways. Accordingly, the first three institutional strategies distinguished in 2006 and the four other ones distinguished as late as in 2007 were very different. Some universities boasted of their broad-based capabilities, emphasizing their strengths, while others moved to the sidelines, resorting to small exclusive “centers for advanced studies,” elite niches away from the general turmoil of universities. In some cases, they simply tried to do nothing and, without showing any recognizable willingness to change, referred to themselves as benchmark institutions. Two institutions, the Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule of Aachen and the Universität Karlsruhe (TH), adopted a different approach. By deliberately overstepping the tacitly agreed borders, they initiated a rapprochement between the university spheres and those of non-university research institutions. The Aachen concept was aimed at networking with the Jülich Research Center in a pattern which de facto had existed in Karlsruhe for years without arousing much attention, and which encompassed in particular cooperation in appointing leading scientific staff. The Karlsruhe concept clearly went further, providing for a complete merger of the two institutions, the Karlsruhe Research Center and the Karlsruhe University, into the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). Now a line had been crossed: One effect on the science system was created not only by the foreseeable sheer size of KIT—the Universität Karlsruhe and the Karlsruhe Research Center each had nearly 4,000 staff members, which made KIT the biggest independent science institution in Germany—but, above all, the statement associated with this concept: The excellent technical outfit of the Research Center and the vivacity of the University, with its students

2

The additional university rankings conducted by various sources will not be referred to at this point, as they are unlikely to change the system and do not even elicit specific responses of the universities.

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and post-graduates, the possibility to improve teaching by including staff from the national research center, and the connection between (non-university) fundamental research especially with engineering research close to application and the associated innovation potential—all this, if it succeeded, seemed to be superior to the inflexible old system. The increased attention this KIT vision received in the media, in political circles, and also in the international scientific community gave rise to animosities, fears, and frustrations especially among the leading staff of other institutions. Even the federal ministries and those of the state of Baden-Württemberg expressed rather subdued joy, both sides being afraid that an important institution under their responsibility might change into the domain of the other, or that the whole institution might seek too much independence. Yet, KIT was supported by the powers that be, first in a rather low-key fashion, later with more and more conviction, partly also because those responsible could not well go back on their word. Even the Helmholtz Association, initially very skeptical of the KIT idea, gradually came to like the opportunity to extend its influence into the university sphere through the KIT model. However, additional funds for managing the merger were not made available either by the federation or by the state, and also the Institutional Strategy of KIT had planned to invest the additional funds completely in research. Quite the contrary happened: The new size of KIT, and the success of the Excellence Initiative, de facto had a negative impact on a variety of funding sources with respect to the appropriation of additional funds applied for in the interest of research and teaching, but also of university building construction, because “KIT was so big anyway.”

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T HE R ISE

AND

F ALL

OF

KIT— OR

NOT ?

The establishment of KIT, going into effect on October 1, 2009, had been preceded by intense conceptual, legal, and political preparations.3 Although the Karlsruhe concept had won the seal of excellence as early as October 2006, this was an outstanding achievement of the management staff and the project teams involved, given the complex interaction between the federation and the state of Baden-Württemberg, the need for special state legislation covering KIT, and last but not least, the drafting of a detailed roadmap for execution with the assistance of an international advisory board. The Excellence Initiative with its funding key of 75:25 for the federation and the respective federal state was another violation of responsibilities and had sparked off an early emotional debate about potential federal universities, i.e. the universities successful in the Excellence Initiative. Federal Minister of Education Annette Schavan had kindled the debate by her statements referring to KIT as the “flagship of German science,” which triggered corresponding conjectures, hopes, or apprehensions about the further development of KIT, depending on the perspective. Encouraged by the KIT success, also other institutions intensified their contacts with institutions of other “pillars” in local or regional proximity. KIT became an advisor much in demand and frequently quoted as a model of attempts to transgress pillarization and inflexibility of the science system also in other places. In Berlin, for instance, the merger of the Max Delbrück Center, another Helmholtz institution, with the Charité, the Berlin University medical branch, was advanced. In Dresden, a network of cooperation among a number of institutions was conceived. All these processes were decisively advanced by the preparation for the second round of the Excellence Initiative.

3

Cf: Nitsche 2008, 166-175; Nitsche/Löhe 2013, http://digbib.ubka.unikarlsruhe.de/volltexte/1000034247 (last visited October 17, 2013).

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The deadline for the second round of the Excellence Initiative, September 1, 2011, posed a special challenge to KIT. Separate flows of funds and separate bodies of personnel in the former federal and state institutions, respectively, and the need to first consolidate the fresh merger and promote internal fusion, had to be coped with alongside the new proposals to be written for graduate schools, clusters of excellence, and the institutional strategy. The centers and focuses as new integrative research structures were just being devised at this early point in time and had in no way been consolidated, let alone taken shape. The Institutional Strategy II was developed under the leadership of Vice President Detlef Löhe, who had already masterminded the first Institutional Strategy, and the project management of Dr. Irmgard Langbein and the author of this essay, with the cooperation of approximately 140 staff members from science and administration. Automatic extension of the first success was not expected in any way, the realization having gained ground that this was real competition. So, in terms of content, the Institutional Strategy II was no mere continuation of the first one, but a real advanced development with numerous far-reaching, ambitious projects, among other things, in the promotion of young scientists and engineers, internationalization, innovation, diversity, and an interplay of humanities and social sciences with natural sciences and engineering. In addition, Institutional Strategy II encompassed KIT as one complete institution, not focusing on selected aspects or areas. A few days before the decision about the Excellence Initiative was to be announced officially, information had passed through the grapevine that KIT would win an additional graduate school, but would miss both a cluster of excellence newly applied for and the cluster of excellence applied for in renewal of the funding line. However, at least one successful graduate school and one successful cluster of excellence each were the formal minimum preconditions for being granted the Institutional Strategy. The worst fears finally came true when the outcome was announced on July 16, 2012. The Institutional Strategy of KIT which, in itself, had received excellent grades had been taken out

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of the competition because of the failure of the cluster of excellence applied for. In this way, KIT had lost its status of excellence much to the surprise of the entire scientific community. This had not been expected by KIT or any other institution or the ministries involved, especially because the proposal for renewal of a cluster of excellence of KIT, which at the same time had the status of the center of excellence of the DFG, had been ranked excellently by the DFG just a few months earlier and had been granted for another five years. As DFG clusters of excellence are clearly more exclusive than clusters of excellence of the Excellence Initiative, success of this proposal also in the Excellence Initiative had been expected beyond any doubt.4

C ONSEQUENCES TO KIT AND THE S CIENCE S YSTEM The absolutely unexpected failure of KIT in the Excellence Initiative II came as a shock to those responsible at KIT and to many staff members. Although the loss of additional funds under the Excellence Initiative was painful, the approx. EUR 15 million per annum for five years,

4

The KIT Presidential Committee decided to be a good loser, even though there were voices wanting to draw public attention to this unclear situation. In some cases, KIT was accused of having acted “arrogantly” when the cluster had been reviewed. Even if this had been true, which the author feels is impossible in the light of his knowledge of the participants, it could hardly be a scientific criterion for an opinion. That the comparatively small clusters of excellence and graduate schools can cause a failure of the entire institution, irrespective of all other achievements in research and teaching must also be considered a structural defect in the whole Excellence Initiative program. The artificial five-year sequence also does not seem to be a very suitable period, especially for the implementation of fundamental changes like those at KIT.

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compared to an aggregate annual budget of more than EUR 800 million, was a tolerable loss. Much more dramatic was the loss of the seal of excellence and the associated reputation. When the decision had been announced, there were critics who, as they said, “had always been skeptical” or accused KIT of having worked “sloppily.” KIT’s staff began to criticize management as well, sometimes anonymously and in the press. Among other complaints, it was argued that the top performers had been totally absorbed by the merger, which is not very convincing even quantitatively, given a total of more than 9,200 staff members as against “only” 140 persons involved in the project teams of the Excellence Initiative, and 25 leading scientists each in the proposals for graduate schools and clusters of excellence. The argument is not convincing even when such internal bodies as the Senate and the CRYS (Council for Research and Promotion of Young Scientists) quality assurance agency are taken into account. It is good to note that the scientific community as such did not reflect on the failure of KIT in the Excellence Initiative. Efforts in Berlin, in Dresden, and at many other locations were continued and, as things now look, produced respectable success and added value. Even unwinding KIT and restoring its forerunner institutions, i.e. the University and the Research Center, was a proposal not even alluded to. The arguments which had led to the merger continued to be recognized. Moreover: KIT continues to be considered a model, as is expressed also in the “Helmholtz 2020” strategy paper by the Helmholtz Association in which, among other things, closer networking between the Helmholtz Centers and universities is demanded. The violent reactions by, among others, the Max Planck Society, the Fraunhofer Society, and the mixed responses by the universities to the Helmholtz paper indicate that the German science system is beginning to move, and that there is a more and more open fight for resources, agenda setting, and political and public notice. The establishment of lobby associations, such as UAS7, a grouping of self-appointed universities of applied sciences strong in research, and U15, the universities successful in the Excellence Initiative and/or full universities with university hospitals,

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the pronounced public role played by the Conference of University Presidents, and TU9 (Association of Technical Universities) constitute impressive proof. Almost any proposal currently seems to be worth discussing, as is borne out by the recommendations of the Council of Science and Humanities about the establishment of a new, additional type of university with only teaching duties and no research, and the establishment of two leading, internationally visible outlier universities followed by some 20 strong follower universities preceding a field of only mediocre institutions. This, too, the Council of Science and Humanities argues, required doping, above all by federal funding of state universities short of money.

L ESSONS L EARNT Despite all negative consequences, KIT’s failure in the Excellence Initiative has produced some positive effects as well: Re-emphasis on quality instead of quantity, a salutary warning shot and the associated grounding, and new incentives are valuable building blocks of future success. Numerous technical breakthroughs, new annual records in third-party funding, visibly improved internal networking, no more structural debates, internal process optimization, top positions in teaching as documented by ratings and rankings, and the exclusive distinction of a founder university leave room for a lot of optimism.5 KIT is, and remains, the most comprehensive experiment conducted to overcome the pillarization of the German research scene. Irrespective of its failure in the Excellence Initiative II, the establishment of KIT remains a milestone in the history of German science, and the Excellence Initiative proper can claim to have broken up this pillariza-

5

http://www.kit.edu/besuchen/presseinformationen.php (last visited October 2013). http://www.kit.edu/visit/press_releases.php (last visited October 17, 2013).

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tion. There is one drop of bitterness, however: namely, the fact that there seems to be no conclusive overall concept for the German science system which could constitute a theoretical foundation of the need for different types of institutions and assign to the respective institutions clear duties and the necessary resources. The author therefore dares to predict that the German science system is going to look markedly different just a few years from now. However, whether particular interests or a conclusive system will win the day remains an open question.

R EFERENCES Nitsche, Dennis. 2008. “Die Gründung des Karlsruher Instituts für Technologie.” In Badische Heimat (2) 2008: 166-175. Nitsche, Dennis and Detlef Löhe. 2013. Establishing Science-adequate Research Structures at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology—Risks and Opportunities Associated with the Reconcilement of Disciplines, Transdisciplinarity, and Competencies. An Essay, http:// digbib.ubka.uni-karlsruhe.de/volltexte/1000034247 (last visited October 17, 2013). Rüttinger, Denise and Dennis Nitsche. 2011. “Die Struktur des Forschungssystems in Deutschland.” In Bildung, Forschung und Innovation am Oberrhein, edited by Eric Jakob, Manuel Friesecke, Joachim Beck, and Margot Bonnafous, 87-94. Baden-Baden, Zürich: Nomos, Dike Verlag. http://www.kit.edu/besuchen/presseinformationen.php (last visited October 17, 2013). http://www.kit.edu/visit/press_releases.php (last visited October 17, 2013).

A Place Apart: Opportunities in Developing Leuphana University of Lüneburg S ASCHA S POUN

AND

C HRISTIAN K ÖLZER

I NTRODUCTION Modern universities are called upon to be many different things for many different people: They should be training grounds for future professionals, research institutions as well as protected reserves of scholastic learning, to name but a few of their tasks. And, while it is true that universities can be all of these things, they are, first and foremost, communities. And as such they develop their own, at times idiosyncratic, cultures, which may or may not further their essential purpose: to provide a place for young people to develop their minds and personalities. For this to happen, universities must master a balancing act between two fundamental principles: firstly, it must guarantee the freedom its members need to carry out their research and teaching as well as to organize and run their own institution, and, secondly, it must cultivate a commitment to the society it is a part of. A university can thus be neither here nor there but has to maintain its status as what could be called a place apart, a place slightly removed and thus liberated from

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the mere practical needs and demands of society and yet at the same time attending to these very needs through its research and teaching.

L EUPHANA U NIVERSITY : A

PLACE APART

Leuphana University defines itself as a public university for civil society in the 21st century. It embraces the ideals of humanism, sustainability and service to society. Both research and teaching at Leuphana University are committed to these principles, which, in turn, are the foundations of a university culture characterized by three values: Individuality At Leuphana University education is understood as cultivating the growth of human beings both as individuals and as members of society. Leading a fulfilled life in this regard means developing one’s individual faculties, interests and personality. The University can shape and guide an integral part of this process of personal development, if it can provide and guarantee sufficient freedom and inspiration for this process to evolve. A person, then, is to be considered holistically. Being human encompasses faculties of the mind and of the body, of thinking and of acting. Thus, educating a person entails offering him or her a wide variety of different subjects and approaches to learning, all of which simultaneously address the concerns of a heterogeneous society. As individuality can only exist within the structures of a society and as a standpoint can only relate to an overall culture, so personality evolves in interaction with others. Thus, the processes of education involve individual learning processes as well as learning through interaction. As an institution Leuphana also cultivates this sense of individuality by promoting interdisciplinary academic fields of study and re-

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search it believes undervalued and promising. Consequently, Leuphana University does not offer the whole spectrum of academic subjects usually found at German universities but concentrates on culture, education, entrepreneurship, and sustainability. Within these fields, students for example, choose a major subject and a minor subject, which—together with an additional transdisciplinary curriculum, the Complementary Studies Program—are combined to form one coherent study program, the Leuphana Bachelor’s. Openness In both its research and teaching, Leuphana University has established a culture that transcends traditional boundaries of disciplines, ideological schools of thought and other constraints on creativity and intellectual growth. Instead, this culture is shaped by a constant exchange of ideas, by transdisciplinary collaboration and a broadening of intellectual horizons through challenging scientific approaches and methods with an explicitly international scope. This creates an inspiring and challenging environment for scholars interested in central research questions spanning across individual disciplines. Leuphana University focuses on learning through research, that is, on students participating actively in a mutual exchange with researchers. This does away with the traditional hierarchy of teachers and learners, creating in its place a more egalitarian structure of interactive learning experiences, to the advantage of both. Study programs are designed to meet the expectations, interests and needs of students in different phases of their lives and careers. Education in essence means opening up new perspectives and seeking to complement one’s own expertise through interaction with others —an essential precondition for participating in today’s pluralistic and heterogeneous society.

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Responsibility Leuphana University is committed in many ways to taking on responsibility for civil society in the 21st century. Some aspects of its research and teaching are linked to the most pressing issues and questions facing us today. Leuphana engages in social processes of transformation and is an essential motor for regional social and economic development, particularly by means of its Innovation Incubator. By following its individual path of constant organizational renewal and developing its academic curriculum, Leuphana University fosters new creative potential among its own members and the members of society in general. As a result, Leuphana University has become an attractive place for people interested in actively tackling the challenges of today’s society in their research and teaching and using their expertise to shape the processes of development leading into the future.

L EUPHANA C OLLEGE The Leuphana College was founded in 2007 as the institution for undergraduate education. It is an element in the process of developing Lüneburg University in accordance with the guiding vision of becoming an inspiring public university for civil society in the 21st century. This reorientation did not aim merely at realizing the potential for university development provided by the Bologna Process but seeks to establish a culture of learning through research within the modern structure of a democratic university. Three salient features of this process can be identified: Firstly, study programs dependent on only one discipline have been superseded by study programs encompassing different fields of expertise represented by a wide variety of scholars. All undergraduate study programs are organized within the administrative framework of the College, which creates coherence in this variety and facilitates bonding

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between students and “their” university, whatever their individual choice of courses might be. This unity is essential if there is to be an enriching learning experience, one based on a holistic understanding of the learning process and of the learners involved. Secondly, Leuphana College represents yet another significant step on the university’s progression on a path defined by two development strategies: links between disciplines, classroom learning, and experiential learning on the one hand, and the professionalization of administration for teaching as well on the other. The College is part of a comprehensive, content-driven concept of university, not only for research but also for teaching within the structures of a democratic university. By drawing central administrative tasks into the College and thus providing a coherent organization, faculty members are able to devote their attention to research and teaching instead. Thirdly, at Leuphana College teaching is as highly valued as research; with learning being considered a holistic process involving a person’s whole being. Research and teaching are not treated as separate activities. Instead, in various settings teaching empowers students to interact with active researchers, this interaction being the basis of a learning process on both sides. Such learning through research is supported ideally in an organizational unit such as the College. A central element of the College is the so-called “Leuphana Semester,” the first semester which has a common curriculum for all students no matter which major or minor programs of study they are enrolled in. In three transdisciplinary and two discipline-specific courses, students are introduced to the academic world with its own rules of etiquette and discourses and hone their team skills in single or group-work projects. In the second semester, students start their studies in their majors (90 credits) and minors (30 credits). At the same time, they take courses in the so-called “Complementary Studies Program” (30 credits), which by offering frequent changes of perspective helps them to transcend the boundaries of the individual disciplines. All central administrative functions are located within the organizational unit of the College, for example, the coordination of majors and

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transdisciplinary courses as well as the support for lecturers. The college is supervised in all academic decisions by elected committees and assisted concerning its strategic development, personnel and resources by a Vice President and ultimately by the Presidential Board. Deans elected by members of their faculties supervise clusters of the study programs while an elected faculty member supervises each major program and minor program, thus ensuring their quality. All matters of academic procedure are dealt with by individual committees, discipline-specific boards, the Study Commission for Transdisciplinary Courses (Leuphana Semester, Complementary Studies) and in the appropriate examination boards. Besides these common administrative boards, a number of additional communication formats have been introduced to assess student feedback in a quick and efficient way and to provide the means for a productive exchange about the goals, topics, methods and teaching approaches as well as the specifics of their implementation among all members of the university community. An ongoing process of communication has been introduced among the Presidential Committee, the Faculties and the Deans of Study responsible for the Bachelor’s program, with the Office of Accreditation and Examination Boards and with the organizational units of the Graduate School, where students can continue their university education after graduating from the College, and with the Professional School. Three factors seem essential for the successful implementation of the College model within our university system: 1. A clear understanding of what constitutes a good university experience for students. 2. Arrangements providing students and teachers with the best possible settings for learning through research. 3. A lean and effective structure of overarching administrative tasks within the organizational unit of the College. The organizational and conceptual work within the College is grounded in the academic freedom a university relies on, which in Lower Saxony is regulated by the Higher Education Act. However, for

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the development of innovative structures for academic teaching and learning, third-party funding and tuition fees are essential. Realizing the goals of the College is made possible through cooperation among the four faculties of the university. It is this cooperation which creates a structure of coherence and community, which, in turn, is the most central indicator of the College’s success in coaching students in their learning processes—and making our university a place apart.

T HE G RADUATE S CHOOL Leuphana University founded its Graduate School in 2008, taking its cue from the United States, where the bundling of individual Master’s and PhD study programs within a single organizational unit has long been a central element of university design. In Germany, Leuphana was one of the first universities to introduce a Graduate School offering admission to qualified graduates from the College Bachelor’s program. By coordinating all study programs leading up to the Master’s degree within the Graduate School, it is possible to design inter- and transdisciplinary study programs and to closely integrate Master’s and PhD study programs. This design has many advantages over traditional structures. For one thing, prospective students are not forced to look for appropriate study programs or for PhD program guidelines in each and every individual department. After enrolling in their programs of study, students can address all of their questions and problems to one administrative unit. This structure also fosters collaborative projects through networking among faculty members and students, creating a culture of community and a mutual exchange of ideas. The Leuphana Graduate School is coordinated by a Vice President who also advances the topics and agendas of the Graduate School in the meetings of the Presidential Committee. Deans of Study for each of the Master’s programs oversee the relationship between Graduate

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School and the four faculties, with each major being supervised by a faculty member. What is more, in the central Graduate School Study Commission, faculty members and students discuss interdisciplinary aspects of the Master’s program. As in the Bachelor’s program, at Leuphana University Master’s students also enroll in courses of the Complementary Studies program in addition to the coursework in their majors.

T HE P ROFESSIONAL S CHOOL The Leuphana Professional School was founded in 2009 as an independent unit providing study programs to individuals seeking further qualification, helping young entrepreneurs to start up their first enterprises as well as generating and developing projects on the threshold between academia and business. Full-time and part-time study programs for further education address people with and without a previous university degree with seminars focusing on the demands of current and future job markets. Within the Innovation Incubator Lüneburg, Leuphana University provides young entrepreneurs with the guidance, coaching and support they need when taking their very first steps in a business startup, whether they are Leuphana graduates or not. This is one more way how Leuphana contributes to developing the regional economy and its innovation infrastructure. With cooperations between researchers of Leuphana University and regional companies and enterprises university research can also have a very positive impact on regional development. What is more, the specific issues and demands of regional enterprises can also inspire new research projects, thereby stressing the mutually beneficial partnership between Leuphana University and the region of Lüneburg.

