Against Interdisciplinarity

Against Interdisciplinarity
Valerie V. Peterson
Abstract: In this essay, I make a case for resisting
interdisciplinarity as a panacea for the limitations of the
contemporary disciplines, for three interrelated reasons.
First, the goals, processes, and products of
interdisciplinarity are ill-defined and contested. Second,
those areas of scholarship that are inherently
interdisciplinary like Communication Studies and
Women's Studies benefit from claiming disciplinary
status. Third, the current popularity of interdisciplinarity
undermines more radical projects to reorganize academic
study. In the end, we should not capitulate to the
popularity of interdisciplinarity, nor should we blindly
reinforce disciplinarity at the expense of thoughtful
scholarship and teaching.
This essay considers interdisciplinarity and the role
of interdisciplinarity in the future of Communication
Studies, Women's Studies, and other recently formed
disciplines. I open with a statement of position: I am
against interdisciplinarity. This means I am swimming
against the current of popular endorsement; as this special
issue of Women and Language attests, there is
considerable enthusiasm for the idea of interdisciplinarity
as a way of doing scholarship and a means of addressing
the complexities of contemporary issues. I argue that we
should not embrace interdisciplinarity without
considerable reflection, for three interrelated reasons.
First, the goals, processes, and products of
interdisciplinarity are ill-defined and contested, in part
thanks to the history of the disciplines in the academy and
in part due to the problems of interdisciplinary studies
themselves. Second, those areas of scholarship that claim
interdisciplinarity may be disadvantaged more than they
benefit from this claim. Third, the current popularity and
taken-for-granted "rightness" of interdisciplinarity
undermines more radical projects to reorganize academic
study. We can't realize more responsive and productive
perspectives if we can't get past the popular appeal of
interdisciplinarity.
My case against interdisciplinarity proceeds as
follows. Starting with a brief mention of the origins of the
modem university and the disciplines within them, I chart
the definitions of the terms "interdisciplinary" and
"interdisciplinarity" and outline problems associated with
interdisciplinary study. I offer a case study of the
"discipline" of Communication, followed by a discussion
of challenges faced by other relatively yoxmg areas of
study. I propose a few alternative means of academic
organization, not necessarily as practical alternatives, but
as means by which we might rethink our relationship to
disciplines and university structures more generally.
Finally I briefly discuss fears (of administrators, faculty
and community) that inhibit efforts to promote such
alternatives with understanding and courage in the face of
the complex and daunting challenges these times pose for
education and the university.
The Origins of Disciplines in the Modern University
We know that administrative structures are often
flawed. The system that arranges scholarly study into
disciplines certainly is flawed, and today's confusion over
the definition of interdisciplinary studies can be largely
attributed to the problems of disciplines and disciplinarity
preceding it. Disciplines are not natural "species," but
social organizations, "whose origins and continued
existence are as much attributable to educational politics
as to the needs of scholarly inquiry" (Newell & Green,
1998, p. 25). Disciplines have been variously and
incommensurately categorized by their subject matter
(e.g., the past), their method (e.g., participant-observer),
their perspective (e.g., the economic man), or the
questions they ask (e.g., philosophic) (Newell & Green,
1998). This results in a great deal of confusion, overlap,
and feuding.
The modem post-industrial university system is only
about one hundred and fifty years old. Basic ideas that
underlie the system were expressed by ancient thinkers
such as Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian but were
more fully articulated in Roman higher education and in
the medieval cathedral schools. (Thompson, 1990). By the
Middle Ages and partly in response to demands for
specialization in certain areas, the term "discipline" was
being used to differentiate the study of arts, theology, the
law, and medicine (Thompson, 1990). The growing
particularization of knowledge continued to have an effect
on the structuring of higher education, especially during
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Germany,
France, Britain, and the United States. During that time,
universities were reconstituted for many reasons,
including advancements in natural sciences, the
privileging of the scientific method, the industrial
revolution, technological advancements, the expansion of
agriculture, and a consciousness made possible by
widespread print literacy (Thompson, 1990).