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AND OPPORTUNITIES

Having said all that, it is only prudent to consider some problems arising inevitably for an institution committed to individuality and innovation. Some six and a half years into the process of developing our organization it can be stated that—while the strategies outlined above are beginning to bear fruit—Leuphana will have to continue on its path of innovation and inventiveness if it is to be able to keep abreast with the other medium-sized universities in Lower Saxony in the competition for governmental and third-party funding and—most of all—for students. On this path, three obstacles must be considered the most serious ones. Obstacle #1: Current vs. potential performance It is no secret that at Leuphana University the redesigning process has only just begun to bear fruit. This means that wherever we turn to seek cooperation and partnerships with other universities and organizations, whenever we compete with other universities for students, funding and researchers, what we have to offer is often only potentially inherent in our university model. When it comes to comparing statistics only—the number of articles published per year, the number of exchange placements abroad for our students, the number of dissertations per professorship per year—the numbers are still increasing, because university reform needs and takes time and support for these developments has not been in place long enough. While these circumstances are acknowledged by potential partners, some data still tell a different and misleading story. Obstacle #2: Asynchronicity of university development incentives While some initiatives of professors and other university members in the field of university development can be implemented at one go,

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other development projects, due to financial factors or personnel capacity or both, have to be set in motion one step at a time. This is not at all uncommon in change management processes, but it has to be taken into consideration when setting standards for objective agreements or when positioning the university in interdisciplinary research networks. This asynchronicity, of course, can also lead to tension among faculty members when research funding opportunities seem to be distributed unequally. It is a difficult balancing act for all to seize opportunities for quick growth and development while at the same time tending those parts of the university where further steps still have to be made. Obstacle #3: Limits to innovation Given the limited public resources in personnel and funding Leuphana University still faces, innovation projects, also those undertaken with new cooperation partners, are subject to greater scrutiny than would be the case at larger and more securely established universities. While innovation is an essential part of our mission as a university and is brought to full bloom by our faculty, not every interesting and perhaps even seminal innovation project can be implemented on a sustainable basis. Leuphana University does not have the same opportunities as other institutions situated in regions with a more developed economic structure: Thus, quite a few cooperation agreements with regional companies have been launched successfully, but many regional enterprises simply do not have the funds to act as third-party supporters of innovative research and teaching projects, seminal as they may be. A grave concern here is, of course, the prospect of further cuts in the financing of Lower Saxony’s system of higher education or limitations of the university’s freedom to develop their culture. The consequences would be that Leuphana University would have to continue along the same lines described above, with innovative opportunities of development being carefully weighed against what has already been successfully implemented—and with very little scope for engaging with all the opportunities we deem worthwhile. There is even the danger that being

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forced to discontinue promising projects due to a lack of capacity or funding could be regarded by others as a sign of failure. This makes it all the more important for us to motivate the realization that at Leuphana University there is more potential to be tapped. At Leuphana University we see three fields into which we think we should venture as a response to these problems and as strategies to steer Leuphana confidently into the future. Opportunity #1: Internationalization Higher education has long since been globalized. Academic exchange schemes are no longer a “nice to have” for some universities but a “must have” for all. So, expanding our international research network and making Leuphana University more attractive for international students and researchers will be one of the core tasks of the near future. Naturally, this depends on having in place an adequate system of communication, teaching and support—and in English. But while openly acknowledging that in many disciplines and research fields English has long become the preferred lingua franca for conferences and publications, it must be said that in some disciplines the German language—with its structures and terminologies—still plays an important role and should not be lightly abandoned. Still, with many students from abroad planning to spend only one or two semesters in Germany and with international scholars intent on continuing their research here without the obstacle of learning a new language, Leuphana University will have to present itself as an attractive place for people from around the world to study and do research at. Further academic exchange schemes could then be introduced with appropriate institutions, and research cooperations already in place through the efforts of individuals or within the Innovation Incubator could then be expanded. A full curriculum of majors and minors taught in English, it has to be emphasized, would not only be advantageous as regards international students and scholars but also as an additional level of qualification for German students and researchers at Leuphana University.

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Opportunity #2: Expansion through cooperation with external partners A German university has, of course, first and foremost a responsibility towards the students and researchers who come there seeking out the freedom of a place apart, a place where they can develop their own talents, capabilities and personalities. However, a university’s purpose can also be thought of in a more abstract way. A university is also a closed administrative system whose function is to provide the necessary means for higher education with a variety of different content. Thus, a university can also offer its services to an external institution seeking to outsource its own needs to train and develop its employees. And Leuphana University is about to embark on a number of such undertakings, such as different concepts of learning in a digital environment. Opportunity #3: Compatibility versus compete-ability One of the hallmarks of Leuphana University is its individuality, as expressed in the study programs and structures it offers. This strategy has made Leuphana University highly attractive, as we are able to inspire students and researchers alike who are interested in and motivated by this very special-ness and who endeavor to develop their own interests and capabilities within this individuality while evolving it further through their own contributions. In turn, Leuphana University’s contributes to the academic community by providing education both within very specialized fields as well as with a still rare transdisciplinary focus. At the same time, however, the compatibility of individual academic achievements and overall degrees has to be guaranteed, if there is to be an unhindered mobility of students and researchers without any disadvantage for their careers. Thus, new study programs have to be set up not apart from but in close connection to those of other universities while at the same time offering subjects and combinations of disciplines not found at other higher education institutions. This in-

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herent tension between individuality and compatibility is a challenge but also an inspiring motor for university development.

C ONCLUSION It should now be evident that at Leuphana University development is a challenging and highly individualized process. First, after a period of critical self-reflection, also on its social and economic situation, a university must locate itself, must find its starting-point. Then it must find a viable process that will allow it to develop an individual profile of teaching and research goals and what could be called idiosyncrasies, all of which will motivate students and researchers to commit themselves to this university, and then contribute to its ongoing evolution. Leuphana University has completed the first phase of redesigning itself as a public university for civil society in the 21st century. We are now set to cultivate and nurture our individuality as a place apart, and on the basis of demands, inspirations and questions posed to us by the society we are a part of to develop further the talents and faculties of the people committed to our university community.

The Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF)— Epistemic and Institutional Considerations B RITTA P ADBERG

When the Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF) was founded in Bielefeld in 1968, it was one of the few university-based institutes in the world whose programs were oriented to cross-disciplinary research. Interdisciplinarity was at the time still rather exotic and was an exception to the common rule that research and teaching at universities had to be organized in disciplines. In the 45 years since then, there has been fundamental change in the organization of universities. Interdisciplinary centers, research programs and study programs have sprung up like mushrooms and the mission statements of almost all universities advocate the promotion of interdisciplinary collaboration as an institutional goal. In Germany, this development has experienced an additional boost in the past years through the Excellence Initiative. No less than 4.5 billion Euros were invested to create excellence clusters,

I would like to especially thank Christoph Horn for valuable discussions during the development of this text and Marc Weingart for translation.

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graduate schools and institutional strategies which aim to foster interdisciplinary collaboration. But despite these institutional changes interdisciplinarity is still today difficult and complex to realize. Academic disciplines frequently appear to cling to their respective issues of interest, their methods and institutions and refuse interdisciplinary cooperation. In this contribution, I focus on the question how this reservation can be explained and in which cases it can be considered legitimate or illegitimate. It is not enough to diagnose a resistance to reforms among the subject fields and to claim that many of their representatives act like tribesmen who defend their territory against invaders and show a tendency toward stronger parceling than toward opening borders. In many cases, scientists reject measures for restructuring their research because they perceive these measures as top-down orders. In particular, however, I want to show that there are relevant epistemic reasons why the collaboration between different disciplines is successful to different degrees. In the following, I first focus on the question which reasons speak for interdisciplinarity (1); I will contrast these reasons with institutional interests (2). Some epistemic considerations will follow (3). In the main part, I will take a differentiated look at interdisciplinary forms of collaboration and their scientific results by using a typological classification (4). In conclusion, I will present some institutional observations on the promotion of interdisciplinarity at universities.

(1) W HY I NTERDISCIPLINARITY ? Interdisciplinarity should not be confused with two distantly related phenomena: on the one hand, the vision of a unified science (as in Plato, Leibniz or the Vienna Circle) and, on the other, the call for an extensive humanistic education. Interdisciplinarity cannot be considered as a way of lifting all boundaries between subjects nor can the personal specialization of scientific work be reversed. Thus, the call for cross-

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disciplinary activities or even a new unity of the sciences is at most only part of the pre-history of interdisciplinarity. The often cited dictum of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg: “Who does not understand anything but chemistry does not even understand it properly” („Wer nichts als Chemie versteht, versteht auch die nicht recht“) may be appropriate in view of the entire knowledge of an epoch—and be truly appropriate in view of an ideal of comprehensive personality development. However, it does not fit the specificity of our concept. Thus, a reflected concept of interdisciplinarity first appeared as late as 1929, as Balsiger’s brief history of the term shows.1 The conceptual core of interdisciplinarity is the idea of a scientific collaboration. In the course of doing research, one regularly encounters problems that can only be solved by means of expertise from other fields. The object of research can, however, still remain the same highly specialized area as before. Thus, interdisciplinary cooperation does not necessarily lead to a significant change of perspective of those involved or a thematic opening. The specialists can remain as specialized as before—they merely realize that they need to collaborate in certain cases. In the current debate, the societal perspective also plays a crucial role, be it national or international in scope. While it often seems as if the disciplines tend toward concentrating on more and more internally defined subtle issues, pressing social, technological and ecological problems are more and more difficult to ignore. These so-called real world problems can surely not be solved within the boundaries of the historically developed disciplines. Rather, interdisciplinary connections of research need to be created in order to bring together the entire existing knowledge and to conduct research that is problem-oriented. Problems that urgently need such an interdisciplinary approach are

1

The first mentioning of the term “interdisciplinarity” was identified by the sociologist David L. Sills in the Sixth Annual Report, 1929-1930 of the Social Science Research Council (Balsiger 2004, 410).

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climate change, energy supply, ecological sustainability and the global financial system.

(2) I NSTITUTIONAL I NTERESTS Both the arguments for the necessity of interdisciplinarity as well as the societal relevance of interdisciplinary research were already taken up in the 1960s by science policymakers and university planners and connected to considerations on the reorganization of research and structures of higher education. Thus, Reinalter states (2011, 368): “It was primarily a postulate regarding the organization of research because the traditional structures of the primarily university-based European research enterprise was considered insufficient with respect to the in-creasing complexity of problems.” („Dabei handelte es sich in erster Linie um ein ‚forschungsorganisatorisches Postulat‘, weil die traditionellen Strukturen des vorwiegend an die Universitäten gebundenen europäischen Forschungsbetriebs wegen der wachsenden Komplexität der Fragestellungen und Problemfelder als ungenügend empfunden wurden.“). In his conception of the soon to be founded University of Bielefeld, Helmut Schelsky took up similar considerations. By crossdisciplinary research institutes and the founding of a Center for Interdisciplinary Research as a kind of incubator for interdisciplinary projects, the new university was to have a structure that meets these considerations. As a realistic thinker, Schelsky did not pursue a reverseoriented reconstruction of a unity of the sciences; however it may be designed, but stated appropriately: “The claim does not rest on a universal synthesis of the sciences or their results but aims at the cooperation of disciplines for the formulation and research of problems that have different disciplinary aspects, thus at the development of partial scientific unity regarding the empirical subject matter.” („Die hier liegende Forderung geht nicht auf eine Universalsynthese der Wissenschaften oder ihrer Ergebnisse aus, sondern zielt auf eine Kooperation der

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Fachdisziplinen zur Entwicklung und Erforschung von Fragestellungen, die verschiedene Fachaspekte haben, also zur Entwicklung partieller wissenschaftlicher Einheit am empirischen Gegenstand.“) (Schelsky 1967b, 72).

Here, he mainly abstained from epistemological reflections. For him, it was rather about institutional and organizational aspects. At about the same time, the German Research Foundation (DFG) began to implement Collaborative Research Centers (CRC) and thus supported the emergence of cross-disciplinary structures at universities. At some locations, large DFG research centers evolved from these CRCs which, in turn, were to become the institutional predecessors of the even larger Excellence Clusters that were developed in the framework of the Excellence Initiative. Out of initially six DFG research centers, 43 Excellence Clusters have meanwhile developed throughout Germany. But not only interdisciplinary research centers within universities were stimulated. Additionally, the institutional strategies of the universities were strongly influenced by the Excellence Initiative. Resulting from the criteria formulated in the announcement, all applying universities implemented the promotion of cross-disciplinary research in their institutional strategies. Thus the Excellence Initiative influenced the structures or at least the institutional missions of the German universities to a remarkable extent. But regardless the Excellence Initiative, the advantages of an interdisciplinary orientation for universities are obvious: Limited budgets and an increasing competition force universities to create interdisciplinary research foci in order to sharpen the university’s profile, to increase the visibility of research activities, to implement a targeted allocation of funds and to apply for third-party funds to a greater extent. Even though the long-term integration of cross-disciplinary centers, graduate schools and research centers will confront university leadership with significant problems (see Schimank in this volume), there seems to be no alternative to this strategy. In addition to this institutional strategy of concentrating resources and developing a profile, it has become more and more important for universities to legitimize themselves among society (Weingart 2010).

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This is a side effect of a development in the course of which universities have been pushed more and more toward the center of the current knowledge societies. The expectations toward the problem-solving competencies of science have grown continuously. Society brings its interests, as a stakeholder, into play, and expects proof that science provides useful results, especially in times of highly indebted national budgets. With an interdisciplinary strategy, a university signalizes that it produces “useful knowledge.” Thus, it is no coincidence that research foci are oriented toward the grand challenges of humanity. The University College London, for example, has implemented focus areas in the fields of Global Health, Sustainable Cities, Intercultural Interaction and Human Well-Being. The label interdisciplinarity thus also serves as a communication strategy with the public in a time when, despite or because of the increasing significance of science, the pressure of societal legitimation grows continuously. Confronted with the requests of the policy makers and the society, as well as stimulated by third part funding, universities have established interdisciplinarity as a conventional strategy to signalize an orientation to reform and future viability (see Frodeman in this volume).

(3) E PISTEMIC C ONSIDERATIONS In contrast to this development, there is little clarity in science on when and under which conditions, interdisciplinary work is fruitful and when it is not helpful. In the literature on interdisciplinarity, which mainly concentrates on questions of sociology of science, the reservation and skepticism of a lot of researchers regarding interdisciplinary activities is usually explained with conservative structures and forms of organization of the subject areas. The researchers would react in such a way in order to ensure resources and reputation for their respective field. Dissidents and border liners would be often marginalized and would

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have almost no chance in the competition for job appointments (s. e.g., Klein 1990, 77 ff. or Becher and Trowler 2001). Epistemic considerations on interdisciplinarity are made far more rarely. One exception is Winfried Löffler who, in this context, asked the interesting question of why “interdisciplinary research projects/research approaches” are frequently spoken of but “interdisciplinary theories/interdisciplinary presentations and interdisciplinary terms” are hardly mentioned (Löffler 2010, 161). He refers to the differentiation between material and formal aspects of one item that was already present in Aristotle—here between the material object and the formal object of research. Material objects are the objects of research; formal objects contain the research question, the perspective of the study.2 Thus, disciplines can deal with the same material objects while the formal objects can be entirely different. Interdisciplinary concepts, theories or explanations, however, would presuppose common formal objects. Löffler here formulates three conditions which should be existent for a fruitful interdisciplinary cooperation. They work best: 1. where the involved disciplines have the same material object and 2. where the respective formal objects do not differ too much from

each other or (if 1 and 2 are not fulfilled) 3. where the material and formal objects of the involved disciplines

are closely tied to each other and the regularities between them are well known or can at least be estimated. (Löffler 2010, 162 f.) The differentiation between material and formal objects indicates one significant difficulty in interdisciplinary cooperation: Interest in the same material object often suggests scientific proximity which soon turns out to be misleading. Interdisciplinary projects often have to

2

More palatable is probably the comparable distinction between objects of experience and objects of research by Franz-Xaver Kaufmann (Kaufmann 1987, 68).

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deal with misunderstandings that are created by the use of similar terms which, however, have very different meanings. These misunderstandings are particularly problematic as they often occur only in the course of intensive collaboration. The struggle for common concepts or even a common language is one of the biggest challenges and, at the same time, one of the most important preconditions for interdisciplinary collaboration. Thus, from an epistemic perspective, interdisciplinarity has significant requirements. The success of cross-disciplinary cooperation largely depends on whether epistemic interfaces between the involved disciplines resp. disciplinary perspectives can be created. Epistemic interfaces, however, require shared research questions, shared methods or shared theories.

(4) T YPOLOGY

OF I NTERDISCIPLINARITY

Looking at the forms of collaboration between disciplines, it becomes apparent that these are so different that the term interdisciplinary nears a questionable equivocation. In order to differentiate different degrees of interdisciplinarity, a number of typologies have been created. These, however, usually assume integration as the most common benchmark and interpreted differences—in reference to observations in sociology of science—as effects of the social contexts (Klein 2010, 17). Here, always an ideal image of interdisciplinary collaboration is created which brings together the different approaches as closely as possible. The weakness of such an ideal-typical description is that epistemic aspects are not systematically taken into account.3 Preconditions, which can be realized more easily in the natural sciences than in the humanities and social sciences, are then implicitly assumed.

3

An exception is the typology of Heckmann 1972, which corresponds strongly to the one presented here.

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Based on the considerations in (3), I will now attempt to create a typology which makes it possible to differentiate different preconditions and results of interdisciplinary forms of collaboration according to epistemic aspects. The degree of realized, resp. needed epistemic intersections can—thus my thesis—be an important anchor for such a typology. To illustrate the different types of interdisciplinarity, I will refer to research groups that have worked at Bielefeld’s Center for Interdisciplinary Research. This differentiation, however, follows a rather rough sorting and does not take include sub-groups which exist in every research group. While scientific collaboration is intensive to different degrees depending on the subject matter, it should not be overlooked that at least five of the six here presented types of interdisciplinary collaboration can be scientifically very fruitful. It is, however, another question if every form of interdisciplinarity should be institutionalized. Here, skepticism is appropriate and I will return to this issue in the final section of this article. From the perspective of promoting research and of science administration, in particular of the ZiF, it becomes apparent that one needs to differentiate between at least six types of collaboration. 1) Egalitarian Collaboration: This is surely the ideal form of success-

ful interdisciplinarity. This type realizes an interactive collaboration between the involved disciplines, in which material and formal object match and the involved partners benefit to a similar degree; it is a win win situation. This type makes interdisciplinarity seem extremely fruitful and distinguishes it as scientifically significant. This type refers to a thematic hybrid which makes the transfer of theories and methods from one discipline to the other possible and necessary. The strong unity of the object or the method can lead to permanent collaboration and even the emergence of a new discipline. One example is the ZiF research group Game Theory in the Behavioral Sciences, convened by Reinhard Selten. This group operated in 1987/88 and brought together economists, scholars of political sciences, biologists, psychologists, philosophers and mathematicians. Their common interest was in developing game theoreti-

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cal models of potential conflicts and cooperation strategies as well as the presentation of scenarios of balance (Gleichgewichtsszenarien). The research group contributed significantly to the development of the research field of experimental economics and to the establishment of game theory as a method that can be applied well beyond the boundaries of mathematics and economics. 2) Subordinative Interdisciplinarity: The subordinate use of a disci-

pline in the framework of another discipline can also be successful in that methods of one discipline are applied to the other one. Here, collaboration does not take place at eye-level but both sides can still benefit. The unity of the method can also lead to permanent collaboration in this type without giving up the identity of the respective discipline. This type was also frequently present at the ZiF. In most cases, these were research groups which focused on applying mathematical methods and models to areas of the natural and social sciences as, for example, the research group Stochastic Modelling in the Sciences in 2005 convened by Friedrich Götze, Yuri Kondratiev and Michael Röckner. Another example for this type is the 1993/94 group Prerational Intelligence convened by Holk Cruse and Helge Ritter which was successful in transferring theoretical fundamentals from biology to robotics. 3) Interdisciplinary Metadiscourse: A successful special form of

cross-disciplinary collaboration is furthermore the collaboration of science and the humanities in the form of discourse and metadiscourse. The exchange about paradigmatic developments within and between the disciplines and the discussion of research results relevant for our conception of the world brings together natural and social sciences and the humanities without expecting consensual results. Thus, in the debate on free will, the most important achievement is to demarcate the theoretical range of the respective other discipline and to repudiate claims of absoluteness. In addition, the philosophical debates about applied ethics are fitting examples for this type of interdisciplinarity. A good ZiF example is

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the 1982/83 research group The Probabilistic Revolution 18001930: Dynamics of Scientific Development convened by Lorenz Krüger. This group studied the interdependency between the emergence of stochastics as a discipline and the changing conception of the world from a deterministic to a probabilistic point of view. 4) Complementary Interdisciplinarity: These are constellations in

which the collaboration of different disciplines adds or completes the focus on a common field of research. Here, a loosely defined thematic connecting link serves as a common reference. Even though there is no unity with regard to object or method, the different perspectives can complement each other by composing individual pieces to a mosaic. One example is the research group Emotions as Bio-cultural Processes, which was convened by Birgitt Röttger-Rössler and Hans J. Markowitsch in 2004/05, or the 1991/92 group Biological Foundation of Human Culture convened by Peter Weingart. Both groups brought together natural, cultural and social scientists under a common topic to exchange their different disciplinary perspectives. This form can best be described as a cartography: “Rather, we documented the diversity of arguments and related them by drawing a map” (Maasen 2000, 189). An important element of complementary interdisciplinarity is to demarcate the range of competing theories: “However, there is more than cartography. On a very basic level, the group arrived at the understanding that any fundamentalist language should be avoided—one should adhere to neither biological nor sociological reductionism” (Maasen 2000, 189). 5) Aggregative Interdisciplinarity: A very wide-spread type of inter-

disciplinarity brings different disciplines and research approaches together to one common material object. This object can also be a term used in different areas. In fact, however, it is then often only a similar term but the methods and research questions (formal objects) are incongruent. An epistemic intersection is not created. This form of collaboration can serve to achieve an overview of

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different approaches in one particular field of research. In contrast to type 4, in which the different research results complement each other as in a puzzle, they remain alternative to each other in this type: They form an aggregate without any connection, are observed alternatively and do not merge. The outcome of this type of interdisciplinary collaboration is mostly the systematization of the field of discourse. A closer and permanent collaboration seldom follows. An example for this form of collaboration is the 2009/10 ZiF research group Challenges to the Image of Humanity and Human Dignity by New Developments in Medical Technology convened by Jan C. Joerden, Eric Hilgendorf and Felix Thiele. The achievement of this group was especially to take into account the different concepts of human dignity and their application in medical-ethical and judicial contexts. The group’s edited handbook Human Dignity and Medicine (Menschenwürde und Medizin) is now a standard work of the discourse on human dignity. 6) Type of forced collaboration between different interests (so-called

hunting community): This type can be found where there are strong incentives for applying for large third party funds. It can be described as collaboration of different interests. Frequently, not only the formal object is different but also the material object—which is often concealed by very broad formulations of titles or by equivocations in the selection of titles. These temporary communities scatter into their respective disciplines soon after the collaboration. A large amount of examples can be found in the list of project proposals of the cultural, media and social sciences. But also the recently granted “Human Brain Project” in the framework of the socalled FET-Flagship Initiative with a funding volume of 1 Billion Euros for 10 years could run the risk of becoming prey for such hunting communities. Thus, back to our initial question: Under which circumstances can disciplines profit from interdisciplinary collaboration? They can in different constellations and under different framework conditions. Most

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types of interdisciplinary collaboration do not lead to a long-term outcome, they profit from the situational exchange. In rare cases, the basis for long-term collaboration is created, which can even lead to the development of a new field of research or even a new discipline. Examples for such a merging of different paradigms, theories or methods can especially be found in the natural and technical sciences. Thus, genetics and molecular biology as a common basis have contributed to the development of the Life Sciences as a cross-disciplinary field of research (type 1). Recently, an experimental physicist told me: “In my area, I collaborate with colleagues from all around the world whose academic background I don’t even know. Regardless if we come from physics, biology or chemistry, our common interest in nanolayers is what brings us together.” The disciplinary education continues to play a dominant role, but it seems to me that many specific fields of research have emerged especially in the natural sciences in which experts from different disciplines collaborate with each other as if it were nothing exceptional. Here, interdisciplinarity functions so naturally that it is often no longer labeled as such—unless it helps in applying for funds. In the humanities, too, there are interdisciplinary fields of research that are permanent. Similar to the natural sciences, they mostly do not emerge from top-down initiatives but in the course of scientific specialization in which new linkages are developed. An older but still relevant example are the Classics (Klassische Altertumswissenschaften) which is a collaboration between philology, ancient history, archaeology, history of art, history of philosophy etc. The same goes for the history of science. Ian Hacking, who took part in a 1982/83 ZiF research group dedicated primarily to questions in the history of probability, described the work of that group as follows: “Is the Bielefeld group a model for ‘interdisciplinarity’? Yes, of course, the participants were drawn from a number of disciplines, and worked in an institution dedicated by name and practise to interdisciplinary research. But in a sense, the answer is ‘no.’ (...) I never thought in those terms, and never once heard one of my colleagues use the word ‘interdisciplinarity.’ (…) We thought of ourselves as individuals from different disciplines

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with some overlapping interest.” (Hacking 2004/2010, 196). This ZiF research group, in which historians of science, philosophers of science, physicists and mathematicians collaborated, is a good example for interdisciplinarity of type 3 (metadisciplinary discourse). The examples from physics and the history of science make clear that a strong degree of specialization does not necessarily have to lead to an atomization of science, but that new and occasionally also crossdisciplinary linkages can emerge in the specialization. Collaboration is particularly fruitful where a high compatibility of theories and/or methods can be created. However, the preconditions for a high epistemic homogeneity are much more likely given in the natural sciences than in the humanities. The strength of work in the natural sciences is that complex objects of study could be divided into subproblems that can be studied in a division of labor. This meanwhile taken-for-granted form of work for natural scientists is only possible because of a broad basis of shared theories and methods. Thus, in laboratories, frequently natural scientists from different disciplines work together without reflecting or without a need to reflect on this. Even the intersections between natural sciences and engineering sciences are meanwhile so large that theme- and problem-oriented research has become very common. Also infrastructures such as large instruments and big science institutions promote interdisciplinarity in the natural sciences. In the humanities and social sciences, the preconditions are very different. They focus on objects of study whose relevance and meaning especially depend on complex and singular conditions and which therefore require an “idiographic,” not a “reductionist,” treatment. It is thus characteristic of the humanities and social sciences to depend on a broad repertoire of approaches and methods. The plurality of methods and theories is thus a characteristic of quality and by no means an indicator for “soft standards of science.” This diversity, however, is an obstacle for interdisciplinary collaboration. Close forms of collaboration as represented by type 1 are usually not possible for the humanities and social sciences. Loose forms of collaboration are often much more

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suitable. The collaboration enables the involved researchers to gain broad contextual knowledge which benefits their power of judgment with reference to their respective field. Thus, under which conditions can disciplines profit from interdisciplinary collaboration? They truly benefit if there is a shared research interest. Depending on the field, the research question, and the constellation of the involved disciplines, the scientifically and cooperatively achieved outcome is sometimes higher, sometimes lower. Interdisciplinarity thus marks a point of transition, a state of uncertainty, which is inspiring for the researchers involved. If new linkages in research could be found, a permanent collaboration could develop which in turn could result in the constitution of a new discipline (as can be seen in special journals and in the long-term emergence of specialized teaching programs). For close and successful forms of cross-disciplinary collaboration, it can be said that interdisciplinarity as a term disappears. Basically, one can speak of a dialectic of interdisciplinarity: Where interdisciplinarity is particularly successful, it dissolves in a newly emerging discipline.

(5) G IVING M EANING TO I NTERDISCIPLINARITY THE O RGANIZATION OF U NIVERSITIES

IN

Finally, back to the institutional considerations: Is a university welladvised to focus on interdisciplinary structures of research? If interdisciplinary structures entail flexibility, then the answer is definitely yes. If, however, the understanding of interdisciplinarity is only tied to institutional objectives like visibility and developing of focus areas, then one should be careful: Such a practice, which can be observed at many locations, leads to the creation of artificial and top-down projects in which resources and personnel are wasted to a large extent. Interdisciplinarity as a dominant guideline for universities contains the risk that especially the disciplinary cultures of the humanities are put at risk.

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This, however, shall clearly not be a self-denial of an institution whose fundamental purpose is to promote interdisciplinary projects. Quite the contrary: In the past 45 years, the ZiF has constantly proven that its interdisciplinary groups have been scientifically very productive and have sometimes achieved paradigmatic effects. Decisive, however, is the point that Helmut Schelsky already mentioned at the founding of the ZiF: “Interdisciplinary research of different kinds today belongs to the decisive fundamentals of scientific progress and is to be institutionally integrated into the universities. The permanent specialization in interdisciplinary institutes is a misplaced route to take which eliminates the advantages of interdisciplinary research in the long run.” („Forschung verschiedenster Art gehört heute zu den entscheidenden Grundlagen wissenschaftlichen Fortschritts und ist institutionell in die Hochschulen einzubauen. Die Dauerspezialisierung in interdisziplinären Forschungsinstituten ist ein Irrweg, der langfristig die Vorteile interdisziplinärer Forschung aufhebt.“) (Schelsky 1967a, 38)

As Schelsky rightly recognized, interdisciplinarity marks a transitory status or a kind of productive exceptional state and requires an own form of institutional framework. In its structure, the ZiF is in a special way adjusted to transition: Through the temporary gathering of scholars from different disciplines, it provides an extraordinary opportunity for interdisciplinary debates, discussions and collaborations. As an institution, it thus well connects structurally rooted interdisciplinarity with flexibility in content. The special orientation on “temporary interdisciplinary collaboration” makes it possible to promote different types of interdisciplinarity: Loose forms of interdisciplinarity support the exchange and the self-reflection of different approaches and serve the systematic selection of the respective field of research. In those cases where epistemic intersections between the different approaches emerge, the participation in a research group can have an initial impact through which a permanent collaboration across subject boundaries and locations can develop. These tighter forms of interdisciplinarity can establish a long-term position at universities in the framework of

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larger joint projects or research centers. In this sense, the ZiF can serve as an incubator for new ideas and future research foci. As in the words of Lorenz Krüger: “Interdisciplinary research is the work on issues that have not yet found their disciplines” (Krüger 1987, 119). Long-term oriented interdisciplinarity that is established misjudging the differences between disciplinary cultures, however, will promote type 6 of interdisciplinarity: That of the hunting communities which—often encouraged resp. initiated under the directive of university administrations—especially gather with the objective to obtain their share of the financial resources of large research funders. Regarding some CRCs or Excellence Initiative Clusters (particularly in the humanities) one certainly can have this suspicion.

R EFERENCES Balsiger, Philip W. 2004. “Supradisciplinary research practices: history, objectives and rationale.” Futures 36: 407-421. Becher, Tony and Paul R. Trowler. 2001. Academic tribes and territories: intellectual enquiry and the culture of disciplines. 2nd edition, Buckingham: Society for Research into Higher Education & Open University Press. Hacking, Ian. 2004/2010. The Complacent Disciplinarian, http://www. interdisciplines.org/medias/confs/archives/archive_3.pdf, 194-197 (last visited August 3, 2013), published in German: “Verteidigung der Disziplin.” In Interdisziplinarität, Theorie, Praxis, Probleme, edited by Michael Jungert, Elsa Romfeld, Thomas Sukopp, and Uwe Voigt, 191-206. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Heckmann, Heinz. 1971. “Discipline and Interdisciplinarity.” In Interdisciplinarity, Problems of teaching and research in universities, edited by the Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI), 83-89. Paris: OECD.

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Joerden, Jan C., Eric Hilgendorf, and Felix Thiele (eds.). 2013. Menschenwürde und Medizin—Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot. Kaufmann, Franz-Xaver. 1987. “Interdisziplinäre Wissenschaftspraxis. Erfahrungen und Kriterien.” In Interdisziplinarität, Praxis— Herausforderungen—Ideologie, edited by Jürgen Kocka, 63-81. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Klein, Julie Thompson. 2010. “A taxonomy of interdisciplinarity.” In The Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity, edited by Robert Frodeman, Julie T. Klein, and Carl Mitcham, 15-30. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. Klein, Julie Thompson. 1990. Interdisciplinarity, History, Theory, and Practise. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Krüger, Lorenz. 1987. “Einheit der Welt—Vielheit der Wissenschaften.” In Interdisziplinarität, Praxis—Herausforderungen— Ideologie, edited by Jürgen Kocka, 106-125. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Löffler, Winfried. 2010. “Vom Schlechten des Guten. Gibt es schlechte Interdisziplinarität?” In Interdisziplinarität, Theorie, Praxis, Probleme, edited by Michael Jungert, Elsa Romfeld, Thomas Sukopp, and Uwe Voigt, 157-172. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Maasen, Sabine. 2000. “Inducing Interdisciplinarity: Irresistible Infliction? The Example of a Research Group at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF), Bielefeld, Germany.” In Practising Interdisciplinarity, edited by Peter Weingart and Nico Stehr, 173-193. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Reinalter, Helmut. 2011. “Interdisziplinarität.” In Lexikon der Geisteswissenschaften, edited by Helmut Reinalter and Peter J. Brenner, 368-372. Wien, Köln, Weimar: Böhlau Verlag. Schelsky, Helmut. 1967a. “Grundzüge einer neuen Universität, Eine Denkschrift.” In Grundzüge einer neuen Universität, Zur Planung einer Hochschulgründung in Ostwestfalen, edited by Paul Mikat and Helmut Schelsky, 35-69. Gütersloh: C. Bertelsmann Verlag.

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Schelsky, Helmut. 1967b. “Das Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Forschung. Eine Denkschrift.” In Grundzüge einer neuen Universität, Zur Planung einer Hochschulgründung in Ostwestfalen, edited by Paul Mikat and Helmut Schelsky, 71-87. Gütersloh: C. Bertelsmann Verlag. Weingart, Peter. 2010. “A short history of knowledge formation.” In The Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity, edited by Robert Frodeman, Julie T. Klein, and Carl Mitcham, 3-14. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.

“Cross the border, close the gap” Reinventing the University as an Interdisciplinary Enterprise W OLFGANG M ARQUARDT

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T HORSTEN W ILHELMY

The topic of plagiarism was something of a hot potato last year, and not just within the academic community. For this reason, we would like to begin by making a confession. We have stolen the title for this article. It is taken from a 1969 publication by the literary critic Leslie Fiedler which became notorious within relevant literary circles. In this work, Fiedler argued that the borders between so-called “High Art” and “Pop Art”—i.e., between Bach and the Beatles and between serious novels and popular fiction—needed to be overcome. In order to prove that he himself was serious about breaking down these barriers and closing gaps, he published his essay in the December edition of Playboy rather than in a specialist periodical or in the New York Times. This brings us to the topic of our own essay and to the first thesis: “Within the academic research system, the overcoming of disciplinary borders in the form of interdisciplinarity is both sexy and disreputable at the same time”—a point we will return to later. It is, however, not merely the title that is copied. The much more extensive question arises as to whether the topic itself we have chosen to address, the institutional and structural conditions relating to

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interdisciplinarity in universities, has a plagiaristic quality. To put it bluntly, at least the considerations undertaken by Schelsky which led to the establishment of both the ZiF and the University of Bielefeld, were devoted to precisely this issue. For this reason, not everything in this overview can claim to be new. In terms of diagnosing the present, however, the question of which new ideas regarding interdisciplinarity are emerging is not a particularly interesting one. The issue of whether interdisciplinarily aligned approaches and practices have already reached an extent to which they are able to lead to a new interdisciplinary paradigm is much more significant. To relate this issue to the institution itself, the question is whether a university model is beginning to emerge in Germany which is driven by the idea of interdisciplinarity in a new way. Our aim is to report on the emerging developments by using specific examples. In particular, we will cover the following aspects: I. We are going to outline a number of observations made within the

scope of the Excellence Initiative1 and highlight the role played by interdisciplinarity at those universities that applied in the third funding line, which bears the title of “Institutional Strategies.” II. We will add further observations and, outside the context of the

Excellence Initiative, use this as a basis for attempting to respond to the question of whether there are signs of a new type of institution which places a strong focus on interdisciplinarity.

1

The Excellence Initiative was initiated by the German federal and state governments in 2005 to promote top-level research and to improve the quality of German universities and research institutions in general. It provided substantial project-based funding in three funding lines. For more information, refer to Leibfried 2010.

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T HE I NSTITUTIONAL V ISIONS OF THE E XCELLENCE I NITIATIVE

In the memorandum “Features of a new university” (“Grundzüge einer neuen Universität”), which Schelsky presented in 1965, one of the guiding principles is as follows: “Interdisciplinary research of various kinds is today one of the crucial foundations for academic research progress and needs to be integrated into higher education establishments at an institutional level. Long-term specialisation in interdisciplinary institutes is the wrong track to take and will eventually cancel out the benefits of interdisciplinary research.”2 Considering the present situation from the perspective of this statement made by Schelsky, three things become apparent. 1. Interdisciplinarity is still expected to play a crucial role in the progress of academic research. A statement such as “progress arises at the edges or limits of disciplines” is just as true today as it was then and indeed may even meet with a greater degree of agreement now. For this reason, almost 50 years after Schelsky, many universities and academic research policymakers postulate that interdisciplinarity is a highly promising precondition for academic research progress if not even the key factor. Initially, we are faced with a general truism here, because nature and structure of interdisciplinarity are not defined. The question as to whether disciplinarity is equally capable of yielding progress is veiled and indeed even at the time was veiled by the postulate itself. To put it in crude terms, interdisciplinarity is sexy and remains to be so, even 50 years down the road.

2

Schelsky 1967, 38: “Interdisziplinäre Forschung verschiedenster Art gehört heute zu den entscheidenden Grundlagen wissenschaftlichen Fortschritts und ist institutionell in die Hochschulen einzubauen. Die Dauerspezialisierung in interdisziplinären Forschungsinstituten ist ein Irrweg, der langfristig die Vorteile interdisziplinärer Forschung aufhebt.”

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2. In the quotation Schelsky emphasizes institutional momentum. In other words, he moves beyond the idea of individual interest in the way in which other academic disciplines work. The use of the verb “integrate” clearly signals the existence of a planning component. In 1965, a founding committee, or even Schelsky himself, were responsible for planning: they joined forces with policymakers to instigate this “integration” of interdisciplinarity into the new university. The planning component is still evident today. Interdisciplinarity is not left to chance. Any confidence that interdisciplinarity will emerge of its own accord and will grow naturally has not led to an abandoning of planning. Meanwhile, we should also consider that the individual higher education institution has assumed a kind of double role. It is both responsible for the planning process and the object of planning. The evaluation criteria on which all funding lines of the Excellence Initiative are based speak of “a general strategy for interdisciplinarity and international networking in research.”3 This means that the Excellence Initiative is allied with the expectation that universities will arm themselves for the future by undertaking precisely the same restructuring which Schelsky demanded at the time for the “new” university. How this will happen exactly is left up to their own institutional vision and their capacity to make change. 3. Schelsky’s proposition contains both a precise formulation and a warning. Schelsky indicates how the institutional integration of interdisciplinarity should not be conducted in any circumstances. He describes interdisciplinary research institutes as being on the wrong track because they lead to “long-term specialisation.” This makes the tension within his own idea apparent. Although the institutionalization of interdisciplinarity aims to achieve

3

Cf. Call for Proposals for the Second Programme Phase of March 10, 2010 (www.wissenschaftsrat.de/download/archiv/exini_call%202010.pdf) last visited September 13, 2012).

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sustainable integration and structural formation, the hope is also that interdisciplinarity will at the same time constantly generate new thematic impulses for research in overall terms. The focus, therefore, is on the paradox of providing long-term flexibility, i.e., an open structure for interdisciplinary activities, which is not dependent on purely coincidental constellations of teams of researchers. How is this reflected in the applications for “Institutional Strategies”4 of universities in 2012? The selection of the strategies presented here is not governed by the chances of success of the relevant universities and not connected with any kind of evaluation. The information which we are bundling together here is also freely accessible and is taken from publications and descriptions produced by the respective universities themselves. Our aim is not to anticipate any results of the competition.5 The choice of examples is virtually random. One generalizable observation within the context of the “Institutional Strategies” is that both topic-oriented and solutionoriented research approaches have received a new quality in terms of the identity of the universities. These approaches pursue a specific requirement which does not develop of its own accord from an academic research discipline or is even formulated outside the field of academic research. Furthermore, this requirement cannot be satisfied using existing available knowledge. Given these constraints, knowledge from more than one discipline is needed in order to be able to develop solutions successfully. Such interdisciplinary research often focuses on a topic which has attracted a strong degree of societal interest. We take solution-oriented research to mean interdisciplinary

4 5

Institutional Strategies refer to the third funding line of the Excellence Initiative of the German federal and state governments. The decision on funding proposals in the second phase of the Excellence Initiative was taken in June 2012, shortly after the talk on which this article is based was held.

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research which brings together existing methods within individual disciplines in order to arrive at a new set of instruments which is applicable to a class of problems previously not properly accessible. I am thinking, for example, here of Computational Science and Engineering, a combination of information technology, mathematics and natural sciences or engineering—or software technology, numerical algorithms and modeling. Topic-oriented research, on the other hand, follows a specific requirement which is formulated outside the field of academic research. This requirement is not capable of being satisfied using existing available knowledge. Here, knowledge from more than one academic research discipline is necessary in order to process the problem successfully. Precisely to address a set of problems not intrinsically associated with academic research was long considered crude by the academic research community. Notwithstanding this, dealing with a cross-cutting university research program inspired by topics can represent a welcome opportunity for research groups to leave the well-worn track behind and reinvent themselves (in some regards). A series of universities has defined such cross-institutional research focuses. So-called focus areas or main topics are then dubbed “Energy,” “Energy and the Environment,” “Humans and Technology,” “Climate Change,” “Cultural Comparison of Religions”—the list could be extended arbitrarily. As can be seen from the flourishing of these topics, it is now no longer regarded to be disreputable to claim that one’s own research is intended to process urgent problems of society. A quotation from the Mission Statement of the LudwigMaximilians-University, Munich (LMU Munich), can serve as an example in this regard. “As a genuine ‘universitas’ LMU Munich has the unique opportunity and a deep obligation to deal with the ever more complex questions facing humankind, society, culture, the environment and technology by creating interdisciplinary problemsolving approaches.” Within the immediate vicinity, the Technische Universität München (TUM) is currently establishing its own interdisciplinary body in the form of the Munich Centre for

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Technology in Society. The name of this institute clearly indicates the spirit of aligning academic research toward society as described above. One has to mention, of course, that this form of rationale is also a means via which a university can obtain legitimacy within the context of struggles for resources within society. We may, however, also impute that such an opening up to real problems is not solely strategically motivated. For this reason, the first observation is: Interdisciplinarity at German universities is typically and most often solution- and topic-oriented. Although there is considerable variation in how this is implemented by a university, we can clearly see that the Excellence Initiative is a driving force in fostering both solution- and topicoriented research in an interdisciplinary manner. Secondly, we can observe the creation of significantly more visible large-scale interdisciplinary units across department and faculty borders. This is a field where two variations are emerging which, in figurative terms, are located on either side of the red line drawn by Schelsky when he issued his warning about the permanent specialization in interdisciplinary research institutes. On the one hand, we see the establishment of temporary units. One example of this is at the Ruhr-University Bochum, where the interdisciplinary units are referred to as Research Departments. They aim at serving as flexible entities to build bridges between disciplines and bring together existing competence in interdisciplinary research. These Research Departments are set up for a fixed term. The Humboldt-University of Berlin is adopting a similar approach with its so-called Integrated Research Institutes. These are also limited in terms of the duration of their existence. The first such institute already established is IRIS Adlerhof, which operates in the field of the natural sciences. Further establishments are planned, including an institute in the area of the life sciences. The aim is for these interdisciplinary centers to offer optimum conditions for outstanding academic researchers seeking to

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work jointly and on an interdisciplinary basis within a field of research. As cross-faculty institutes, their objectives are to achieve intra-university cooperation agreements with effective research capabilities and to facilitate the integration of strong extra-university partners. On the other hand, the temporary character is by no means characteristic for all newly created interdisciplinary research institutes. Integrated Research Centers also exist at the Technische Universität München, where they have been established on a permanent footing. One particularly prominent example is the Center for Marine Environmental Sciences (MARUM) at the University of Bremen. MARUM researches the reciprocal effects of the oceans and climate, investigates geological and biological processes, develops models and organizes expeditions using a research ship and its own drill cores. MARUM possesses an extremely robust structural form. Founded in 2001 as a temporary DFG-Research-Center, it was established as a permanent university research institute with independent budgetary control and staff sovereignty on the basis of a resolution of the Academic Senate in 2011. This status has its foundations in a paragraph contained within Bremen Higher Education Law which permits such a stand-alone position within the university and allows the relevant degree of autonomy in individual cases. On this basis, MARUM concludes a target agreement with the Rector’s Office of the university. It is supported by a Scientific Advisory Board and is evaluated every five years. We are certainly registering the emergence of interdisciplinary sub-structures of considerable importance within the universities, some of which have been established on a permanent basis. Regardless of whether such bodies go by the name of “Research Center,” “Cluster of Excellence” or “Integrated Research Institute,” it is clear that interdisciplinary units are being developed within the context of the Excellence Initiative and that they are enjoying greater emancipation from disciplinary structures in terms of finance, structure and human resources than was previously the case.