Just over a century ago, the rapid proliferation of new
knowledge in the sciences and human sciences led
reformers to demand that American colleges do
something in response. The dramatic increase in new
disciplinary "studies" posed challenges to organized
curricula and increasingly obscured any reasoned
connections among emerging fields. In this sudden
transformative surge, college curricula both expanded and
became fragmented into many separate pieces (Newell,
1998). By 1910, the typical college curriculum contained
twenty or more new disciplines that had not existed in the
1880s (Bennett, 1997). However, few educators felt that
difficulties posed by the new expanded curriculum had
been resolved (Newell, 1998). Regardless, the trend of
Women and Language, Vol. 31, No. 2, Pg. 42

disciplinarity has continued, especially as public and
private institutions feel increased pressure to create not
only well-educated but also employable graduates.
Stimulated by industry's appetite for educated
workers, the growing size of academic institutions, and
the pressures of managing resources, modem universities
of the twentieth and twenty-fu-st centuries have
increasingly compartmentalized and "disciplined"
intellectual life. A few colleges over the years have
challenged these trends by radically reconfiguring
themselves, but this requires presidents, provosts, deans,
faculty members, and communities with vision who are
dedicated to revolution. Such dedication is rare, and
probably will be more so in the future. Because
disciplines are one way to feed the job market and
because they are an entrenched feature of current
university systems, they are a difficult model of
administration to challenge.
Interdisciplinary, Interdisciplinarity, and Problems of
Interdisciplinarity
InterdiscipHnarity may seem, at first glance, to
challenge the entrenched disciplinary system of academe,
but we fmd on closer reflection that this is not the case.
Specifically, we need to distinguish interdisciplinary
practices from interdisciplinarity as a product or goal or
"cause." "Interdisciplinary" generically and inclusively
means "any deliberate crossing of disciplinary
boundaries" (Fiscella & Kimmel, p. 2). More specifically,
the word "interdisciplinary" suggests "bringing together
perspectives, concepts, themes, materials, methods,
insights, and/or theories from more than one academic
field of study or school subject to understand or resolve a
problem, answer a question, or treat a topic" (Fiscella &
Kimmel, p. 2). The interdisciplinary nature of many
intellectual endeavors is already afact of university life, a
consequence of the complexity of modem study, the
proliferation of information and knowledge, the
commercialization of knowledge and professional
practice, and the need to track across necessary but
permeable structures of university arrangement.
As compared to the adjective "interdisciplinary," the
noun "interdisciplinarity" is a less promising term. In her
detailed history of interdisciplinarity, Julie Thompson
Klein charts both the evolution of the term (which
emerged formally only in the twentieth century) and
disputes over its origins and meanings (1990, 19-39).
Whether conceptualized as a concerted effort to compare
disciplines, as a means to transform disciplines, or as a
focus on issues, problems, or topics drawing from
whatever knowledge serves them; I would argue that
interdisciplinary is to interdisciplinarity as leaming is to
education: the fn-st of the terms describes a process or
quality of a process, the second of the terms describes a
"cause" or result.
Lately, interdisciplinarity has become an increasingly
popular expression, with similarities to other buzzwords
or buzz phrases such as "think outside the box," "on the
same page," "proactive," "diversity," "best practices," and
"accountability" (Hubenthal, 1998, p. 428). As with all
these terms, we should remind ourselves that giving
something a new name and establishing bureaucratic
entities and goals in the service of that name, does not
mean we will automatically or miraculously accomplish
anything. For example, many essays about
interdisciplinarity comment upon the practice of scholarly
activity but are at least one step removed from that
scholarly activity as they do so (this piece of scholarship
included), and/or they are not themselves
interdisciplinary. The bibliography of Fiscella and
Kimmel's" Interdisciplinary Education: A Guide to
Resources (1999) lists over one thousand essays. Many
essays on interdisciplinary education report on context-
and subject-specific teaching projects that would be
difficult to replicate and from which it would be difficult
to extrapolate. Others are theoretical, with little grounding
in practice (Klein, 1990).