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Within the context of the Schelsky Conference, this is perhaps the most interesting development. Although we owe him the greatest respect for his visionary description of the higher education system, it seems that he was at least partially in error in his rejection of permanent interdisciplinary structures. The trend most recently characterized by MARUM is, of course, initially merely a continuation of long-recognized developments with regard to the formation of independent research sub-structures in the shape of Collaborative Research Centers, CRC/Transregios, Clusters of Excellence, research centers and so forth. It is clearly visible to us that interdisciplinary structures are pushing for a continued presence within the contemporary university. This is logically consistent to the extent that the focus is on issues of resources, the procurement of equipment, the time needed to process a topic and the associated necessity of offering prospects to the academic researchers involved. Sometimes, but definitely not always, the sheer size of interdisciplinary projects is an argument for a research cluster to gain independence. The effectiveness and productive administration capacity of existing structures of faculties and departments may reach its limits. Granting partial autonomy and emancipation to such a research cluster is then the logical way to go. This does not mean that risks may not arise in some places: aspects such as the linking of research with teaching, the flexibility required with regard to the development of new topics in light of the finite nature of available resources, and finally the danger that powerful large-scale centers within a university are capable of taking the rest of the institution hostage. This may lead to the development of “residual universities” alongside the major interdisciplinary research centers. Nevertheless, anyone who is serious about largescale interdisciplinary projects should not keep them on a short “disciplinary leash.” The consequence would be that this type of research could only take place outside universities at such bodies as the Leibniz Institute or within the scope of the Helmholtz Association. And originally, the Excellence Initiative was conceived precisely to counter this emigration of research from universities. It is also clear,

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however, that the formation of independent units acting autonomously with regard to human resources and budgetary matters will trigger a question of power within the universities. For this reason, any university committing to an interdisciplinary approach will need to resolve this power issue. Something is becoming discernible here which, although perhaps not yet clearly enough to be viewed as a specific third trend, is nevertheless a tendency which is important with regard to the “Institutional Strategies.” As demonstrated by citing the example of MARUM, this form of implementation of interdisciplinary units exerts a direct effect on governance and decision-making structures. For this reason, to put it cautiously, the probable logical consequence will be that we will need to deal with a co-evolution of interdisciplinary research approaches and new decision-making structures and bodies within the universities. At several universities, including the University of Göttingen, internal competitive selection processes for the funding of new research areas have become the common practice. The establishment of new research groups and profile areas, including of an interdisciplinary nature, is determined by internal selection mechanisms. One interesting variation is represented by the Gutenberg Research College at the University of Mainz. This unit has both the status of an Institute for Advanced Studies—a point I will return to later—as well as fulfilling the following purpose. On request, the college’s management committee advises faculties, the Senate or university management on the realignment of professorships or on the restructuring of institutes. The consultancy provided by the Gutenberg Research College is of crucial significance to future interdisciplinary orientation planned at an institutional or even at a cross-faculties level. This body may serve as an example beyond the usual committees possessing a remit explicitly directed toward interdisciplinarity. It goes without saying that not every realignment of decision-making structures arises out of interdisciplinary needs or that such revised decision-making structures appear as agents facilitating the restructuring of a disciplinary

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organization into an interdisciplinary one. However, frequently the changed nature of university governance may provide new areas of scope for interdisciplinarity. If these new decision-making bodies set the direction for the future profile of a university, such roadmaps are more likely to be favorable toward interdisciplinarity when fewer representatives act as members of their faculty. To express matters in clearer terms with regard to the issue of power: anyone seeking to lend greater weight to interdisciplinarity within a university will possibly have to take such a course of action with the assistance of governance bodies which are less dominated by disciplinary logic than has previously been the case. Although there is evidence of initial approaches in this regard, there are also unresolved conflicts. In the case of the appointment of a professor, for example, the faculty’s point of view may be that the main emphasis should be on teaching requirements whereas this may be considered a minor aspect for the interdisciplinary research unit. This seems to me to be typical of the times. When it comes to institutional development, there is much talk nowadays of the university “becoming a stakeholder.” The extended autonomy accorded to universities by the states grants them a much more active role than previously. In this respect, it is no coincidence that the interdisciplinary university we know today will also be a university of interdisciplinary decision-making bodies. We would propound the thesis that such considerations to link the management of higher education institutions with interdisciplinarity are symptomatic of our times and will therefore tend to get more important in the future. There is a further thought to add as a counterpoint to this. It may be the case that in some places precisely the relinquishment of pervasive universal steering will make interdisciplinarity a very strong instrument of change management. If a university has defined its topics in an interdisciplinary manner, a Darwin-like process may subsequently take place in which stronger subject groups win out against weaker groups within the interdisciplinary setting. Some subjects move to the center of the joint project, whereas others are only able to

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“supply” disciplinary aspects regarded as peripheral. The interdisciplinary structure itself would then be the first and crucial management measure, and the “difficult decisions” would occur in a quasi-natural fashion within the process. We are not contending that it is an identifiable management structure to separate “fit” and “less fit” disciplines. In some places, however, this may be the result of an interdisciplinary project where the initial aim was simply to get everyone on board. There is a final trend which appears to strengthen the role of interdisciplinarity in the contemporary university. This is a late triumph of one of Schelsky’s ideas, which he realized at the time with the ZiF that subsequently should play a pioneering role within the German academic research system. Its reception has gained new momentum via the Excellence Initiative. At many German universities, Centers for Advanced Studies now form part of a provision which is indispensable not only for the university’s own researchers. Such an Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS) has been set up at the University of Freiburg in the form of FRIAS. The LMU has the CAS, the Technische Universität München the TUM-IAS, the University of Göttingen the Lichtenberg-Kolleg and the University of Heidelberg the Marsilius Kolleg. More of such institutes may come into being in the future. Schelsky emphasized a very strong interdisciplinary direction, and this is something to which the ZiF has remained committed up to the present day. Although the dissemination of the IAS idea is associated with a renaissance of the pluridisciplinary academic community, there is no agreement whether the focus is actually always on interdisciplinarity. The institutes compensate for the freedoms lost in everyday university life. It remains undetermined whether they are (or wish to be) compensation for lost opportunities for discussion between representatives of different disciplines and even act as incubators for new interdisciplinary fields of research. With regard to the rapid success achieved by the Institutes for Advanced Studies, it is possible to state that there is a tendency to “integrate” such an institution into the university’s standard repertoire.

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This alone, however, is not yet sufficient to change the character of the university as a whole in terms of moving toward interdisciplinarity and indeed not even capable of changing the character of the IAS itself. By the way, this contains a positive message for the ZiF. Although the university-based IAS’s are inspired by institutions such as the ZiF, they are on closer inspection far less similar to the ZiF than they may appear, especially as they act sometimes in a significantly less ambitious manner with regard to the interdisciplinary objective.

II

C ONCLUSIONS — A R ESEARCH S YSTEM P ERSPECTIVE

We have made out the following trends within the scope of the Excellence Initiative. 1. Topic- and solution-oriented interdisciplinarity is becoming more self-evident. 2. Large-scale interdisciplinary sub-structures which in some cases are extensively emancipated from the disciplinary structure of the “home university” are being formed. 3. The consequence is that interdisciplinarity will presumably become more significant at the level of new decision-making structures. 4. In many places, university-based Institutes for Advanced Studies are proving themselves to be a (compensatory) supplement to normal university activities, although sometimes they are merely places of a weak reciprocal effect between disciplines and not an indicator of the “interdisciplinary university.” We now try to cautiously draw conclusions from the perspective of the research system. In 2010, the German Council of Science and Humanities (Wissenschaftsrat) devoted considerable attention to the issue of how

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differentiation within the higher education system should be taken forward and what the chances are for establishing new types of higher education institutions. Is a new type of university emerging that puts a strong emphasis on interdisciplinarity as a profile characteristic? The response to this question needs to be couched in cautious terms. With initial regard to the Excellence Initiative, we can, however, say “no.” Even if the mission statements of virtually all the universities that applied in this program do not relinquish interdisciplinarity, and even if this criterion is highlighted as a differentiating characteristic, none of the universities has converted to the interdisciplinary paradigm in toto or even predominantly. Disciplinary regimes remain in place everywhere. This is most clearly visible in teaching and education, even if PhD training in particular—or the post-doctorate phase in the case of the Zukunftskolleg of the University of Konstanz—is being opened up to interdisciplinary research to a greater extent than before. As far as the education function of the universities is concerned, however, we may still only speak of a moderate move toward interdisciplinarity. Although this monograph presents the views of two institutes of higher education, the Leuphana University of Lüneburg and the University College Maastricht, which strongly emphasize on interdisciplinarity in teaching—something which Schelsky, by the way, described as an “abstruse measure” involving “a general course of study to impart to the students a unit of scholarship which the professors themselves no longer possess”6—the education function of the universities is strongly aligned to disciplinary characteristics and certifications. The same moderate mode also applies to other aspects. The disciplinary profile of applicants in recruitment processes and for appointments remains crucial. This is where the dual character of interdisciplinarity mentioned before—sexy and disreputable—exerts its full effect. Just as interdisciplinary projects are gaining in significance for the profiling of universities, for research practice and—an aspect

6

Cf. Schelsky 1967, 154.

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which unfortunately is not entirely absent—the success rate of research proposals, interdisciplinary profile formation can also become a problem for individuals. Recruitment continues to take place in accordance with logics which are predominantly disciplinary (if not even “genealogies”). Furthermore, the reputation of researchers is also initially forged within disciplinary communities, a key aspect being publications in disciplinary journals. For this reason, it would be premature or reckless to claim that the interdisciplinary university which places its faith in interdisciplinarity in all the partial tasks it performs has already taken shape as a new idea within the German academic research system, and perhaps it is even doubtful that this will ever occur. As part of his contribution, Michael Crow has presented Arizona State University as a role model for the “New American University.” With regard to the Excellence Initiative and its significance within the German academic research system, it is fair to say that the universities that applied in this program are strong advocates for interdisciplinary issues and solution-oriented research. In this respect, they are thus expanding the spectrum of academic research practice in Germany. They are also embarking upon new routes in order to install within their institutions interdisciplinary units which are set up for the long term and equipped with their own wide-ranging powers. And finally, they have conceived procedures for how to take account of interdisciplinarity in decisionmaking and strategic processes. There does not seem to be, however, a role model yet for a predominantly interdisciplinary university in all of this. In order for this to happen, the highly disciplinary aspects of education, recruitment of up-and-coming talent, publication and reputational gain would all have to change much more extensively. There are, however, no places where such aspects are entirely detached from purely disciplinary processes. Meanwhile, it is worth casting a glance beyond the applicants in the Excellence Initiative. It is certainly apparent that topic-oriented or topic-centered higher education institutions have now become established. Here we would cite the German Sports University Cologne,

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which has already been in existence for some time, the BauhausUniversität Weimar or the private Hertie School of Governance. Exemplarily, we say a few words on the latter. “Governance” research has been identified as an interdisciplinary core area in some places, such as at the University of Hamburg. By this token, the private Hertie School in Berlin should be an interdisciplinary higher education institution par excellence, and indeed those who teach there originate from a wide range of disciplines such as law as well as social and political sciences. Nevertheless, precise inspection also reveals that “governance” cuts both ways. It could be that the Hertie School goes to bed as an interdisciplinary higher education institution and wakes up the next morning as a disciplinary one. During the 1986 ZiF Symposium, Peter Weingart compared interdisciplinarity with the discovery of a market niche in some areas, and addressing a new issue—our example here would be governance—he said: “This is primarily interdisciplinary because it is located between disciplines and does not ‘yet’ have its own discipline. Nonetheless, it is particularly specialised research.”7 This also addresses the dilemma of a higher education institution grouped around a new interdisciplinary field. In the initial phase, it risks being perceived together with all the disreputable aspects connected with career development, recruitment and publication. “Is it possible to do a doctorate in Governance?” would be a typical question expressing mistrust. If, however, a relevant higher education institution itself contributes to the establishment of the new “niche” as a discipline, it becomes a permanent specialist institution. If, however, long-term specialization leads to the establishment of new disciplines, interdisciplinarity would merely be an interim stage in the fragmentation of academia. This is precisely the point where we are reminded of Schelsky’s warning regarding permanent interdisciplinary specialization. For this reason, it remains to be seen whether this idea of a topiccentered higher education institution will be so successful that it will

7

Cf. Weingart 1987, 163.

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lead to the development of a specific variety, a new type of higher education institution. We have to assume that respective institutional models will be added as a supplement to a largely disciplinary structured usual case at universities. Within this usual case, interdisciplinarity may gain in significance to the point where some universities will more strongly focus on interdisciplinarity in qualitative terms within research as well as decision-making processes. The issues of power that this development creates are far from being decided. Scientists, science managers and science policy makers should continue to participate in the closing of gaps insofar as these still affect existing prejudices toward the two modes of disciplinary and interdisciplinary research. We leave it up to the editors to decide whether this endeavor is effectively supported by publishing this contribution in the Playboy, in comic formats, or elsewhere.

R EFERENCES Leibfried, Stephan. 2010. Die Exzellenzinitiative, Zwischenstand und Perspektiven. Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag. Schelsky, Helmut. 1969. “Die Universitätsidee Wilhelm von Humboldts und die gegenwärtige Universitätsreform. Festvortrag zum 200. Geburtstag Wilhelm von Humboldts am 22. Juni 1967.” In Abschied von der Hochschulpolitik oder Die Universität im Fadenkreuz des Versagens. Gütersloh: Bertelsmann Universitätsverlag. Helmut Schelsky. 1967. “Grundzüge einer neuen Universität.” In Grundzüge einer neuen Universität. Zur Planung einer Hochschule in Ostwestfalen, edited by Paul Mikat, Helmut Schelsky. Gütersloh: C. Bertelsmann Verlag. Weingart, Peter. 1987. “Interdisziplinarität als List der Institution.” In Interdisziplinarität, Praxis-Herausforderung-Ideologie, edited by Jürgen Kocka. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

Opportunities and Obstacles of University Reforms: Cluster Building and its Problems—From the Perspective of University Leadership U WE S CHIMANK

1

U NIVERSITY L EADERSHIP

Re-reading Helmut Schelsky’s (1963) book on German universities from the early 1960s is a somewhat ambivalent experience. On the one hand, one is still very impressed by the clear-sighted diagnosis of the situation of German universities which was highly problematic even at that time, before the “massification of higher education” started. On the other hand, one cannot help but wonder why a sociologist like Schelsky is unable, or unwilling, to analyze the obvious shortcomings of the traditional governance regime of German universities. In the historical part of the book, Schelsky deals at least briefly with Humboldt’s reservations about the academic self-governance of the universities at the beginning of the 19th century. But in Schelsky’s own diagnosis of the early 1960s and, even more important, in his reform ideas, the in-built immobilism of a “collegial” self-governance, which Helmuth Plessner (1924, 420) aptly characterized as „Zurückhaltung

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auf Gegenseitigkeit“ (“mutual restraint”) among chair-holders, remained unmentioned. For Schelsky, changes of scientific research and its societal “relevance” as well as changes of the societal demand for an academically qualified labor force, both resulting in an overall “scientification of practice” (Schelsky 1963, 204)1—which later on was coined “knowledge society”—were the driving-forces to which the universities had to adapt their performance. But this functionally necessary and, as Schelsky saw it, urgent adaptation in his view could not happen as a “… comprehensive rationally planned organizational basic reform of the university …” (Schelsky 1963, 306). At this point he departed from the technocratic ideas of the 1960s which, despite Cold War disputes about “freedom” and “democracy” against “socialist tyranny,” saw a convergence of West and East in the idea of planning; and interestingly, his argument was not specific to universities but a general one. For Schelsky (1963, 305), the complexity of the modern social world made far-reaching “total reforms” impossible wherever they are attempted.2 However, the conclusion he reached from this assessment went to the other extreme. With respect to universities, Schelsky (1963, 310) argued in favor of a “university reform on one’s own initiative” (“auf eigene Faust”), and he specified unequivocally what he meant by that: “Really new forms of university life result not from mere organizational measures but from the life decisions of scholars …” (Schelsky 1963, 312) Thus, effective reforms can only be undertaken by the personal initiative of individual professors. In other words, Schelsky scaled down the scope of realistic reform activities radically from an illusory all-encompassing “total reform” to measures which do not reach further than a professor’s chair. A larger scale could only be hoped for

1 2

All quotes from Schelsky are my translations. Here Schelsky argues in the same manner as the anti-planning declarations of Karl Popper’s (1957) “piecemeal engineering” and Charles Lindblom’s (1959) “incrementalism.”

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as a patchwork of many voluntary, independent and disjointed individual reform initiatives. Schelsky (1963, 312) saw it very clearly: “Profound changes of the universities can only be achieved by the passion and self-sacrifice of those involved …”—by which he meant, incidentally, students as well as professors. With regard to the latter, this presupposed that they were personally convinced of such changes. Such an identification of German professors with far-reaching reforms of teaching, research, or governance structures of universities did not exist at that time, and still does not exist today—on the contrary, the large majority of professors have strongly resisted all proposed or implemented changes until the present day. However, one of the reasons why Schelsky came to the conclusion that nothing else besides individual initiatives was possible was that, in the governance regime of that time, university leadership was very weak, almost non-existent. Thus, on the one hand, he saw the ministry which might attempt a “total reform” that would, however, inevitably fail as a result of the overwhelming complexity of the object to be reformed; on the other hand, it seemed feasible that professors reformed their own teaching and research activities as well as the management of their own chair—provided they were willing to do so, which, in fact, almost all of them were not.3 If we grant that Schelsky’s judgment with regard to the ministry’s inability to successfully implement a “total reform” is still correct and that, contrary to his hopes, professors are still unwilling to do their own individual reforms, in one respect we have a different situation nowadays. University leadership has been considerably strengthened by new university laws; moreover, there are now quite a number of university

3

Although he saw the reform willingness of German professors as crucial, Schelsky pays no further attention to it. Another curious point is that this plea for individual level reforms does not fit to Schelsky’s own activities, starting at that time, of conceiving new organizational forms for German universities, most prominently in his role as one of the founding fathers of the “reform university” Bielefeld.

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rectors or presidents who are willing to engage themselves as change agents of their universities. Thus, we now have “actorhood” at the top (Meier 2009). A very common strategic aim university leaders try to pursue as reformers of their organization is profile building (Meier/Schimank 2010) which, in turn, often consists in cluster building. This frequent reform strategy is the topic of my further reflections. After briefly asking why rectors or presidents are so keen on sharpening the profile of their university by building up “critical masses” of coordinated or cooperative research activities I will turn to the question of what the typical problems of managing such processes are.

2

C LUSTER B UILDING

Cluster building is an important element of current university reforms which was again prefigured by Schelsky. He strongly argued in favor of the establishment of what he then called “the theoretical university” (Schelsky 1963, 312-317) which, according to his conception, is neither involved in the ordinary teaching and examination business of universities nor in the usual discipline-specific empirical research activities, but concentrates on general trans-disciplinary theoretical syntheses. One example he gives is cybernetics or General Systems Theory which ranges from biology and engineering to the social sciences. Such centers for advanced studies, as they are often called, should be established on a temporary basis or should change their research agenda from time to time so that when particular theoretical challenges lose attraction and more interesting new ones appear on the scene, attention and resources can be shifted. With the exception of the stipulation that only theoretical questions common to several disciplines should be topics for such centers, it is easy to see that not only the Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Forschung (ZiF) or the other centers of the newlyfounded Bielefeld University but also the “collaborative research centers” (“Sonderforschungsbereiche”) of the DFG, Germany’s most im-

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portant funding agency, which were established at the end of the 1960s, were modeled according to this blueprint. Thus, since the end of the 1960s, various kinds of such larger-scale coordinated or cooperative research entities—which I will call clusters here, for brevity’s sake—appeared on the German university scene. Nowadays the variety is considerable: The DFG’s funding schemes for “coordinated programs” consist of “priority programs,” “research training groups” or graduate schools, “collaborative research centers,” “research units” and “humanities centers for advanced studies”; similar funding schemes have been established by the federal research ministry and by most research ministries of the German federal states, by the European Union and the European Research Council, by the VolkswagenStiftung and by the recent “Excellence Initiative”; added to all these are all kinds of clusters which a university conceives and establishes on its own. With this diversification, two further developments have occurred. First, the number of these clusters has grown tremendously; and second, they have become more and more important in the eyes of university leadership. I will concentrate here on the second aspect and take the first one for granted. Perceived importance means: These clusters are no longer seen as a “luxury one can afford”—as long as one can afford it, indeed! —or as something which is certainly “nice to have” but as the highly visible flagships which symbolize a university’s research “excellence.” And because almost all German universities strive for “excellence” nowadays, having one or the other kind of cluster is a “must” from the perspective of university leaders. To be sure, even nowadays there are some universities without any research cluster; but these universities are perceived as second-rate and they also perceive themselves that way. Typically, these are smaller and younger universities which were founded in the late 1960s as regional suppliers of study programs without prominent research ambitions. But even a number of this latest generation of German universities have by now become quite strong research performers, at least in some of their disciplines.

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The official reasons for this idea of research clusters, which is by now universally shared among university leaders, are well-known. It is claimed that there is an irresistible inner-scientific dynamic toward larger-scaled research questions in practically all disciplines accompanied by an equally irresistible extra-scientific dynamic toward “bigger questions” posed by the challenges society is confronted with (Schiene/Schimank 2007). I do not have to reflect here to what extent these postulates are true or just unproven myths that are universally believed because everybody perceives everybody else believing them, and these mutual observations are reinforced by advisors who are perceived as trustworthy experts.4 Whenever university rectors or presidents articulate such reasons for cluster building, I can qualify them as ideology: As if these leadership roles really cared for scientific needs!5 If they did, they would not make a one-size-fits-all policy of cluster building for each and every discipline and research topic. The only thing that matters to them, behind this ideological “superstructure”—here conventional Marxist terminology is appropriate—is the “material basis” which can be summarized in three sentences: First, clusters are no “flea circus” of individual researchers but are highly visible; secondly, this visibility is essential to impress ministries, evaluators, funding agencies, etc.; and thirdly, this “impression management” is necessary nowadays to attract extra-money desperately needed in view of stagnating or even declining basic funding of universities. It is as simple as this. Wherever cluster building is really advantageous to the pursuit of truth—which often certainly is the case, and not just in the natural and engineering sciences but in the social sciences and humanities, too—this is not the primary concern of university lea-

4

Such a neo-institutionalist perspective on cluster building certainly makes a very convincing point—see diMaggio/Powell (1983) for the general mechanisms of “mimetic” and “normative isomorphism.”

5

Note that I do not speak here about concrete persons but about organizational roles. Even if particular persons who are rectors or presidents know better, as role players it is very difficult to resist the idea of cluster building.

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dership but just a “collateral benefit” of reputational and, ultimately, financial considerations. In turn, wherever cluster building harms scientific knowledge production—which happens even in the natural and engineering sciences—university leadership is not in a position where it is able to admit that this is the case and, accordingly, allow researchers to stop such nonsense. The show must go on as long as money makes the world go round.

3

M ANAGEMENT P ROBLEMS

Thus, university leadership today is mainly extrinsically motivated to push cluster building. Taking this impetus for granted, I will now take the role of university leadership and point out five typical problems it faces when it attempts cluster building. Ordered by the life-cycle of a cluster, these are the problem of enrolment, the problem of side payments, the problem of managing a matrix structure, the problem of losing control, and the problem of termination. 1. The problem of enrolment consists in the fact that the top-down general interest of cluster building has to find bottom-up initiatives which work out specific substantial ideas for clusters and mobilize participants (Meier/Schimank 2010). Which are the “hot” topics in those fields where the university has strong or at least promising research performers, and do these researchers not only identify these topics but also arrive at the conclusion that collaborating with each other might create a “win-win” constellation? University leadership is aware of the fact that “leading the horses to water” will not succeed. An interviewed vice-rector clearly stated: “But in the end you cannot decree research in a top-down process. Ultimately, it is the scientists that are conducting the research. And from the rector’s office you can only act as a catalyser and you can motivate.” This means that at least one bottom-up initiative must exist; if there is none, or no suitable one, it is futile to try

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to create one. “Creatio ex nihilo” is beyond the powers of university presidents or rectors although they sometimes forget this limitation. Enrolment, as Bruno Latour (1987, 108-111) understands it, means to translate one’s own interests into the interests of others: “I want what you want.” Thus, university leadership has to persuade a bottomup initiative that their interests, “well-understood,” fit to the cluster idea conceived top-down. To the degree that university leadership can offer financial resources and other kinds of support on which bottomup initiatives usually depend to some extent, many specific features of the initiative’s plans can be negotiated. For instance, leadership can suggest or even demand thematic shifts or the inclusion of other disciplines and their researchers into the cluster; it can insist on cooperation with other institutions, on more internationalization, or on certain add-ons such as special provisions for female doctoral students or the public dissemination of research results. In this way, leadership can substantially contribute to the final shape of the cluster. Usually, and for good reasons, university leadership will not interfere in the cluster’s cognitive core; but the periphery into which this core is embedded may be an important or even the outstanding ingredient of a cluster’s profile—at least in the eyes of politicians, evaluators, or funding agencies. With good luck, both sides may be highly satisfied. Researchers may do what they like to do for purely scientific reasons—and these other actors are pleased by this because their concerns are served as well. Wherever university leadership achieves such a match of interests it can be quite proud of itself. A very delicate situation arises if there are more promising bottomup initiatives of cluster building than the university is able to support. Then university leadership has to decide which initiatives get priority, and which have to be postponed or even cancelled. In some cases, leadership may see itself as “tertius gaudens” in such a situation. It may strike a very favorable bargain with one of the initiatives by threatening to otherwise turn to the rival instead. However, university leadership may as well get under heavy pressure from different initiatives and, in the worst case, lose its authority on all sides.

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2. Alongside the problem of enrolment, university leadership often faces the problem of minimizing inevitable side payments to those groups within the university which, for one reason or another, threaten to disturb or even block the cluster building process. These may be groups that want to become part of the cluster; however, this is neither in the interest of the bottom-up initiative nor of university leadership. Or the troublemakers want to prevent any kind of cluster building because they fear that this will lead to an intra-university redistribution of resources and visibility away from them and to the cluster. This kind of attitude can often be found in faculties or institutes as the established permanent organizational units of universities. Since the university leadership’s formal power does not suffice to stop trouble-making altogether, and even though in the final end trouble-making may not be able to prevent cluster building, it may very well lead to endless delays, and it is usually the most expedient way to handle such practices by bribery. Accordingly, university leadership better reserves some resources for side payments by which trouble-makers can be induced to drop their resistance. Side payments may consist of some participation in the cluster, typically only formally connected to its core activities but entitled to a portion of its resources. But there can also be many other kinds of side payments to a department not involved in the cluster or to older professors whose research motivation has diminished but who still occupy powerful positions in the university’s academic self-governance. Of course, side payments should be kept at a minimum. However, when it is common knowledge within a university that its rector or president tends to deal with disturbances of his plans by side payments, even actors who in fact are totally indifferent to a cluster building initiative may pretend that they feel affected and are inclined to mobilize resistance to make a profit from their acquiescence. Thus, on the one hand, university leadership should avoid the impression that it relies only and immediately on side payments because this would inflate the prices which have to be paid for an undisturbed process. On the other hand, side payments may be occasionally necessary to maintain a

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cluster building initiative’s momentum against delays which otherwise may bring about that it dies away. 3. As soon as a cluster is established and works on a regular basis, again and again conflicts arise from the fact that it is cross-linked with several or even all departments of the university. These conflicts originate not only in the just mentioned general violation of a department’s vested interests by this new organizational unit. There are also a number of specific reasons for disagreements. For university leadership, this poses the problem of managing a matrix structure. A typical example of such a disagreement occurs whenever a professorship has to be filled which belongs to a certain department and to the cluster at the same time. In such a situation, the department usually tries to take care that its teaching requirements are not neglected whereas the cluster often has an interest to recruit someone with a highly specialized research profile. Both demands are legitimate but frequently cannot be reconciled with each other. Numerous conflicts of this kind result from the matrix structure. This implies the danger that they accumulate over time and lead to a strong polarization between cluster, on the one hand, and departments, on the other. If this occurs, the cluster is prone to become the university’s scapegoat which is made responsible for all kinds of conflicts. That the departments join in blaming the cluster for the university-wide bad atmosphere seems quite likely. Luckily, the fact that there is not just one issue of conflict but many such issues come up over time gives university leadership an opportunity to divide burdens more evenly among the parties. Today the cluster’s interests are pursued to the disadvantage of some departments, but tomorrow it will be the other way around. Such a strategy of “turn-taking” has a chance of being perceived as a fair compromise so that it can pacify the conflictual atmosphere. However, it can happen that there may be longer periods of time when the interests of one side should be given a consistent priority, and this may use up the patience of the others who have to make one concession after another. The early phase of a cluster when it needs continually growing resources which

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often have to be taken from the departments is especially delicate in this respect. The worst that can occur is that the dynamic of the cluster is stifled to a standstill, with the final result of a permanently unfinished unit which uses up resources but does not contribute significantly to the university’s visibility. 4. When a cluster has worked successfully for a while, accompanied by growth which is financed by more basic funding from the university or by acquired third-party funding, sooner or later and almost inevitably the university leadership is in danger of losing control over the cluster. This is the inherent risk involved when a university leadership tries to support a cluster to become successful. When it finally has achieved success and is nationally or even internationally recognized for its “excellence,” a critical juncture is reached. There is a chance that this may turn out to be a durable “win-win” constellation in which both university leadership and the cluster may profit—as expected— from their joint effort. The university has got its flagship, and the researchers involved have got their highly improved research opportunities. However, cluster building establishes a new and growing location of power within the university. This may mean that the interests of the cluster more and more dominate the strategy of the university. In particular, university leadership may be forced to allocate an increasing share of financial resources to the cluster because, in the extreme case, the university’s reputation has become totally dependent upon the cluster’s continuing success. But even if the cluster is able to acquire most of its resources without having to turn to university leadership, the latter becomes dependent upon the cluster’s on-going success in the acquisition of third-party funds. So the “power-dependence relation” (Emerson 1962) is liable to turn into its opposite. Now the cluster can demand more and more concessions from university leadership—always legitimated by the joint interest to maintain and, if possible, enhance the cluster’s status. Furthermore, this may result in a public image where the cluster outshines the university to which it belongs. If this point is reached, university leadership may ask itself whether this still is worth its price:

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The university contributes with a considerable effort—including internal conflicts which have to be pacified by side payments—to the cluster’s success, but the public attention has shifted entirely to the cluster. It is no longer the gem associated with its university but a stand-alone beauty. University leadership has to maintain a delicate balance here. On the one hand, it has to give the cluster enough room to move for its own development. If the cluster is too tightly coupled to the other organizational, especially the decision-making structures of the university, there is a real danger that the established powerful actors, the departments in particular, will not allow the cluster’s blossoming for the reasons already mentioned which range from rational considerations to sheer jealousy. On the other hand, it has to be prevented that the cluster becomes so powerful on its own that it is able to walk on its own feet and away from the university or to dictate its own demands to university leadership. As important and successful as a cluster might be, it remains just a part of the whole which should not suppress all other parts. 5. Finally, when a cluster has reached its zenith and further innovative ideas have been missed for quite a while, university leadership must face the problem of termination. Schelsky (1963, 314) saw as one of the tasks of “… a far-sighted and skilful …” university leadership “… to terminate such centers of the university in due time and to establish new progressive ones in their place.” But this is easier said than done. When the right moment has come to shift resources away from an established cluster to a promising new bottom-up initiative, the former is usually still quite influential within the university and often also outside. Its researchers are well represented within the university’s formal and informal decision-making structures as well as within the wider scientific community and the funding agencies; they are part of the established mainstream which can defend its claims very well by a variety of means. In particular, the cluster can hide for quite some time that its best times are over; and it does this very authentically because

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its members really believe that they still have much to offer in the future. Accordingly, it is very difficult for university leadership to detect early enough that it should reallocate resources. Even if this is realized and such attempts are made, they are blamed immediately as illegitimate by the cluster and its supporters. To a certain extent it may help to fix the life-span of a cluster from the beginning and quite schematically, as it is done with the “collaborative research centers” of the DFG which end after twelve years, at the latest, regardless of whatever innovative potential there still might be in a particular case. Still, many clusters are established open-ended; and as long as new cohorts of researchers are recruited and the usual standardized performance indicators do not show any alarming signs, the chances are high that a cluster on a downward trend remains strong enough to outfight competitors within the university. It may be even supported by other actors within the university with whom it had many conflicts before but finally reached at least a tacit agreement of “live and let live!” They may reckon that with the status quo they know what they have whereas the inevitable turmoil of terminating the old and building up a new cluster is highly uncertain with regard to the final outcome. All in all, it seems that it needs rather exceptional opportunities for a university leadership being able to terminate an established cluster at the right time. The more common case is a long decline which consumes considerable financial resources that are then lacking for the support of innovative new initiatives.

4

I NHERENT T ENSIONS

All five problems—and this list is certainly not complete—could and should be studied carefully to arrive at some best-practice recommendations which can be given to university leadership. One thing, however, is already clear by now: None of these problems can be avoided,

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and none of them can be solved once and for all because they result from inherent tensions which have to be coped with permanently by university leadership. Accordingly, as Renate Mayntz (1985) once characterized research management in general, the management of cluster building at universities certainly consists of “attempts of steering between Scylla and Charybdis.” There are no recipes to do this kind of job; and the more university leadership consists of activities such as cluster building the more demanding it becomes. Even if there existed a much better knowledge base for handling such management tasks, you still could only wish rectors and presidents what in a Peanuts comic once was said to Charlie Brown when he again tried to fly his obstinate kite: “Good luck! You’ll need it!”

R EFERENCES DiMaggio, Paul J. and Walter W. Powell. 1983. “The Iron Cage Revisited.” American Sociological Review 48: 147-160. Emerson, Richard M. 1962. “Power-Dependence Relations.” American Sociological Review 27: 31-41. Latour, Bruno. 1987. Science in Action. How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Lindblom, Charles E. 1959: “The Science of Muddling Through.” Public Administration Review 13: 79-88. Mayntz, Renate. 1985. Forschungsmanagement—Steuerungsversuche zwischen Scylla und Charybdis. Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag. Meier, Frank. 2009. Die Universität als Akteur. Zum institutionellen Wandel der Hochschulorganisation. Wiesbaden: VS. Meier, Frank and Uwe Schimank. 2010. “Mission Now Possible: Profile Building and Leadership in German Universities.” In Reconfiguring Knowledge Production. Changing Authority Relationships in the Sciences and Their Consequences for Intellectual Innovation, edited by Richard Whitley, Jochen Gläser, and Lars Engwall, 211236. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Plessner, Helmuth. 1924. “Zur Soziologie der modernen Forschung und ihrer Organisation in der deutschen Hochschule.” In Versuche zu einer Soziologie des Wissens, edited by Max Scheler, 407-425. München: Duncker & Humblot. Popper, Karl Raimund. 1957. The Poverty of Historicism. London: Routledge. Schelsky, Helmut. 1963. Einsamkeit und Freiheit. Idee und Gestalt der deutschen Universität und ihrer Reformen. Reinbek: Rowohlt. Schiene, Christof and Uwe Schimank. 2007. “Research Evaluation as Organizational Development: The Work of the Academic Advisory Council in Lower Saxony (FRG).” In The Changing Governance of the Sciences: The Advent of Research Evaluation Systems, edited by Richard Whitley and Jochen Gläser, 171-190. Dordrecht: Springer.

Interdisciplinarity and the New Governance of Universities P ETER W EINGART

PRELIMINARY REMARK For decades the call for interdisciplinarity has permeated discourses in science and higher education policy in reaction to an ever faster specialization and institutional differentiation of research and teaching. Yet, it had little or no effect on the level of organization and actual conduct of researchers and teachers. Now there are signs that this may change. Some universities begin to pioneer structural changes that seem to give substance to the notion of interdisciplinarity by giving it organizational reality. But in most, structural obstacles remain in place. To what challenges do the new pioneers of interdisciplinarity respond, and what keeps the rear guard from advancing more courageously? Does the move towards interdisciplinary organizational structures in universities signal a fundamental change in the organization of knowledge production? I want to argue that the recent changes implemented by some universities indicate a response to pressures from outside to be more responsive to the so-called “grand challenges.” In one regard this is not new. Previous general appeals for “interdisciplinarity” were already reactions to the perceived crisis of science’s overspecialization

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and its distance from society. In another respect, however, this is novel insofar as the demand for interdisciplinarity is now translated into organizational changes within universities. Changing the organizational structures by facilitating or even incentivizing intellectual exchange and cooperation across disciplinary boundaries may go beyond the hitherto vacuous plea for interdisciplinarity. But there are epistemic obstacles that rest in the nature of disciplines as forms of knowledge production and that are, at the same time, institutionalized in the organizational structures like departments or faculties. In view of their selfreferentiality they cannot be changed easily. Thus, the issue is if, although initially undertaken as legitimating exercises, it is imaginable that the structural reforms create “interdisciplinarity by default.” I will probe the different advances both by universities and science policy agencies to establish organizational structures as means to facilitate the response to outside challenges. The farthest reaching claim deduced from the evidence is that “discipline” as the dominating form of knowledge production is likely to be replaced. I will remain a bit more cautious: by providing organizational mechanisms that irritate disciplinary closure and allow for the take-up of topics from outside universities respond to a crisis of trust. The long range impact on the nature of knowledge production is uncertain.

INTERDISCIPLINARITY 1.0 Part of the founding myth of Bielefeld University and its Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF) is the reference to “interdisciplinarity” as a guiding principle. As can be expected, the form it had taken upon its opening in November 1969 was achieved by an amalgam of original ideas emerging over a period of five years under the influence of intellectual, personal and political contingencies. Even the founder himself, Helmut Schelsky, was not precisely regarding what interdisciplinarity meant for the structure of the university. What he foresaw was an ac-

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celerating specialization of science, the organization of research in large organizations, and thus the need for re-integration of science in theoretical research embracing the disciplines. This type of research was to be carried out in “Institutes for Advanced Study.” Without going into further detail regarding this story, thereby doing injustice to the personalities involved, it must be said that some of the original ideas failed under the impact of the reality of mass higher education, others remained half-baked like the so-called “university foci,” i.e. interdisciplinary centers.1 The university centers did not survive for either or both of two reasons: because their subject matters were not chosen in response to “real challenges” from outside academia and/or because the discipline-based structure of the university makes the centers extremely vulnerable to conflicts as they lack political support from the central administration. Insofar the development of this university with its early focus on interdisciplinarity reflects all the problems that characterize the issue at hand. In 1972 the OECD’s Center for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) published a report “Interdisciplinarity—Problems of Teaching and Research in Universities.” Among the contributions was a short article by the Austrian systems theoretician Erich Jantsch who not only coined the now fashionable term “transdisciplinarity,” but also developed a vision of a future university based on a radical epistemological turn: “a partisan viewpoint which starts from the assumption that man has become the chief actor in the process of shaping and con-

1

“Schwerpunkte” (in the language of the time) or interdisciplinary centers: Latin-America Studies, Mathematization of the Sciences, and Science of Science or Science Studies as it came to be named. They had no systematic place in the discipline-bound university organization of “faculties.” Two of them led a zombie existence for many years and eventually died a slow death, only the latter survived when finally in 1993 the university senate agreed to establish it as an interdisciplinary institute. At the end of 2012 it, too, was closed. ZiF from the beginning on began a life (almost) of its own, but that is another story.

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trolling the system,” i.e. the system of human society and its environment (Jantsch 1972, 103). The crucial point is: his “anthropomorphic viewpoint which by definition cannot be ‘objective’” implied a radical departure from the dominant view of science as the representation of the world as it is. Instead, he conceived the generation of new knowledge as well as its dissemination by teaching as teleological and normative, the organization of science as the basis for creative human action would shift more and more to interdisciplinary approaches. At the time Jantsch saw the first steps toward normative interdisciplinarity in experimental university programs that integrated education, research and service (Jantsch 1972, 113). The structure of the transdisciplinary university had three layers: systems design laboratories devoted to themes such as “Ecological Systems in Man-Made Environments” or “Public Health Systems,” function-oriented departments that take an outcome-oriented look at the functions technology performs in societal systems, such as “Housing” or “Urban Distribution,” and finally discipline-oriented departments. For the educational function of the university he envisaged an enormous gain in flexibility. Rather than being bound to disciplines and the acquisition of knowledge per se (“knowhow”), function-oriented departments would focus on “know-what.” Discipline-oriented departments would be motivated to emphasize “know-why” rather than “know-how.” Some students would go through discipline- and function-oriented departments, while others would continue up to the transdisciplinary design labs, not necessarily sequentially but going back and forth. The structure of education, i.e. the curriculum, would essentially be detached from the structure of disciplines and oriented to the highly ambitious function of sociotechnical engineering (118). Some of this sound nostalgic to our ears, reminiscent of the social engineering and planning enthusiasm of the 1960s and 70s, but some was clearly visionary. Jantsch has been forgotten because his ideas were too radical for his time, they came too early. In the higher education and science policy discourses, “interdisciplinarity” gained considerable prominence but largely without any consequences on the level

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of research organization, curriculum structure or university management. The efforts of funding agencies to induce interdisciplinary research in the name of creativity, innovativeness and social relevance were, more often than not, undermined or evaded by re-labeling maneuvers. Interdisciplinarity remained a vacuous, multi-purpose concept in the respective discourses because it had no scientific urgency—no pressure on the supply-side—and little political urgency because the linear image of disciplinary research as the basis of innovation dominated all thinking about science in general and universities in particular. As a science or higher education policy concept, “interdisciplinarity” found no counterpart in research or teaching. Quite the contrary: specialization and differentiation in the production and dissemination of knowledge continued unabated. Not until much more recently can one observe changes in some universities that seem to indicate a move toward more sustained “interdisciplinary” structures. They are triggered both within science and in its social and political environment.

INTERDISCIPLINARITY 2.0? In April 2011 the newly elected president of the University of Siegen, a provincial German university not very visible in rankings, embarked on what was announced to be a bold experiment. Backed by the advice from an expert committee, the board of trustees and the university senate re-structured twelve departments into four faculties. While the disciplinary structures still persist within them, to the outside the faculties are theme-oriented, in line with the university’s overall guiding motto: “Man interacting responsibly with his future, focused on his power to influence this future.” (It does not sound better in German either). This definitely reminds one of Erich Jantsch’s vision, i.e. a reflexive approach to socio-technical systems and practice. The central element of the reform concept at Siegen is the foundation of a “Research Center” (so-called Forschungskolleg) under the “mission statement”: “To de-

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sign the future humanely” (“Zukunft menschlich gestalten”). The authors insist that this is a true “program” and not just a “vacuous and popular label.” To support that claim they identify thematic fields, show their interrelations and their consequences for political practice as organizing principles for research in the center (Rektorat Siegen 2011). The example is instructive not because it is pioneering university development, nor because of its success or failure—at this time we know of neither—but for two other reasons: 1) the attempt is made to formulate a mission statement in such a way that it has internal organizational consequences. The establishment of thematic centers is the crucial test case of university reform “beyond faculties” everywhere. 2) The entire program is given an explicitly normative and practical orientation. In essence that means that interdisciplinarity no longer remains a purely legitimating concept. Rather, it informs structural reforms and guides research. It remains to be seen if this example and various other similar ones will be sustained. It is actually hard to imagine that focused research programs can emanate from the very general title of the research center’s thematic fields. The latter example of the University of Siegen is just one of several. A 2012 report by the “Donors’ Association for German Science” (Stifterverband), titled “Beyond Faculties” (“Jenseits der Fakultäten”) took a close look at various “new organizational units beyond faculties” in German universities, apparently finding the accumulation of such units worth a separate study.2 It classifies four organizational units for research: cross-faculty graduate programs and graduate schools; large research projects or centers (e.g. Research Clusters and Clusters of Excellence funded by the German Research Foundation—DFG); research units oriented to knowledge transfer to industry, and Centers for Advanced Study (Stifterverband 2012, 6). Similarly the report identi-

2

The report is based on an online survey among 99 German universities (35) and “technical” or “universities of applied sciences” (64 Fachhochschulen). The response rate was 32% and considered highly representative.

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fies seven different species of new organizational units for teaching, among them “interdisciplinary teaching and research units geared towards professional fields (e.g. professional schools or teacher training centers)” (ibid. 8). According to the survey, 83% of the universities have graduate programs, 80% have research units across faculties, 40% have units with an external partner (industrial, public-privatepartnerships PPP), 51% feature strategic units cooperating with external research institutions, and 29% have institutes for advanced study (ibid., 31). When asked if research and teaching is expected to be oriented to transdisciplinary topics in the near future, 76% of all higher education institutions answer that they believe this to be probable or very likely in the next few years (ibid. 94). If such expectations may be considered an indicator of likely developments, one can suspect a sustained trend. But, given the remarkable institutional stability of disciplines as the structural basis of universities, fundamental changes are improbable unless the causes are profound. The question then is: what has triggered this development, to which problems does it respond? And in view of the international character of disciplines: is it limited to the specific incentives of a national science and higher education policy or is it more widespread? It is obviously impossible to answer these questions here empirically, but some observations backed by theoretical considerations are a first step. First of all: even though we have no way to say how widespread the movement is, it may be claimed that the development described for Germany is not confined to that country but can be witnessed in other countries as well.3 One albeit admittedly weak indicator is the attention given to the topic in academic discourse. By 2007 almost 8000 articles had been published using the term “interdisciplinarity” and pertinent research had grown steadily (Jacobs and Frickel 2009, 46). Somewhat more focused are the concerns of science policy. The NSF has com-

3

Two examples elsewhere, Arizona State University and University College Maastricht, are being described in more detail in this volume.