In a provocative and widely-cited essay, Thomas L.
Benson calls attention to five of the most widely held
arguments against interdisciplinary studies and expands
upon each in detail. The five arguments ¡ire: First,
interdisciplinary Studie,-; suffer from conceptual confusion
and no principles or values have been developed to serve
as their foundation. Second, it makes no sense for
students to attempt interdisciplinary projects without first
having a strong basis in the contributing disciplines.
Third, because of tlie explosion of knowledge in
disciplines, time spent in interdisciplinary courses makes
it harder for students to, at the same time, gain
disciplinary competence, which may make it harder for
them to get into graduate schools or secure good jobs.
Fourth, integrative studies courses are characteristically
shallow, trading intellectual rigor for topical excitement.
And fifth, interdisciplinarity is costly ( 1998).
Of the five arguments presented by Benson in 1998,
four are easily reflitetl (see Newell, 1998). The first
argument may hold, but confusion over principles and
values is characteristic of disciplines as well as
interdisciplinary studies, and solving that confusion is not
necessary to either intellectual paradigm. Ihe third
argument, concemed with how students spend their time
and the need for disciplinary preparation for graduate
work and careers, would not be a problem as long as
interdisciplinary education were offered as an option
rather than a requirement. The fourth argument, about
intellectual rigor, is unibunded. Even if interdisciplinary
courses are, at present, less rigorous than courses in the
disciplines, that failure would be the fault of the teacher(s)
of those courses, and not the fault of interdisciplinarity,
per se. The fifth argument, about cost, is a practical rather
than ethical consideration. If there is a commitment to
interdisciplinarity because it is a benefit to students, then
we should find ways to make that sort of education
available and affordable.
The second of Benson's arguments, however, offers a
stronger challenge to interdisciplinarity: It asserts that
students who would mt)st benefit from interdisciplinary

study are those who have akeady achieved proficiency, or
at least competence, in the disciplines involved. This level
of skill and understanding takes time to develop, and it
takes even more time when students arrive at college
under-prepared for college-level work, as many do today.
The problem may be partly attributable to the interests of
faculty, who, over the years, tire of their own disciplinary
"home" and desire to borrow from and explore a broader
intellectual "landscape." Or as Nancy Arme Cluck rather
pointedly asks, "Is [interdisciplinary study] merely a new
game for bored scholars?" (1998, p. 361).
In an effort to bring their teaching interests in line
with their research, curious and energetic professors may
design courses reflecting these broader intellectual
territories and featuring and comparing a variety of
approaches to a subject. Such exploration is healthy and
productive for full-time or seasoned scholars, but may not
be as healthy for novice intellectuals whose habits of
mind have yet to be so well established that they might
benefit by being undermined or complicated. As Robert
Paul Wolff, author of The Ideal of the University (1969)
suggests, courses in theoretical economics and logic may
well do more to prepare students for grappling with the
socio-political crises of their time than interdisciplinary
seminars on poverty and the philosophy of war (cited in
Benson, 1997, pp. 78-79).
Still other scholars criticize interdisciplinary studies
for having emerged from "outside" rather than from
within academic need or interest, and for an inclination
toward administrative rather than scholarly productivity.
Bryan S. Turner's (1998) discussion of interdisciplinarity
in the context of the medical curriculum convincingly
demonstrates these issues. He shows how the
development of interdisciplinarity is related not only to
critical evaluations of monodisciplinary assumptions, but
also to financial constraints and to the postmodern
condition more generally. In the latter cases, he argues,
which are most common, the result of interdisciplinarity
is a fragmentary pastiche of disciplines and not
intellectual integration or a more unified, holistic
approach to medicine and medical education. In a
scathing description of the origins and consequences of
interdisciplinary studies such as women's studies, cultural
studies, and the like, Norman Birnbaum (1969) charges
that most interdisciplinary programs did not arise out of
the "inner necessity of the evolution of thought" but were
the product of interested sponsors and clients able to pay
for them. Such sponsorship, he argues, results in
something superficial and contrived, with little
intellectual or structural impact other than a proliferation
of administrative expertise (12).