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missioned a study of interdisciplinary research centers and programs which stated in 2003: “We also see the National Academies as well as individual national scholarly associations—from the American Geophysical Union and the American Chemical Society to the American Institute for Biological Sciences and the American Political Science Association—sponsoring interdisciplinary analyses and emphasizing interdisciplinary activities at the borders of their represented sciences and disciplines. And, we find academic institutions from Harvard to Haverford proclaiming ‘the need for academic and interdisciplinary change and innovation’ to ‘foster and enable collaboration among the faculties . . . to advance understanding of complex problems’ (Harvard University 2003; Haverford 1999)” (Rhoten 2005, 8). Creso Sà observes: “Interdisciplinarity has become a laudable goal for federal agencies, scientific associations, industry, and academic leaders in the U.S. Proponents contend that academic institutions risk impairing scientific advancement and diminishing the contributions of science to society by retaining traditional organizational forms and modes of work associated with disciplinary specialization . . . A sense that the ‘needed’ science does not follow from the ways of organizing research in academia underlies federal, state, and philanthropic funding of interdisciplinary centers…” (Sá 2008, 537). Thus, the promotion of interdisciplinary research, in particular, has been a concern of the U.S. National Academy’s Committees on Facilitating Interdisciplinary Research (CFIR) and on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy (COSEPUP) (NAS 2004). The NAS report Facilitating Interdisciplinary Research states: “A newer structure (of universities—PW), which can already be discerned both in the United States and abroad and which has long been evident in industry and elsewhere, is more like a matrix, in which people move freely among disciplinary departments that are bridged and linked by interdisciplinary centers, offices, programs, courses, and curricula. There are many possible forms of coupling between departments and centers, including appointments, salary lines, distribution of indirect-cost returns, teaching assignments and course-teaching credits, curricula, and degree-

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granting” (NAS 2004, 172, my italics). The report lists numerous examples of newly founded colleges in the U.S. as well as the wellknown ones: “There are models of interdisciplinarity in all venues of scholarship. Rockefeller University is organized around its laboratories…; the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, admits only postgraduate ‘visiting members’ who are free to pursue independent study and develop collaborations as they choose” (ibid. 175). Rockefeller University has been recognized as a long standing example of a higher education institution whose interdisciplinary structure has made it exceptionally innovative in research (Hollingsworth and Hollingsworth 2000). These examples may suffice as evidence that the interest in interdisciplinarity has become more focused as a problem of universities’ organization. But what were the motivations to pursue the necessary reforms, or in institutional terms, what were the causes that blew new life into the quest for interdisciplinarity? Basically three types of causes can be differentiated: 1) internal developments of the disciplines that lead to their cooperation or fusion; 2) strategies of universities in response to financial and/or political incentives that suggest internal structural re-arrangements; 3) external developments such as the demand for “value for money” of research, of an intensified innovativeness and improved technology transfer etc. Of course, these causes are not exclusionary but interdependent or at least mutually reinforcing. Ad 1: The main interest in this article is on the developments outside the universities as I want to focus on their reactions to them, based on the assumption that disciplines organized in faculties or departments follow a logic of differentiation and specialization. However, this has to be qualified to an extent. Actually, the continued specialization of disciplines increases the likelihood of re-combinations of disciplines.

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This is corroborated by several findings. For Germany the differentiation of professional societies shows the following picture: Wissenschaftliche Fachgesellschaften in Deutschland Anzahl der Fachgesellschaften 1900-1999 280 260

Medizin

240

Biologie

220

Agrar- und Forstwissenschaften

200

Gesellschaftswissenschaften

180 160

Ingenieurwissenschaften

140

Psychologie, Pädagogik, Philosophie, Theologie

120

Mathematik, weitere Naturwiss.

100

Sonstige

80 60 40 20 0 1900 1905 1910 1915 1920 1925 1930 1935 1940 1945 1950 1955 1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 Jahre

Source: Weingart, Schwechheimer 2007.

The development of disciplinary differentiation exhibited in the graph hides some peculiarities such as the extraordinary growth of medical societies, the explanation of which is not relevant here. However, the relatively less dynamic specialization in areas like physics or chemistry does not show the fact that these professional societies are differentiated internally. This differentiation often follows with a time lag. Thus, the formation of a section “biochemistry” within the “Society of German Chemists” occurred only in the 1980s, long after the field had come into existence. For the U.S., the NAS report states that the “number of departments has increased steadily over the last century, from about 20 in 1900 to between 50 and 110 in 2000. National professional societies have also increased in number from 82 in 1900 to 367 in 1985. Although those changes may appear to indicate increasing specialization, the increases in new departments such as biophysics and biochemistry, and societies, such as neuroscience and photonics, reflect a blending of previously distinct fields” (NAS 2004, 19 notes).

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Source: NAS 2004, 19.

When considering these data it has to be noted that “discipline” means many things, from the definition of subject matters, the classification of professional societies and the demarcation of academic degrees to the naming of departments or faculties and the subject catalogues of funding organizations, and their delineations are far from identical (Weingart and Schwechheimer: 2007). Nonetheless, although amalgamations or fusions of disciplines do occur, they are relatively rare compared to the general trend of disciplinary specialization. They are not chiefly responsible for universities to become more conducive to interdisciplinary structures. Ad 2) Looking at the examples taken by the study of the “Stifterverband” to be outstanding cases of new arrangements “beyond the faculties,” it is apparent that all (except perhaps one—FH Lübeck) are initiated either specifically as a project (e.g. excellence cluster) in the framework of the German “Excellence Initiative” or are, more indirectly, responses to pressures from science and higher education policy on the universities to develop specific profiles (e.g. the “interdisciplinary faculty,” Rostock University). The report concludes that the largest share of institutional structures that reach beyond disciplinary faculties is connected to external funding. In other words, these structures owe their existence to the strategies of the relevant funding agencies, the DFG, the EU, and some other less potent players (Stifterverband 2012, 33, 84). Some of the research centers, “special research areas”

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(SFB), and “research units” are funding schemes that were already set up in the late 1960s in order to promote interdisciplinary research. The crucial point for the present argument is that these schemes are mostly generated within science, that the “interdisciplinarity” they attempt to establish most often remains superficial, i.e. it seldom leads to new structures beyond the time of funding. Most often the themes of the units in question are defined by the scientists themselves, and it is difficult to separate intellectually justified topics from collaborations that are entered opportunistically by adapting to the funders’ objectives. Ad 3) When Michael Gibbons and co-authors published their book on “the new production of knowledge” in 1994, it met with a mix of enthusiasm and critique because the seemingly radical thesis of a shift from the traditional self-referential knowledge production (Mode 1) to an institutionally dissipated one (Mode 2) was largely based on impressionist evidence and wishful thinking (Gibbons et al.: 1994). But over the nearly two decades since then, the authors’ normative stance has been corroborated to some extent by real developments. In many fields (exemplars are bio- and nanotechnology, genomics and climate modeling) research has moved from the understanding of fundamental laws to an engineering approach and/or the instrument-driven automated production of data. The economic, political, social and/or ethical implications of some of these research lines have assumed such immediacy that something akin to the socio-technological or ecological engineering Jantsch envisaged for the purposive function of the universities may have become more realistic. The changes in the political environment of science and the universities in particular point in the same direction. The most visible challenge for the universities is the political pressure to contribute to economic innovation by taking on a “third mission,” i.e. improving knowledge transfer and getting directly involved in economic activity. Another challenge is that they become accountable to the democratic polity both by making the internal procedures transparent by which the scientific community ascribes reputation based on achievement and by

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legitimating the social relevance of the research output. All across Europe legislatures have mandated that universities establish “governing boards,” in part diffusely emulating the U.S. example, in part responding to expectations of communities, regions and/or economic stakeholders that call for “value for money,” be it economic or political. Societal and political legitimacy has become a new challenge in the universities’ environments even if the ways in which the expectations are formulated may be diffuse and indirect, sometimes even generated by themselves in the form of self-representation. In any case, the increased urgency of these external expectations addressed to science in general and the university in particular has an important implication that differentiates them from most of (though not all) previous attempts by funding agencies to initiate and promote interdisciplinary research: the self-referentiality of disciplines is complemented by the central administration’s orientation to the university’s outside publics. Interdisciplinarity is thus given a concrete meaning and a specific function in the new mode of knowledge production.

INTERDISCIPLINARITY AS AN ORGANIZATIONAL PROBLEM OF UNIVERSITIES It has often been diagnosed that the resistance of universities to change is caused by the social structure of disciplines. The disciplines are connected to the organizational structure of departments (or faculties), they are the basis of their mutual reinforcement and their remarkable resilience across time and space (Sá 2008, 539). The crucial references of departments and their members transcend the individual university. These are the disciplines as intellectual and social organizations with extended ties to respective labor markets (some more clearly defined and protected by accreditations than others). The autopoietic nature of disciplines assures their perennial and, in principle, their unlimited regeneration, growth and differentiation. Professors’ allegiance is to their

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disciplinary and specialties’ communities, i.e. in the context of the university, to their departments. “Their primary focus outside the university is their reputation compared with that of comparable departments at other universities. Furthermore, their concerns focus on the policies of their respective disciplinary and parallel professional associations. However, they are not concerned with the university’s contribution to community service, the politics and economics of the city or the region where the university is located. They are usually not concerned with the university’s politics and representation to the non-academic world at all, except where they touch upon their immediate interests” (Weingart 2013, 8). In other words, as Clark diagnosed: the universities’ “response capabilities” are diminishing as external demands grow (Clark 2000, 12). Both these changes, inside and outside science and its foremost institution, have resulted in new organizational challenges, a few of which should be mentioned here. They are inherently linked to the discipline-based structure of universities. The concept of an “entrepreneurial university” that has gained currency since Burton Clark coined it is pertinent here. Unfortunately, all too often it has been reduced to an economic meaning which misses the point. In contrast, Clark in his summary of case studies of European universities had the broader meaning in mind. He posed the question how universities can become “entrepreneurial,” in the sense of gaining the capacity to act as an organization and by becoming responsive to their environments improve and secure their legitimacy? If one takes the obstacles to the establishment of structures “beyond faculties” such as interdisciplinary research centers as test case the following obstacles on different levels may be identified: 1) allocation of funds which are determined by departmental development strategies. Within the context of a university, departments compete with one another for funds. Development strategies which serve to legitimate claims to such funds cannot be compared with one another. Thus size, the amount of external funding, outside reputation (that also escapes comparison) and a vague perception of a subject’s general relevance (medicine and engineering rank higher than the so-

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cial sciences and humanities) are condensed to an implicit ranking of “power” against which interdisciplinary centers rarely ever have a chance to prevail in budgetary conflicts; 2) recruiting processes work very similarly. In most cases interdisciplinary units or centers rely on the dual membership of professors in these centers and in departments. Recruiting is determined mostly by the departments. They legitimate recruiting decisions with disciplinary “quality standards” rather than with reference to the centers’ interdisciplinary topic and the requisite competencies. Part of the justification is also the time scale as departments usually have a longer lifetime than interdisciplinary centers; 3) teaching is commonly organized within departments in disciplinary curricula. Interdisciplinary organizations are often prevented from offering courses and/or degrees. This makes their members dependent on departmental policies; connected to this is 4) the labor market that as far as professional jobs are concerned is organized along disciplinary lines with disciplinary certificates being the precondition to entry. Typically, students interested in work in interdisciplinary thematic fields are discouraged by the lack of career opportunities; 5) modes of accounting and evaluation that have been introduced into higher education systems everywhere during the last two decades are reinforcing disciplinary structures because virtually all of them are based on indicators that are surrogates of the internal communication process of science and disciplines in particular. “Their effect as incentives to the behaviour of professors and researchers is one of reinforcement rather than re-direction” (Weingart 2013). The list of obstacles to the implementation of interdisciplinary research and teaching may not be complete but the issues mentioned illustrate the “lock-in” in which universities find themselves even if their leaders would like to orient them to interdisciplinary “missions.” How deep the mechanisms reach is revealed by the following. In order to strengthen university central administrations in Germany, university presidents and rectors were granted considerable competencies by new higher education laws to act in entrepreneurial fashion. However, a study that looked recently at six universities’ reactions to out-

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side evaluations found a most striking fact: in spite of the new powers given to the university leaders the system is still significantly less hierarchical and centralized than its counterparts in other European countries, notably the UK. Most importantly, differences between disciplinary cultures generate academic non-aggression pacts and threaten central efforts at structural change by questioning their legitimacy. Often enough the central administrations, presidents in particular, shy away from conflicts and abstain from structural reforms (Gläser and von Stuckrad 2011). Similarly Sá observes: “Despite the multiplication of interdisciplinary ORUs (organized research units—PW) overtime, some observers are frustrated by the lack of administrative leadership in bringing about organizational change to facilitate interdisciplinarity in universities” (Sá 2008, 542). The means to overcome these obstacles are mostly fairly obvious: interdisciplinary centers have to be given greater autonomy, especially in the form of an independent budget. Recruiting processes have to be protected against interventions from departments with competence for the research problems in question as decisive criterion of quality rather than abstract disciplinary competence. Rhoten in her systematic study of interdisciplinary centers concludes: “Interdisciplinary centers need not only to be well-funded but to have an independent physical location and intellectual direction apart from traditional university departments. They should have clear and well-articulated organizing principles—be they problems, products, or projects—around which researchers can be chosen on the basis of their specific technical, methodological, or topical contributions, and to which the researchers are deeply committed. While a center should be established as a longstanding organizational body with continuity in management and leadership, its researchers should be appointed for flexible, intermittent but intensive short-term stays that are dictated by the scientific needs of projects rather than administrative mandates” (Rhoten 2003, 9). Centers should also be given the right to confer degrees at least on the doctoral level so as to avoid anticipatory strategies of adaptation to disciplinary standards. Finally, performance measures should be con-

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structed in such a way that they do not reproduce disciplinary reputational structures. The “depth” of the institutional reach of disciplinarity is impressive and constantly self-reinforcing. In fact, the entire system of generation and distribution of reputation in science, i.e. the mechanism that makes science an autopoietic social system, is organized around disciplines. There is no internal mechanism to bring about change except that the system evolves in such a way that it may become unsustainable.

NEW FORMS OF KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION? THE EMERGENCE OF AN EXTERNAL PUBLIC While so much stands in the way institutionally for interdisciplinary forms of research and teaching to be realized in universities, the discourse about the drawbacks and potentials, about the obstacles and opportunities is itself an indicator of a process of change. The causes of this discourse are probably manifold and its endpoint is far from clear. In order not be caught in momentary hypes or lost in the confusing abundance of detail, it helps to take a step back to get a perspective on the greater picture. Robert Frodeman does just that by pronouncing the end of the age of disciplinarity as the dominating regime of knowledge production (Frodeman, this volume). He correctly points out that disciplines are a creation of the 19th century. In a similar vein Paul Forman writes: “As a distinct cultural constellation disciplinarity began to take shape only toward the end of the eighteenth century. It attained clear articulation and concerted implementation only in the nineteenth century, and even then was realized only slowly and imperfectly. The triumph of disciplinarity as a hegemonic cultural ideal came about during the fifty years following the First World War. Toward the end of that half century, in the two decades following the Second World War, disciplinarity was almost universally regarded as the inevitable, as well as the most estimable, mode of knowledge production. Once attained, it

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was supposed necessarily to remain—in perpetuity, the end of history” (Forman 2012, 59). Each author, for different reasons, sees the end of the disciplinary mode of knowledge production, if not yet realized at least on the horizon. Forman argues as a cultural historian. He sees the shift from modernity to post-modernity as underlying the end of the traditional disciplines—not necessarily the coming of interdisciplinary knowledge production. Fundamental changes of four cultural values: proceduralism, disinterestedness, autonomy, and solidarity signify the shift. “Those four values, together with the high value placed on discipline itself, created disciplinarity as the ideal form of knowledge production and curation in modernity” (Forman 2012, 72). Forman then analyzes how each value has fared in the transition to post-modernity, and how, disciplinarity in particular, has gradually assumed a pejorative connotation. Beginning in the late 1960s “university professors and university administrators; officers of funding organizations, both private and public; government officials, both legislative and executive—all have increasingly disparaged disciplines in thought and word” (Forman 2012, 92). Frodeman comes to a very similar diagnosis, albeit based on a different set of indicators. He identifies a “current crisis of the disciplinary academy” caused by three developments: the spread of web-based education at radically reduced cost before the background of booming costs of higher education; the rise of neoliberal political philosophies and with it the end of a non-economic legitimation of higher education; universities’ loss of control over the creation and dissemination of knowledge which may ultimately also mean the loss of control over certification of knowledge (cf. Frodeman, this volume, 185). There are other factors that add to these. Universities no longer just turn out young academics for replenishment of their own ranks, for research and the professions, i.e. doctors, lawyers, teachers, but with 50% of every age cohort they train qualified personnel for a broadly defined labor market that is differentiated way beyond the range of disciplines. The large array of courses to be found at universities is only in part a reflection of the development of knowledge, but in part also

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responds to the needs of a highly dynamic labor market. Thus, the teaching programs of universities already convey a large share of “know-how” knowledge rather than the disciplinary “know-why,” as Jantsch predicted. A side effect is the loss of the elevated social status of science as an institution and of scientists as a collective. Yet another factor contributing to this is the close observation of science by the media. Partly because of the “news value” of certain research results, partly due to the publicity sought by universities for PR purposes to legitimate themselves, media attention has revealed the normality, internal disagreements, uncertainties and limitations of science. Scientists and their institutions speak on their own behalf, act as interested parties whether in defense of their immediate interests (e.g. financial support) or to promote political positions (e.g. climate change). This is the factual basis of the demise of “disinterestedness” as a fundamental value attached to science, as diagnosed by Forman (Forman 2012). To fully understand the gravity of the change in progress, it helps to recall that the ideal of disciplinary science and thus the peak of its institutionalization had been reached immediately after WWII when, supported by the ideological polarization between the capitalist West and the socialist Eastern block, a new regime of science was established. It was characterized by the separation between an academic “basic research” sector, mainly located in the universities, and the remaining component of “applied” research performed in industrial and government laboratories. In this regime the generation and distribution of reputation resided almost exclusively in the “academic” part of the system, backed by the legitimation of “basic research” as being the basis of the innovation process. Basic research was to be free from any political intervention, following “internal,” i.e. disciplinary criteria of relevance only, thereby creating a stock of knowledge from which later on practical applications could accrue. Basic, self-regulated research in the universities was—and still is—in principle both: socially and politically insulated, communicating only within and to the academic

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community and it is legitimated with the promise to add to the common good and welfare (cf. Frodeman, this volume). This arrangement was “fragile” and was criticized from early on (Guston and Kenniston 1994; Price 1967). Although the promise of science’s contribution to economic and social welfare was by and large fulfilled, the connection is still difficult to communicate. But more importantly, in the late 1960s the hitherto untroubled belief in science’s contribution to the commonweal began to be clouded by the realization of its risks. It took roughly another two decades—until the end of the Cold War in 1989—for the ideological support of the contract to disperse. Since then the expectation of science to contribute more directly to social concerns, to technological innovation and to economic growth has become steadily more pronounced. As Frodeman points out, this amounts to nothing less than to cancel the internal mechanism of selfdirection. This happens, for example, in the form of funding agencies and research councils applying “broader impact” as a criterion of evaluation of research on a par with “intellectual merit” as has happened in the UK, the EU and now in the U.S. Applied seriously this will eventually break the monopoly of disciplinary peer review and establish ‘society’ as a ‘relevant public,’ represented by the policies of the funding agencies. In principle, insofar as the “external public’s” expectations in the form of specified objectives, or particular problems or values are formulated, they may become orienting references for research. The structure of disciplines has never been fixed but has developed ever since disciplines became the primary organizational mode of academic knowledge production. Not only do disciplines differentiate internally, they also expand and integrate new subject matters. But it is not likely that the disciplinary mode would be replaced altogether. External “challenges” would rather, as happens already, be incorporated into the organization of knowledge production, constituting new fields of systematic research effort, with boundaries different from the classical disciplines but subject to specialized methods of analysis, to the epistemic rigor constitutive of science and, thus, to “disciplined” study nonetheless. If the new structural units in universities that are supposed

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to make research more responsive to these challenges are mere “window dressing” exercises serving to secure legitimacy or if they actually constitute new research lines and respond to concrete problems depends on both the intellectual accessibility (and delineation) of the problem and the organizational provisions to integrate the research into the university.

CONCLUSION The inescapable question in light of these diagnoses is: how far along the way towards a new mode of knowledge production are we? Or as Rhoten puts it: “Interdisciplinarity: trend or transition?” pointing out that: “the fact is, universities have tended to approach interdisciplinarity as a trend rather than a real transition and to thus undertake their interdisciplinary efforts in a piecemeal, incoherent, catch-as-catch-can fashion rather than approaching them as comprehensive, root-andbranch reforms” (Rhoten 2005, 6). The very historicity of the disciplinary mode of knowledge production makes it highly improbable that it will remain the same forever. But that does not necessarily mean that the new mode is just around the corner. Some two decades ago a group of authors announced the advent of a “Mode 2” of knowledge production while others spoke of “post-normal science” (Gibbons et al. 1994; Funtowicz and Ravetz 1993). While their prognoses proved premature the attention paid to them was remarkable. Within the academic community they met with much skepticism, pointing to the lack of empirical evidence and to the “normative stance” of the claims (Hessels and van Lente 2008).4 Interestingly enough, however, much of the positive reception came from outside academia, i.e. from the science policy community. Rhoten “found substantial evidence of extrinsic attention

4

Hessels and van Lente give a full overview of the debate over Mode1/Mode2.

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to interdisciplinary research in the discourses and resources of government agencies, policy makers, scholarly associations, and university administrators” (Rhoten 2005, 8). The applause with which the latter greet predictions of the advent of a new age of interdisciplinarity is a reflection of their distrust of the existing system of academic knowledge production, especially in the universities, as much as it reacts to its intractability and its distance from society. If this is the reason behind the call for interdisciplinarity it also explains why it has remained without effect. There will be no change without organizational measures in support of concrete research efforts responding to concrete problems. The juxtaposition of disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity is misleading as the uptake of problems that arise outside science is but the continued expansion of the scientific method to new phenomena. That is characteristic of the knowledge society.

REFERENCES Clark, Burton. 2000. “Collegial entrepreneurialism in proactive universities: lessons from Europe.” Change 32: 10-19. Forman, Paul. 2012. “On the Historical Forms of Knowledge Production and Curation: Modernity Entailed Disciplinarity, Postmodernity Entails Antidisciplinarity.” OSIRIS 27: 56–97 (January). Frodeman, Robert. 2014. “The End of Disciplinarity.” In University Experiments in Interdisciplinarity—Obstacles and Opportunities, edited by Peter Weingart and Britta Padberg, 185. Bielefeld: Transcript. Funtowicz, Silvio and Jerome Ravetz. 1993. “Science for the postnormal age.” Futures 25: 735–755. Gibbons, Michael, Camille Limoges, Helga Nowotny, Simon Schwartzman, Peter Scott, and Martin Trow. 1994. The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science and Research in Contemporary Societies. London: SAGE.

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Gläser, Jochen and Thimo von Stuckrad. 2012. “‚Es ist höchstens eine Kollegenschelte möglich, aber die bringt nichts.‘—Kontingente und strukturelle Handlungsbeschränkungen der intrauniversitären Forschungsgovernance.” In Hochschule als Organisation, edited by Uwe Wilkesmann and Christian Schmid, 223-44. Wiesbaden: Springer. Guston, David H. and Kenneth Keniston. 1994. The Fragile Contract: University Science and the Federal Government. Cambridge: MIT Press. Harvard University, Office of the Provost. 2003. http://www.provost. harvard.edu/interdisciplinary_activities.Haverford University.1999.http:// www.haverford.edu/publications/summer99/notefromfounders.htm. Hessels, K. Laurens, and Harro van Lente. 2008 “Re-thinking new knowledge production: A literature review and a research agenda.” Research Policy 37: 740-760. Hollingsworth, J. Rogers and Ellen Jane Hollingsworth. 2000. “Major Discoveries and Biomedical Research Organizations: Perspectives on Interdisciplinarity, Nurturing Leadership, and Integrated Structure and Cultures.” In Practising Interdisciplinarity, edited by Peter Weingart and Nico Stehr, 215-44. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Jacobs, Jerry A. and Scott Frickel. 2009. “Interdisciplinarity: A Critical Assessment.” Annual Review of Sociology 35: 43-65. Jantsch, Erich. 1972. “Towards Interdisciplinarity and Transdisciplinarity in Education and Innovation.” In CERI, Interdisciplinarity. Problems of Teaching and Research in Universities, 97-120. Paris: OECD. NAS (National Academy of Science). 2004. Facilitating Interdisciplinary Research. Washington DC: The National Academies Press. Price, Don K. 1967. The Scientific Estate. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

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Rektorat Universität Siegen, Konzept Forschungskolleg „Zukunft menschlich gestalten“. http://www.uni-siegen.de/start/die_universi taet/ueber_uns/hochschulentwicklung/konzept_forschungskolleg.pdf (last visited February 2, 2013). Rhoten, Diana. 2005. “Interdisciplinary research: trend or transition?” Items Issues 5: 6-11. Rhoten, Diana. 2003. Final Report, A Multi-Method Analysis of the Social and Technical Conditions for Interdisciplinary Collaboration. San Francisco, CA: The Hybrid Vigor Institute. Sá, Creso M. 2008. “‘Interdisciplinary strategies’ in U.S. research universities.” Higher Education 55: 537-552. Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft e. V. (Sybille Reichert, Mathias Wilde, Volker Meyer-Guckel). 2012. Jenseits der Fakultäten. Hochschuldifferenzierung durch neue Organisationseinheiten für Forschung und Lehre. Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft: Essen. Weingart, Peter and Holger Schwechheimer. 2007. “Dimensionen der Veränderung der Disziplinenlandschaft.” In Nachrichten aus der Wissensgesellschaft, Analysen zur Veränderung von Wissenschaft, edited by Peter Weingart, Martin Carrier, and Wolfgang Krohn. Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft. Weingart, Peter. 2013. “The loss of trust and how to regain it: performance measures and entrepreneurial universities.” In Trust in Universities, edited by Lars Engwall and Peter Scott, 83-95. London: Portland Press.

The End of Disciplinarity R OBERT F RODEMAN Disciplinarity is now an impossibility, both ideologically and practicably. Paul Forman

I.

I NTRODUCTION

We face a political revolution in the production of knowledge. The regime of knowledge that has characterized the last 125 years is coming to a close. The control that universities once exercised over knowledge production, dissemination, and certification is ending, as knowledge now becomes instantly available on handheld devices from an infinite number of sources. It’s a political revolution driven by technological innovation that is likely to result in major epistemic change. If a name is needed to identify the period now ending, call it “the age of disciplinarity.” Disciplinarity will nonetheless be difficult to shake, not least because it primarily exists in the minds of men. As Forman (2012) notes, one of the most striking aspects of the disciplinary era was its lack of curiosity about its own nature. Disciplines were assumed to be rooted in the facts of the world. Though the alchemy of research, academic standards would naturally rise as epistemic differentiation naturally oc-

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curred. This would occur because the world broke up into natural kinds. So, for instance, on the one side there are rocks, and on the other life; the academy mirrored these natural divisions by giving us geology and biology. (Limestone suggests what is problematic about that.) Or scholars tried to base the idea of a discipline in a distinctive quality of methods, tools, or perspectives. These accounts have been no more fruitful (cf. Laudan 1983). With greater success, Stephen Turner argued that the definition of a discipline is largely nominal: a given discipline is constituted by what we have decided to gather together as a discipline (Turner 2000). What else unifies the four aspects of anthropology—physical anthropology, cultural anthropology, archeology, and linguistics? Or makes aqueous geochemistry and vertebrate paleontology both part of geology? Or makes the history of philosophy part of philosophy rather than history? Turner noted a second characteristic of disciplinarity: it functions as an internal market or intellectual cartel. Disciplines consist of departments that train people to work in departments at other universities that have the same name as the first department. But note that this is more than a point about hiring, or even economic relations; most centrally it is a point about audience. The disciplinary university created an internal economy of knowledge in which attention to peers trumps relevance to external social developments and modes of thought. Within the disciplinary academy non-academics were marginal players in the process of knowledge creation, certification, and dissemination. There are myriad reasons for the breakdown of disciplinarity (technological, sociological, epistemic; which is not to say that disciplines themselves are in danger of going away). But the central issue is that in the age now dawning, engagement with non-academics will become central to university research. That is, the university is losing its autonomy. This is part and parcel of the fact that the university is losing its status as the locus classicus of knowledge production. Academics will react bitterly to the loss of autonomy. But the more important consequence is that this shift highlights the unsustainability of our current mode of knowledge production. When knowledge pro-

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duction was primarily an intra-academic affair it operated without an explicit governor (though there were always implicit ones, e.g., limits of time and resources). For academics, every answer raised a new question, an effective infinity of research questions, what Hegel would call a bad infinity. But when knowledge production becomes explicitly tied to social needs for knowledge, infinite knowledge production becomes unsustainable. It is this, even more than the loss of autonomy, which threatens the status quo of the academy. Academics are trained in and spend their professional lives housed within disciplines. But their thoughts on the subject are remarkably undisciplined, which is to say unorganized and poorly thought through. What is a discipline? When were disciplines invented? Are all disciplines alike, at least in terms of their nature as a discipline? Do disciplines vary in terms of the degree or type of disciplinarity their field admits of? Is every academic field of study a “discipline?” And what is the purpose or function of a discipline? The literature—if not on disciplines per se but on these specific questions—is surprisingly scant. Researchers on interdisciplinarity gesture toward these issues again and again without making a full frontal attack. You can find a few essays that offer a historical or philosophical account of disciplinarity.1 You can also piece the story together from works on the history of science and of higher education.2 But there exists no substantial body of literature that focuses on the intellectual history of disciplinarity. This is not the place to try to fill that gap. The focus here is on the consequences of the current transition from a disciplinary to an inter-

1

2

Stephen Turner’s essay “What are Disciplines? And How is Interdisciplinarity Different?” (2000) is a notable example. See also Rudolf Stichweh, “History of the Scientific Disciplines” (2001) and Peter Weingart “A Short History of Knowledge Formations” (2010). See Veysey (1965) and Clark (2006). More recently, Paul Forman (2012) offers an account of disciplinarity which also notes the lack of scholarly self-consciousness on the subject.

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disciplinary regime of knowledge. But this task requires at least a sketch of the nature of disciplinarity. More particularly, this essay has four parts: a prolegomenon to a full account of disciplinarity; a summary of the crisis that the university finds itself in today; a description of what interdisciplinarity is taken to mean, versus what I believe it actually is about; and an exploration of what I see as the most important consequence of the shift toward interdisciplinarity—that the concept of sustainability will need to be applied to academic research itself.

II. D ISCIPLINARITY

AS THE

G REAT U NTHOUGHT

Concerning disciplinarity, I wish to emphasize four points: First, by whatever name, the concept of discipline can be traced back to the roots of Western culture. One can, for instance, argue that disciplines were born in ancient Greece, in the transition from Plato to Aristotle. While Plato named his dialogues in terms of people, or social roles (e.g., the Theaetetus or the Phaedo; the Sophist or the Statesman), Aristotle framed his treatises—at least the works that have come down to us, his dialogues having been lost—in terms of regions of knowledge such as logic, physics and poetry. But while disciplines have a prehistory stretching back to antiquity, modern disciplinary culture is the creation of the late 19th century. Before then, disciplines—or “faculties”—were not the domains of specialists. From the founding of the first universities through the 18th century there were commonly four faculties, consisting of theology, medicine, law, and philosophy or the humanities. Professors would cycle through these faculties across the course of their careers, moving from the lower faculty of philosophy to the three higher faculties (Clark 2006). Such movement discouraged specialization and narrowly focused conversations. Second, while new discoveries and insights have always been made, there was nothing resembling today’s institutional research cul-

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ture dedicated to producing new knowledge until late in the 19th century. Rather than producing and disseminating new knowledge, professors literally lectured (from the Latin lectus, past participle of legere, to read). This was in part a matter of technology: with books at a premium the oral transmission of knowledge was a necessity. The power of the Church played an important role as well, in that professors were expected to promote a set of perennial truths—a philosophia perennis—rooted in religious orthodoxy. Rumblings of a new orientation can be found by the 1690s, in the querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, where the advances of modern science were increasingly seen as the equal or superior of ancient learning. Swift added a satirical edge to the debate in his Battle of the Books (1704). But it was not until the founding of the University of Berlin (1810) that the instruction of university students was explicitly tied to the production of new knowledge. The institutionalization of disciplines, majors, and the PhD would wait until the 1870s, at American institutions such as Johns Hopkins, Harvard, and the University of Michigan. Third, as noted above, a “discipline” is typically (if not invariably) assumed to be an epistemological category.3 Disciplines, it is said, share a common subject matter, set of perspectives, tools, and methodology. There is of course an epistemic content to a discipline; one could even say that academic knowledge consists of nothing other than epistemological activity, since the job of the academic, scientist or humanist, is to make arguments of one type or another. But this is a red herring. The mistake comes in thinking that since academics are epistemologists, then the grouping of different academic specialties within a given discipline forms a coherent epistemic whole in principle distinct from other disciplines.

3

As Forman (2012) notes, there is also a characterological dimension to the term, denoting the disciplined soul, which was ascendant until the mid-20th century.

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Fourth, disciplinarity offered an answer to the political question of academic governance. Disciplinary knowledge production does not have to explain or justify itself, except to disciplinary peers. It is knowledge that severs the connection between knowledge production and use: researchers produce knowledge with little concern with the uses non-academics put that knowledge to. This definition of disciplinary knowledge parallels what Gibbons et al. (1994) called Mode 1 knowledge—while emphasizing the political implications of disciplinarity. Remarkably, the isolation of disciplinary knowledge from extraacademic influences has generally been presented as a virtue, most notably in iconic works such as Bush’s Science—the Endless Frontier (1945) and Polanyi’s The Republic of Science (1962). Their idea was that academics create a reservoir of knowledge that society can then draw upon—but where inputs into the reservoir are kept separate from societal outcomes (cf. Pielke and Byerly 1998). Of course, a great deal of work has been done in the policy literature across the last two decades that questions the Bush-Polanyi paradigm (e.g., Sarewitz 1996, Guston 2002, Pielke 2012). But this has had surprisingly little effect on the general understanding of the relation between science and politics, in large part because this work runs counter to the disciplinary understanding of knowledge production. Disciplinary knowledge has thus managed the feat of being simultaneously relevant and apolitical. Knowledge is viewed as an infinite, and inherently beneficial good, which is somehow automatically relevant to society at large. Academics have argued that they had a special justification for self-rule: their activities—the production of knowledge, and its dissemination via presentations, publications, and teaching—are so specialized and so important that ordinary people cannot properly judge their work. Instead, academics have devised a means for evaluating themselves, through a process known as peer review. If one of the oldest questions of philosophy is “who guards the guardians?” the disciplinary regime answered the question just as Plato did: the guardians, aka

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disciplinarians, get to govern themselves. Biologists are the only ones competent to judge work in biology, and only chemists can evaluate the research of other chemists. Non-experts—whether within or outside the academy—will only disrupt the process, leading to misguided or even disastrous results.4 The crisis of the disciplinary academy today thus manifests itself in part as a crisis in peer review. However they are constituted, disciplines are defined by an internal gaze. There are two criteria for disciplinary knowledge production: the ability to say something original and the ability to interest (and pass muster with) one’s disciplinary colleagues. The standards of evaluation for disciplines have also been internal. Peers use their expert judgment to evaluate one another. The focus on expert judgment has been key; but it is now in the process of being undercut by the rise of metrics for academic work. Bibliometrics, even when “disciplinary” in focus, are destructive to disciplinary self-governance. For it takes no expertise to judge one number as being higher than another. Metrics thus promote non-disciplinary, non-expert evaluation—by creatures such as deans, provosts, state legislators, and the public. Of course, metrics themselves invariably rely on prior acts of peer-reviewed judgment. A metric may appear objective, but when we open the black box we find various types of political and epistemic judgment about what should be measured, in what way, and by whom. But this fact has not slowed down the drive toward metrics. Peer review was inherently a fragile compact. Someone was bound to notice that experts often disagree about the facts of the case, and are susceptible to biases based upon the personal or professional advantages of one conclusion over another (cf. Chubin and Hackett 1990). Anyone who has had a manuscript or proposal reviewed is well aware of the arbitrariness of the reviewing process, where slight differences in academic background can determine the success or failure of a grant, where reviewers can always find a neglected perspective to high-

4

The question of who should count as a disciplinary peer in the case of philosophy is addressed by Frodeman, Briggle, and Holbrook 2012.

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light, or seem to almost willfully miss the main point of an argument. Such notorious problems set the stage for a move toward metrics once computing power gained sufficient strength. But the move toward quantification is not greatest recent change to peer review. Rather, it is the increasing focus over the last 20 years on the broader societal impacts of scientific research. “Broader impacts” threatens the entire edifice of (disciplinary) peer review. In the US, demands for broader impacts were codified in proposal review criteria at the National Science Foundation in 1997, when it was paired with the traditional concept of “intellectual merit.” The new term was at first largely ignored, then declared obscure or meaningless, and then claimed to represent nothing new at all (Rothenberg 2010). But over time, in response to pressure from Congress, the importance of the broader impacts criterion has grown (Holbrook 2012). Similar pressures can be found abroad, for instance within the Research Councils of the United Kingdom and the European Commission. In the newest set of NSF guidelines, broader impact is approaching parity with the criterion of intellectual merit (NSF 2012). The rise of such societal criteria represents the de-disciplining of the peer review process, as the choice of which scientific project to fund becomes a more overtly political process. All of the agencies mentioned above have put a great deal of thought into the question of broader impacts. But none of them have confronted the radical nature of this addition, which portends the destruction of the very idea of peer review. Biologists have a special claim to judging the biological aspects of research, but they have no particular expertise or priority in judging the ethical, legal, or societal effects of that work. And if the two points are tied together—that is, if the disciplinary separation of research from outputs is repudiated, and intellectual merit must be judged together with broader impact—then science loses its crucial social status as knowledge that lies beyond the realm of the political. And with that, the modernist project of identifying a space for truth outside values and politics fails.

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Practically, there are a number of ways to deal with broader impacts elements on the level of a review (Holbrook and Frodeman 2011). Reviewers may be asked to first identify the intellectual merit of a proposal, and then separately evaluate its broader impacts. Or different reviewers can evaluate different aspects of the proposal—biologists reviewing the biological aspects, and sociologists or economists the social and economic aspects. The problem comes when broader impacts considerations function as anything more than as a tiebreaker in deliberations—a point now being reached at NSF. Then the intellectual incoherence of the entire edifice becomes manifest. For what could count as the intellectual merit of an article or proposal except its impact? The difference between intellectual merit and broader impacts then comes down to which audience is being impacted—a disciplinary, or a transdisciplinary one.

III. C RISIS

IN THE

D ISCIPLINARY U NIVERSITY

But the crisis within peer review is still an implicit one. More recognized is the point about autonomy: disciplinary self-rule is ending as the academy falls steadily under the sway of society at large. This can be framed in terms of the rise of the neoliberal university, as pervasive currents of 20th century political philosophy affect one of the last bastions of independence (Frodeman, Briggle, and Holbrook 2012). But the process is more generally driven by forces of globalization and technoscientific advance. The situation for academics is analogous to the one faced by the medical profession. Patients today arrive at the office informed—or often, misinformed—about their maladies and ready to challenge the physician’s authority and expertise. (Of course, the physician’s authority is also undermined by the fact that medicine is increasing about lifestyle choices rather than simple matters of health.) A similar process of deprofessionalization affects both groups: PhDs, like physi-

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cians, are losing their autonomy as the conditions of epistemic scarcity that had underlain their authority are dissolved by readily available knowledge. The transition to a new era of knowledge production will be an ongoing process, and could play out in a variety of ways. On one account: In fifty years, if not much sooner, half of the roughly 4,500 colleges and universities now operating in the United States will have ceased to exist. The technology driving this change is already at work, and nothing can stop it. The future looks like this: Access to college-level education will be free for everyone; the residential college campus will become largely obsolete; tens of thousands of professors will lose their jobs; the bachelor’s degree will become increasingly irrelevant; and ten years from now Harvard will enroll ten million students (Harden 2013).

Of course, prognostications are often little better than a coin flip. It may be that 75% of colleges will disappear, or 90%. Or we could see a boom in the creation of new universities, as has happened in China. Rather than Harvard, it may be Stanford or a yet uncreated educational entity (such as the Minerva Project5) that becomes the high-end provider of internet-based education. Instead of disappearing, the bachelor’s degree might shrink to 3 years, or be converted to flexible time units rather than semesters. Other accounts emphasize other factors— the breakdown of peer review and the growth of metrics in the face of demands for greater social accountability; the changing ways to certify skills, such as the awarding of “badges;” the unsustainability of mounting student debt, in the US now surpassing $1 trillion; or the dangers of untrammeled scientific and technological progress, which puts tremendous power in the hands of malicious or unstable individuals (e.g. Joy 2000). But in outline, the point stands clear: the mode of academic knowledge production that characterized the period after 1880 is coming to an end.

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http://www.minervaproject.com

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Codifying the state of things, the current crisis of the disciplinary academy can be described in terms of three points: 1. The cost of higher education continues to rise at rates higher than inflation, while web-based technologies make possible a radical reduction of the cost of education. This sets up conditions for what Christensen calls a “disruptive innovation”—a thorough restructuring of the knowledge system (Christensen and Eyring 2011). One sign of the future: in the fall of 2011 some 160,000 students worldwide took a computer science course online with a professor at Stanford. Similarly, in the spring of 2012 MIT and Harvard announced plans for creating an online platform to offer free courses from both universities. This platform will include science and engineering as well as humanities courses. 2. The rise of individualistic, neoliberal political philosophies across the Western world. In the aftermath of World War II, higher education was conceived as having larger social and political as well as economic purposes (Schrum 2007). Conservatives offered a noneconomic defense for higher education: students go to college not only to get trained for a job, but also to become educated in democratic virtues as a bulwark against totalitarian ideologies. But with the fall of the Berlin Wall, governments no longer saw the political, cultural, and philosophic aspects of higher education as a public good. And if education was simply a personal economic good, the individuals who reaped the benefits of education should bear the costs. 3. Universities no longer control the creation and dissemination of knowledge; and one must wonder how much longer they will control the certification of knowledge. In the US, corporations now spend nearly triple the amount on research compared to public sources such as the US National Science Foundation (Science Progress 2011). IBM estimates that humans now generate 2.5 quintillion bytes of data each day, with 90% of the knowledge created in the last two years (IBM 2013). The overabundance of knowledge has created the new management challenge of “big data.” Much of this falls within the domain of Web 2.0, i.e., user-generated content, through billions of blogs,

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tweets, texts, pictures, and videos, as well as cell phone GPS signals and purchase transaction records. The resulting infosphere has become a smog of information that one surfs, cherry-picks, or simply ignores. The crisis of the disciplinary academy is rooted in the loss of control over knowledge. Of course, disciplines themselves are not ending. They will continue to serve a central function in higher education. But the belief or assumption that disciplinary knowledge is sufficient, that it is the end of knowledge, is expiring. Academics face increased demands for accountability at the same time that their funding has been cut. This is matched by a growing recognition that our problems are complex, exceeding disciplinary frames, and always involve an inseparable mix of facts and values. Academics have lost their monopoly over knowledge production; are losing their long-cherished autonomy; and are likely to soon lose their control over the process of knowledge certification as well. There was an implicitly platonic dimension to disciplinarity. Since they were ostensibly disconnected from the exigencies of market and society, academics were at leisure to pursue their interests at their own pace. Of course, questions of time and tenure always played a role, but a non-temporal definition of “rigor”—i.e., epistemological precision and detail—ruled as the dominant criteria for what counted as academic excellence. The question of the possible relevance of this research to an outside audience was of little importance, and was often dismissed as “dumbing down” or “outreach.” So was the question of the timeliness in reporting out one’s results. There was little extradisciplinary pressure to produce “just-in-time.” The economic costs of research—in terms of time and materials, and in terms of lost opportunities for relevance—remained an unacknowledged factor in the production of knowledge.

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IV. T HE N ATURE OF I NTERDISCIPLINARITY Today one finds two tendencies characteristic of thinking about interdisciplinarity. On the one side, interdisciplinarity remains a hot topic. The literature on the subject is voluminous, and continues to grow, as universities create interdisciplinary colleges and appoint senior administrative staff to manage an increasingly explicit interdisciplinary portfolio. As a review article noted, interdisciplinary approaches to research and education can be found in areas as diverse as poverty, public health, and leisure studies (Jacobs and Frickel 2009)—just about everywhere, in fact. Within the academy, calling for new interdisciplinary initiatives has become the conventional way to indicate one’s reformist orientation. But there is also skepticism concerning the promise of interdisciplinarity. It is not clear that interdisciplinary research does a better job than disciplinary research at addressing societal problems. Nor is it obvious that interdisciplinary majors leave students better prepared for either the workplace or for life. (Disciplinary—that is, academic— outcomes are of course much easier to evaluate than inter- or transdisciplinary ones, since disciplines allow for comparisons between like and like. Part of the definition of a discipline is that there is an agreed upon means for evaluating work. The lack of such standards is what makes the question of how to evaluate the “broader impacts” of research and education such a difficult one.) Calls for interdisciplinarity often signify sound and fury but little else. The term itself is in danger of becoming an empty signifier. Today there is a small but growing set of researchers who have made interdisciplinarity the focus of their work.6 For many of these re-

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Recent signs of this increased focus include the 2008 founding of the Center for the Study of Interdisciplinarity at the University of North Texas; the 2010 creation of PIN, the Philosophy of/as Interdisciplinarity Network; and the 2011 founding of INIT—the International Network for Inter- and Transdisciplinarity. With a more educational focus, the Association for In-

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searchers, the presumption is that we need to get rigorous about interdisciplinarity. Typically this turns into talk about method—identifying a step-by-step procedure for integrating disciplinary knowledge and perspectives to increase the efficiency of academic work in addressing societal problems. In fact, and with little sense of irony, some interdisciplinarians seek to acquire all the accoutrements of a discipline: a defining methodology, a canonical set of readings, associations, conferences, journals, degrees, and (eventually) freestanding departments.7 Their goal is to complete the circle: universities will have a new discipline of interdisciplinarity, replete with specialists with expertise in communicating with and integrating across different disciplines. Whatever merits this goal has, it fits a common pattern—as Wolfgang Krohn has noted: Whatever drives people into highly complex interdisciplinary projects— curiosity, social responsibility, or money—the need of manageable objects and presentable results in their reference community drives them out again.” (Krohn 2010, 32)

Krohn identifies one of the reasons for the impetus toward disciplinarity: objects do become more manageable when they are separated off from the larger world, even if this often comes at the cost of realism and relevance. His second phrase—presentable results—hints at another problem. Our very definition of truth is disciplinary in nature. The modernist conception of truth looks for items that can be bracketed off from the larger world and repeatedly manipulated until we can get invariant results. In contrast, interdisciplinary results make it exceedingly difficult to identify the relevant cause of a phenomenon. But in the end this becomes more of a political than an epistemic problem.