Instead of breaking down barriers between
disciplines or building bridges across disciplines,
interdisciplinarity, as cause/object/goal, often maintains
and reinforces separation. This is not just the linguistic
implication of a compound word, where the prefix "inter"
has the effect of solidifying (rather than complicating or
eroding) the root word "disciplinarity." It is the
consequence of a powerful and conventional metaphor.
"interdisciplinarity is a cause/object/goal," that both
describes and sanctions the way people think and act in
everyday intellectual and academic life. In the chapter
"The Rhetoric of Interdisciplinarity," Klein points out the
problematic metaphorical implications of the ways people
talk and think about the terms "discipline" and
"interdisciplinarity." She notes how their talk is full of
expressions common to geopolitical struggle, war,
religious difference, and ideology. For example,
academics argue over 'territories" and "fiefdoms"
interdisciplinarity is a "threat" or an "exploration across
boundaries" or a "third-party challenge," people are
"converts" to a discipline or "against" them (Klein, 1990).
These metaphors are not simply superficial matters -
artful turns of phrase independent of the "reality" of the
situation - they are the very ground of human experience
(Lakoff& Johnson, 1980).
The criticisms raised against interdisciplinarity are
serious, but not all interdisciplinary studies are the same.
What is at stake differs depending upon the histories,
features, and issues of a particular interdisciplinary study:
who helped make it possible?; how is it defined by
others?; how does it characterize itself?; etc. I consider
Communication Studies and Women's Studies, two very
different areas of interdisciplinary study, in the following
sections.
The Case of Communication Studies
For Communication Studies, a "discipline" in which
at least some of the readers of this essay are currently
"located," the goal of interdisciplinarity should be
abandoned. The issue here is not that mixing is a bad idea
(it isn't). The issue is that the study of communication
already consists of a mix of people and inquiries coming
from a variety of intellectual and cultural backgrounds. In
other words. Communication Studies is akeady
interdisciplinary.
The study of communication is unique in that its
"objects" of study and processes of interest are the very
means by which humans gain access to and share ideas
about the world. Unlike other areas of study that separate
the means of knowing (methods) from the known
(theories or knowledge). Communication Studies is
primarily concerned with the relationship between means
of knowing - symbolic behavior as it appears in
linguistic, visual, non-verbal, and social forms - and "the
known." In other words, scholars of communication study
how humans (and sometimes also nonhumans)
communicate or make meaning in and about a wide
variety of things and in a multitude of ways.
Communication scholars may study the origins and means
of communication, or the way means of communication
(the alphabet, printing press, cellular telephone, intemet,
etc.) affect areas of interest or concern and the human
condition more generally. Among other things.
Communication scholars may study how communication
shapes and is shaped by the ways we "do" science, the
ways we make histories and perform myths, the ways we

design homes and maintain communities and build
economies, and the ways we differently commune with
the earth and cosmos. Consequently, communication
scholars are often thought of as wanderers (or trespassers)
in other disciplinary territories.
As a discipline. Communication is a more recently
formed galaxy of scholarship than other areas of study
(e.g., history, English, and philosophy). Some histories of
Communication Studies place its birth on November 28,
1914, when a group of speech teachers looked to ancient
Greece for disciplinary footing in rhetoric and broke off
from the National Council of Teachers of English. These
speech teacher rebels expanded their group and scope of
study to eventually become the 7,000+ member National
Communication Association (for more on this history, see
Gray, 1964). Many other regional, national and
international associations have also appeared and
prospered in the 20"* century (e.g.. International
Communication Association, Association for Education in
Journalism and Mass Communication, Media Ecology
Association, Western Communication Association, and
Communication associations in Russia, South Africa,
China, Mexico, and other countries). Some
Communication scholars in the U.S. (see Bowers, 1989)
are inclined to call Communication a discipline as an
assertion of intellectual territory and means toward public
and institutional legitimacy. Many of these see the post-
WWn era of scholarship on propaganda and media as
integral to the development of the "discipline." Others are
disinclined to call Communication(s) a discipline, and
refer to it as a field (reflecting the variety of scholars from
which it draws). In any event, because the study of
communication has to do with populist power (the power
of speech rather than money or land), it is more common
in land-grant schools, and some elite universities do not
have departments devoted to it at all.
Communication departments are also a fairly recent
phenomenon. By "communication departments" I mean
all those departments or administrative units primarily
concemed with the study of communication regardless of
their particular title (e.g.. Communication Studies
Department, Speech Communication Department, School
of Communications, etc.). As relative latecomers on the
disciplinary scene, communication departments and
scholars have more of a challenge claiming subjects of
study, explaining their special contribution to the study of
humanity, and defending the ways their work is arranged
and located.
The point is that Communication Studies is especially
difficult to "discipline" and departmentalize. The variety
of departmental arrangements within and across colleges
and universities across the country, the variation in majors
offered by different communication departments,
perceptions of overlap in course content with other
departments/disciplines, and the challenge of finding and
indexing communication scholarship are all evidence of
this difficulty. Under these circumstances, and perhaps
also because of these circumstances, it is desirable that
Communication Studies be recognized as a discipline.
Despite the drawbacks of "domestication'" and the
challenges of coalition-building, it would be foolish to
toss away the hard-w(in legitimacy that this complex but
viable disciplinarity affords scholars of Communication
Studies in wider university and intellectual communities.
Other "Interdisciplinary" Areas of Study
Over the last forty years or so, other
"interdisciplinary" departments have appeared across
universities (Klein, l'J98a; 1998b). Their appearance is
largely the result of political activism and a lack of
attention paid to issues of concern in "traditional" (and
older) courses and areas of study, e.g., history, social
studies, philosophy, etc. (Birnbaum, 1969; Piscella &
Kimmel, 1999). Some authors argue that by presenting
perspectives of people who have been historically
underrepresented in the education canon, departments like
ethnic studies, women's studies, A frican-American/Black
studies, and cultural studies can challenge and transform
the assumptions, views, methodology, and interpretations
of a number of traditional disciplines (Bumell, 1991;
Butler, 1991). Others are not so sure. These more recently
formed departments are often publicly celebrated, but
they are also often ghettoized at their universities and in
scholarship, which often appears in specialized joumals
devoted to "those" coiicems. We can look to Women's
Studies as a case in point, and as a means of discussing
some of the special difficulties faced by this kind of
intellectual coalition.
DuBois, et al. (1987) note that, in general, people
have been receptive to Women's Studies, but that its
reach and potential impact is harder to assess. It is
difficult to know what counts as scholarship "on women"
because of the diversity of topics and types of work that
might qualify, and much of what is published as
scholarship appears in interdisciplinary joumals devoted
to women's studies. As Klein argues, "special issues" on
women may raise awateness, but they do not substitute
for sustained consideration in and by the mainstream:
"Building distinct subfields and assigning special rubrics
are effective ways of mounting a feminist presence, but
this strategy may ultimately reinforce marginalization"
(1998b, p. 458).
Howe and Lauter (1980) point out tliat difficulty
arises from the two distinct goals of Women's Studies.
One goal is to develop an interdisciplinary academic
program with its own distinctive curricula, research
concems, teaching methodologies, and student bodies.
The other is to implement a strategy for changing the
traditional, male-centered academic curriculum. While
other programs have also aimed to change the institution
within which they operated (e.g., general education, area
studies), no program has so clearly put fundamental
changes in curriculum, personnel, and structure at the top
of its agenda (p. 1). Ihis double charge for women's
studies presents extra challenges to research, evaluation,
and the possibilities of interaction across larger
intellectual and academic contexts.