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tegrative Studies, founded in 1979, as of 2013 has renamed itself the Association for Interdisciplinary Studies. Gabriele Bammer, for instance, is explicit about her goal of disciplining interdisciplinarity, by founding a new field she calls Integration and Implementation Sciences.

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The greatest success of science has always been political rather than epistemological in nature, in that science provided a means for stopping political debate before the “facts of the matter.” That’s the precipice before us at the end of disciplinarity—the loss of science as an epistemic absolute. Thinking on interdisciplinarity thus tracks the development of other fields that sought to challenge disciplinary strictures. Take the field of science and technology studies (STS). Since its founding in the 1960s the field has steadily moved toward disciplinary status. This development has itself been the subject of considerable debate, sometimes framed in terms of “low” and “high church” STS (the latter identifying with the goal of becoming a discipline; cf. Jasanoff 2010). The field of applied ethics, most notably environmental ethics and bioethics, has followed a similar trajectory (Frodeman, Briggle, and Holbrook 2012). And over the last few years the Science of Team Science (SciTS) has initiated a new effort across the social sciences to theorize the (interdisciplinary) coordination of work plans across disparate research groups and disciplines. One can thus identify two camps today in the study of interdisciplinarity. The larger and longer established group focuses on questions of technique and codification. A second group treats interdisciplinarity as cultural critique. One also finds a small group of philosophers concerned with the philosophy of interdisciplinary—for instance, Michael Hoffman and Jan Schmidt, who along with Nancy Nersessian produced a special issue of Synthese in 2012 on the philosophy of interdisciplinarity—who are perhaps equally distributed across the two camps.

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Newell’s 2007 work is representative of the methodological approach: Newell 2007: The Steps in the Interdisciplinary Research Process

A. Drawing on Disciplinary Perspectives

1. Defining the problem (question, topic, issue) 2. Determining the relevant disciplines (including interdisciplines and schools of thought) 3. Developing a working command of the relevant concepts, theories, and methods of each discipline 4. Gathering all relevant disciplinary knowledge 5. Studying the problem from the perspective of each discipline 6. Generating disciplinary insights into the problem B. Integrating Insights through the Construction of a more Comprehensive Understanding

7. Identifying conflicts in insights by using disciplines to illuminate each other’s assumptions, or by looking for different concepts with common meanings or concepts with different meanings, through which those insights are expressed 8. Evaluating assumptions and concepts in the context of a specific problem 9. Resolving conflicts by working toward a common vocabulary and set of assumptions 10. Creating common ground 11. Identifying (non-linear) linkages between variables studied by different disciplines 12. Constructing a new understanding of the problem 13. Producing a model (metaphor, theme) that captures the new understanding 14. Testing the understanding by attempting to solve the problem

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There is a stipulative quality to Newell’s list, akin to saying that warring parties should “come together and reach agreement on differences” that leaves the hard work undone. Nor is there any indication that practical exigencies such as time or cost enter into Newell’s account of the interdisciplinary process. In contrast, while also methodologically oriented, O’Rourke and Crowley (2012) have created a workshop format that seeks to improve communication within interdisciplinary teams. Called the Toolbox Project, their group has run more than 60 workshops across the US where team members spend three hours becoming more of the epistemic, metaphysical, and ethical assumptions embedded in their approach to research. Reflections on interdisciplinarity invariably reveal the traces of the writer’s own disciplinary training (in my case, the history of philosophy, STS, and geology). This obvious but rarely remarked upon fact forms part of the general lack of thought surrounding the effects that disciplinary institutional structures have upon academic thought. Academics who make it their practice to question everything tacitly accept disciplines and departments as the natural order of things, and do not ask about the effect such institutional structures have on their theorizing. Various theorists, perhaps most prominently Julie Thompson Klein, have paid close attention to the institutional impediments to interdisciplinary research and education. But their concern has not extended to the theoretical implications of disciplinary institutional structures. If we ask, what is interdisciplinarity? We are left with a negative and a positive answer. Negatively, the rise in interdisciplinarity means the end of modernity: the breakdown in the separation of the public spheres and the isolation of one kind of knowledge—scientific—from other types of discourse. It also portends the end of academic autonomy, as knowledge becomes a common possession of society at large, most obviously via the Internet. Again negatively, interdisciplinarity is charged with politicizing knowledge, with being insufficiently rigorous, and thereby with undermining academic authority. All of these charges are true. But the

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answer is not to seek to re-depoliticize knowledge, or to labor to become more rigorous, or find ways to better prop up academic authority. The social conditions underlying those points are fading or are already gone. Positively framed, interdisciplinary research is research that recognizes limits—to people’s capacity for understanding, to time and money, and to research itself. Of course, this sounds like a negative point as well. Modernity has been in part defined by its ignorance of or disdain for limits. Capitalism is an economic system predicated on the overcoming of every limit. A post-modern age—if we are able to get there—is likely to be defined by an ecological understanding of things, where sustainability will be the watchword. But then the question becomes what sustainability means for the academy.

V. A CADEMIC S USTAINABILITY With some irony, sustainability has become a growth industry for the academy. It has also become a prime example of interdisciplinary work. There are now a number of institutes, colleges, and schools of sustainability, perhaps most prominently the School of Sustainability at Arizona State. Such centers focus on how to make life livable on a globally warmed, resource limited, biologically compromised, overpopulated planet. But another aspect of the sustainability question has not formed part of the agenda: is knowledge production itself sustainable, as it is currently configured? Or might economic and environmental sustainability need to be matched with academic sustainability? There is perhaps no question more foreign to modern academic culture. Academics are trained to respond to every result by raising additional questions. More research is always needed, whether in physics or poetics. Nevertheless, there are several reasons to think that continued knowledge production is likely to become an issue for the academy—with far reaching results.

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Most obviously, higher education is on an unsustainable pattern of growth. Across a career PhDs clone themselves many times over, even as the number of academic positions is in decline. A form of bait and switch is played on graduate students: they are admitted to PhD programs, supposedly in order to acquire an education; but at many universities their real function is to serve the economic needs of their university. Yes, they are usually told that the job market is dismal. But it is rarely explained to them that the point of most graduate programs is not to actually train students for future employment, but rather to promote two ulterior goals: to allow professors to teach graduate courses in their area of specialty, and to minister to the university’s need for cheap classroom labor. Second, are the existential concerns of the type voiced by Bill Joy. In his 2000 article “Why the Future doesn’t need Us,” Joy argues that the technologies now coming on line—what he calls GNR, genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics—raise the possibility that by accident or intentionality we may destroy ourselves. These technologies are so powerful that they can spawn whole new classes of accidents and abuses. Perhaps most dangerously, for the first time these accidents and abuses are widely within the reach of individuals or small groups. They will not require large facilities or rare raw materials. Knowledge alone will enable their use (Joy 2000). Joy’s response to these concerns was to call for “relinquishment,” the voluntary cessation of dangerous types of research. This suggestion has been thoroughly ignored, but continuing controversies such as those surrounding the development of a manmade strain of avian influenza virus (H5N1) show that questions about the malign uses of knowledge will continue to surface (Enserink 2011). We are one accident away from a societal debate about whether we should be producing such knowledge at all. A third factor, one tied to the end of disciplinarity, is likely to contribute to the limits of knowledge production: our limited need and capacity for knowledge. Disciplinary knowledge production assumes that the knowledge being produced will eventually be utilized in one way

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or another; but it is not the role of the knowledge producer to coordinate discoveries with a particular “user group.” This removes the limits to knowledge production. Embedded in the assumption that knowledge will be used by “somebody” is the belief that there is no need to make it relevant to anyone in particular. Knowledge producers thus avoid a central issue—that the users of knowledge will have a specific and limited need for that knowledge. For the latter’s commitment is not to knowledge as an end in itself, as it is for most academics; knowledge is rather a means to another end (health, profit, whatever). When disciplinary knowledge production becomes dedisciplined—tied to the needs of particular user groups—the infinite production of knowledge becomes untenable. For thousands of years it was a given within Western culture that there were, and should be, limits to knowledge. From the time of the Greeks (think Oedipus) and the Old Testament (e.g., the snake), to popular myths and fables (e.g., Frankenstein, the Sorcerer’s Apprentice), the dangers of excessive knowledge were amply recognized. Knowledge was limited for a variety of prudential, religious, technological, and political reasons (Shattuck1996). The Enlightenment changed our assumption concerning limits to knowledge. Limits were now treated as something to be overcome. Descartes claimed, in the manuscript unpublished in his lifetime (Rules for the Direction of the Mind) that if one followed his method “there is no need for minds to be confined at all within limits.” And in Goethe’s Faust, Faust sold his soul in order to gain access to all the knowledge and experience. Once, the commitment to epistemological infinity was constrained by the means we had at hand. But knowledge acquisition, storage, and dissemination today is for practical purposes infinite. Of course there is, and always will be, the need for new knowledge. But what must change is the assumption that additional knowledge is the answer to all of our problems. Our answers will come from an artful mix of new knowledge along with what we already know, tempered and balanced by personal discipline and self-control. Put differently, an ecological age needs to be one where a Buddhist commitment to con-

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trol our desires becomes a public as well as a private virtue. This means that our research institutions will need to acknowledge a more modest role, embracing something closer to a perennial philosophy.

R EFERENCES Bammer, Gabriele. 2013. Disciplining Interdisciplinarity: Integration and Implementation Sciences for Researching Complex Real-World Problems. Australian National University E Press. Bush, Vannevar. 1945. Science, the endless frontier: A report to the President. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Print. Christensen, Clayton M. and Henry J. Eyring. 2011. The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass Publishing. Chubin, Daryl and Edward J. Hackett. 1990. Peerless Science: Peer Review and U.S. Science Policy. New York: SUNY Press. Clark, William. 2006. Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Enserink, Martin. 2011. “Controversial Studies Give a Deadly Flu Virus Wings.” Science 334(6060): 1192-1193. Forman, Paul. 2012. “On the Historical Forms of Knowledge, Production and Curation.” OSIRIS 27: 56–97. Frodeman, Robert, Adam Briggle, and J. Britt Holbrook. 2012. “Philosophy in the Age of Neoliberalism.” Social Epistemology 25 (34): 311-330. Gibbons, Michael et al. 1994. The New Production of Knowledge: Dynamics of Science and Research in Contemporary Societies. London, UK: SAGE Publications. Guston, David H. 2002. Between Politics and Science: Assuring the Integrity and Productivity of Research. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

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Harden, Nathan. 2013. The End of the University as We Know It. The American Interest, 8(3). Available at: http://www.the-americaninterest.com/article.cfm?piece=1352 (last visited August 14, 2013). Hoffman Michael, Jan C. Schmidt, and Nancy Nersessian (eds.). 2012. Philosophy of and as Interdisciplinarity. Special Issue. Synthese. Epub (December). Holbrook, J. Britt. 2012. “Re-assessing the science—society relation: The case of the US National Science Foundation’s broader impacts merit review criterion (1997–2011).” In Peer Review, Research Integrity, and the Governance of Science—Practice, Theory, and Current Discussions, edited by Robert Frodeman, J. Britt Holbrook, Carl Mitcham, and Hong Xiaonan, 328–62. Beijing: People’s Publishing House. Holbrook, J. Britt and Robert Frodeman. 2011. “Peer Review and the Ex Ante Assessment of Societal Impacts.” Research Evaluation (20): 3, 239-246(8). IBM. 2013. Bringing Big Data to the Enterprise. http://www-01.ibm. com/software/data/bigdata/ (last visited: February 16, 2013). Jacobs, Jerry A. and Scott Frickel. 2009. “Interdisciplinarity: A Critical Assessment.” Annual Review of Sociology 35: 43-65. Jasanoff, Sheila. 2010. “A Field of its Own: The Emergence of Science and Technology Studies.” In The Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity, edited by Robert Frodeman, Judy T. Klein, and Carl Mitcham, 191-205. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Joy, Bill. 2000. “Why the future doesn’t need us.” Wired, 8.04, April. Available at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html (last visited August 14, 2013). Krohn, Wolfgang. 2010. “Interdisciplinary cases and disciplinary knowledge.” In The Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity, edited by Robert Frodeman, Judy T. Klein, and Carl Mitcham, 31-49. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

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Laudan, Larry. 1983/21996. “The demise of the demarcation problem.” In But is it science? The philosophical question in the creation/evolution controversy, edited by Michael Ruse, 337-350. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books. National Science Foundation (NSF). 2012. “Revised Merit Review Criteria Resources for the External Community,” at http://www. nsf.gov/bfa/dias/policy/merit_review/resources.jsp. (last visited September 3, 2013). Newell, William H. 2007. “Decision making in interdisciplinary studies.” In Handbook of Decision Making, edited by Goktuk Morçöl. New York: Marcel-Dekker. O’Rourke, Michael and Stephen J. Crowley. 2012. Philosophical Intervention and Cross-disciplinary Science: The Story of the Toolbox Project. Synthese [Published online September 13, 2012] doi: 10.1007/s11229-012-0175-y. Pielke, Roger A., Jr. 2012. “‘Basic Research’ as a Political Symbol.” Minerva 50: 339–361. Pielke, Roger A. Jr. and Radford Byerly. 1998. “Beyond Basic and Applied.” Physics Today 51(2): 42-46. Polanyi, Michael. 1962/22007. The Republic of Science, Its Political and Economic Theory. A Lecture Delivered at Roosevelt University, January 11, 1962. Chicago, IL: Roosevelt University Press. Rothenberg, Marc. 2010. “Making Judgments about Grant Proposals: A Brief History of the Merit Review Criteria at the National Science Foundation.” Technology and Innovation 12: 189-195. Sarewitz, Daniel. 1996. Frontiers of Illusion. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Schrum, Ethan. 2007. “Establishing a Democratic Religion: Metaphysics and Democracy in the Debates over the President’s Commission on Higher Education.” History of Education Quarterly 47: 3 (August). Science Progress. 2011. U.S. Scientific Research and Development 101. Available at http://scienceprogress.org/2011/02/u-s-scientificresearch-and-development-101/ (last visited: February 16, 2013).

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Shattuck, Roger. 1996. Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography. New York City, NY: St. Martin’s Press. Stichweh, Rudolph. 2001. “History of the Scientific Disciplines.” In The International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 20, 13727-13731. Oxford, UK: Elsevier Publishers. Swift, Jonathan. 1704. A Tale of a Tub. The Battle of Books. Edingburgh: Walter Scott. Turner, Stephen. 2000. “What are Disciplines? And How is Interdisciplinarity Different?” In Practising Interdisciplinarity, edited by Nico Stehr and Peter Weingart, 46-65. Toronto, CD: University of Toronto Press. Veysey, Laurence R. 1965. The Emergence of the American University. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Weingart, Peter. 2010. “A short history of knowledge formations.” In The Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity, edited by Robert Frodeman, Judy T. Klein, and Carl Mitcham, 3-14. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

About the Authors

Boon, Louis is professor of philosophy and history of science at Maastricht University. He founded the faculty of psychology at this university in 1994, and in 2002 established the second liberal arts and sciences program in the Netherlands, University College Maastricht. Currently he is setting up a satellite campus of Maastricht University in Venlo. Crow, Michael M. became the president of Arizona State University in 2002. Crow was previously executive vice provost of Columbia University, where he served as chief strategist of Columbia’s research enterprise and technology transfer operations. He has been an advisor to the U.S. Departments of State, Commerce, and Energy, as well as defense and intelligence agencies, on matters of science and technology policy in areas related to intelligence and national security. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and National Academy of Public Administration, and member of the Council on Foreign Relations and U.S. Department of Commerce National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship. He is the author of books and articles analyzing science and technology policy and the design of knowledge enterprises. Crow received his PhD in public administration (science and technology policy) from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University.

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Dabars, William B. is Senior Research Fellow for University Design in the Office of the President, Arizona State University. He has served in various research capacities for the University of Southern California, University of California, Santa Barbara, and Getty Research Institute, where he participated in editorial projects in aesthetic and architectural theory. He has also served as an editorial consultant for the Getty Conservation Institute and University of Colorado, Boulder. He received a PhD in history from the University of California, Los Angeles. His dissertation, publications, and current research focus on the American research university. Frodeman, Robert (PhD, Philosophy, and MS Geology) is professor of philosophy and former chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the University of North Texas (UNT), where he specializes in environmental philosophy, the philosophy of science and technology policy, and the philosophy of interdisciplinarity. He served as a consultant for the US Geological Survey for eight years, was the 2001-2002 Hennebach Professor of the Humanities at the Colorado School of Mines, and was an ESRC Fellow at Lancaster University in England in the spring of 2005. In addition to more than 80 published articles Frodeman is the author and/or editor of 9 books, including Geo-Logic: Breaking Ground between Philosophy and the Earth Sciences (New York, 2003), the Encyclopedia of Environmental Ethics and Philosophy (Independence, KY, 2008), The Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity (Oxford, 2010), and Sustainable Knowledge (Palgrave MacMillan, 2013). Frodeman is the founding director of the Center for the Study of Interdisciplinarity at UNT (www.csid.unt. edu). Grunwald, Armin is professor of philosophy (philosophy and ethics of technology) at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany. He is director of the Institute for Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis (ITAS) at KIT and head of the Office of Technology Assessment at the German Bundestag (TAB). He is also a member of the

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Academy of Engineering Sciences (acatech) in Germany and member of the Saxonian Academy of Sciences at Leipzig. He has published numerous articles and books in the fields of ethics of technology, theory and methodology of technology assessment, and sustainable development, among them Responsible Nanobiotechnology (Singapure, 2012); Handbuch Technikethik (ed., Stuttgart, 2013); Technikfolgenabschätzung. Eine Einführung (Berlin, 2010). Kölzer, Christian has a PhD in English literature, having studied English and Catholic theology in Giessen, Sheffield, and St Andrews. From 2008 to 2012 he was a member of the academic staff of Cusanuswerk (Bonn), a Catholic foundation for the advancement of highly gifted students. Today, he is the personal assistant to the President of Leuphana University of Lüneburg and director of University Marketing. Marquardt, Wolfgang is professor of process systems engineering at RWTH Aachen University. His research interest spans a wide area in chemical engineering emphasizing mathematical modelling, chemical process synthesis, model-based control and real-time optimization with a variety of applications including new value chains from renewable carbon sources to novel products. He served in various advisory boards and national committees on research and education policy. Currently he is acting as the chairman of the German Council of Science and Humanities. Nitsche, Dennis is head of the Division Relationship Management at Karlsruhe Institute for Technology (KIT) and managing director of the KIT Stiftung (foundation). He is responsible for fundraising and sponsoring activities at KIT, representative of alumni relations and leads the KIT Company & Career Service. In former positions at KIT Dr. Nitsche was responsible for strategic planning and governance issues. He studied political sciences at the University of Augsburg and received a summa cum laude doctoral degree for his work on Interna-

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tional Criminal Tribunals and their influence on the progress of peace and stability in post-conflict constellations. He is author of several publications in political science and on science policy and polity in Germany. Padberg, Britta is the executive secretary of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research (Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Forschung ZiF) since 2008. She is a physical anthropologist and historian by education and received her PhD at Göttingen University. In a former position she was a member of the academic staff of Cusanuswerk (Bonn), a Catholic foundation for the advancement of highly gifted students. From 2005 to 2008 she worked for the German Council of Science and Humanities (Wissenschaftsrat) and was responsible for organizing its part in the Excellence Initiative. Schimank, Uwe is professor for sociological theory at University of Bremen, Germany. Fields of interest: general sociological theory, and theories of modern society in particular; organizational sociology; governance research; science and higher education studies. Recent publications: Gesellschaft (Bielefeld, 2013); (with Frank Meier) Mission Now Possible: Profile Building and Leadership in German Universities, in Reconfiguring Knowledge Production, Richard Whitley/Jochen Gläser/ Lars Engwall (eds.) (Oxford, 2010); Changing Authority Relationships in the Sciences and Their Consequences for Intellectual Innovation (Oxford, 2010); (with Stefan Lange) Germany: A Latecomer to New Public Management, in University Governance—Western European Comparative Perspectives, Catherine Paradiese et al. (eds.) (Dordrecht, 2009). Spoun, Sascha is president of Leuphana University Lüneburg since 2006 and guest professor for university management at the University of St. Gallen’s Business Administration Department. He is involved in different non-profit initiatives. A trained economist and political scientist at universities in Switzerland (HSG), France (HEC Paris, Sciences

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Po), Germany and the US (University of Michigan Business School, Ann Arbor) he was part of the University of St. Gallen’s full time Faculty of Business Administration for six years. In addition to researching and teaching, he was in charge as delegate of the president of a fundamental curriculum reform to establish new Bachelor and Master programs (1999–2006). His research interest focuses on change in public organizations and on the aims, theory, methodology, and practice of higher education. Publications include the edited volume Studienziel Persönlichkeit (Frankfurt/New York, 2005), the beginner’s textbook Erfolgreich Studieren (München, 2013) and Virale Kommunikation (Baden-Baden, 2009). Weingart, Peter is professor emeritus of sociology (sociology of science and science policy) at Bielefeld University, Germany. He is Visiting Professor at the Stellenbosch University, South Africa (since 1994), and a fellow of STIAS. He was director of the Institute for Science and Technology Studies (IWT, 1993-2009) and former Managing Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF, 1989-1994). He is a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Engineering Sciences (acatech) in Germany, managing editor of the Yearbook Sociology of the Sciences (Dordrecht) and since 2008 he is editor-in-chief of /Minerva/. He published numerous articles and books in the sociology of science and science studies, among them Metaphors and the Dynamics of Knowledge (with Sabine Maasen, Routledge, 2000); Die Stunde der Wahrheit? (Weilerswist, 2001); Die Wissenschaft der Öffentlichkeit (Weilerswist, 2005). Wilhelmy, Thorsten studied comparative literature, German literature, and history at Saarland University and earned his doctorate in 2003. From 2003 through 2008, he was a member of the academic staff of Cusanuswerk (Bonn), a Catholic foundation for the advancement of highly gifted students. From 2008 through 2012, he worked for the German Council of Science and Humanities in the Department of Higher Education. From 2005 through 2012, he also held a university

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teaching position in comparative literature at Bonn University. As of August 1, 2012 he holds the position of Secretary at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.