Many scholars in Women's Studies departments and
other politically focused departments are interested in
interdisciplinarity because they wish to be recognized by,
woven into, and/or present challenges to the disciplines,
departments, and bodies of knowledge that have the most
cultural capital and that (still) dominate and set the
cultural agenda. Yet despite these interdisciplinary
inclinations and in contrast to stated aims, Klein notes that
much of feminist scholarship retains a strongly
disciplinary character (1998b, p. 459). Other Women's
Studies scholars have commented on the "add women and
stir" phenomenon, where established disciplines briefly
make women an object of analysis. Some scholars,
understandably, hope that more than this can be achieved.
The disciplining of Women's Studies and other
interdisciplinary studies into clear and separate camps,
departments, and/or disciplines can also lead to problems
of exclusion within those scholarly and academic groups.
In her essay outlining a twenty-first century agenda for
interdisciplinary and international women's studies. Alma
Vinyard describes the problems of inclusion and
exclusion in two women's studies programs in which she
was involved:
Neither of the programs sought to validate the
experience of every woman. One was
exclusively based on race, ethnicity, and class;
the other excluded students - and faculty along
lines of political values and academic disciplines.
The exclusiveness in both instances was
relegated to informal power networks (of
students and faculty) based on friendship and
elitism (1998, p. 97).
Such stories remind us that simply replacing good-old-
boy networks with good-old-girl networks is no great
improvement, and no moral victory. Because of this
experience, Vinyard promises to resist and combat such
exclusivity in future programs; vowing "I have made a
personal commitment to be the voice of the conscious
reminder lest some forget and regress to exclusion
practices of the past" (p. 97). While her commitment is
commendable, it is unclear if this alone will be enough to
safeguard future programs.
The case of Women's Studies illustrates that
interdisciplinary studies can duplicate the rigidity and
narrowness of the disciplines rather than offering an
alternative. Stanley Fish, in his trenchant essay, "Being
Interdisciplinary Is So Very Hard to Do," points out that
exclusions and marginalizations emerge from within the
interdisciplinary impulse as well as in disciplinary
projects:
Partiality and parochialism are not eliminated or
even diminished by the exposure of their
operation, merely relocated. The blurring of
existing authoritative disciplinary lines and
boundaries will only create new lines and new
authorities; the interdisciplinary impulse finally
does not liberate us from the narrow confines of
academic ghettos to something more capacious;
it merely redomiciles us in enclosures that do not
advertise them as such (p. 244).
According to Fish, interdisciplinarity is not just
difficult, it's impossible. It leaves us "with projects
that look disconcertingly like the disciplinary projects
we are trying to escape" (pp. 244-245).
Women's Studies departments and other identity-
based interdisciplinary studies departments have an
interest in retaining and maintaining the walls that were
established, in the first place, to foster the growth and
health of scholarship from under-represented
perspectives. Traditional disciplines also have an interest
in these walls, as a means of "protecting" themselves
from challenges or "radical" ideas. Yet walls present a
conundnun for identity-based scholars who also have
interdisciplinarity as a goal. While teaching and research
in interdisciplinary programs may be intellectually as
rigorous as that in more "traditional" departments, as long
as interdisciplinary studies like Women's Studies "exhibit
an implicitly shared epistemology that dismantles the
boundary separating knowledge from action, discipline
from politics," departments and scholars related to them
will be seen as ideological (and often rightftilly so)
(Klein, 1998b, pp. 455-456). Consequently, they will
(continue to) encounter difficulties in being accepted by
and working in conjunction with other, more established
disciplines.
Communication departments share with other more
recently formed interdisciplinary departments the
challenge of being accepted. But neither more
disciplinarity nor more interdisciplinarity offers a way
forward. Too much disciplinarity both ghettoizes and
undermines integrative and activist goals, while moves
toward interdisciplinarity will be met with suspicion to
the extent that methods, pedagogy, and aims of Women's
Studies, Cultural Studies, Ethnic Studies, and similar
programs threaten existing academic practices and
structures (see Grossberg, 1993). For people in
Communication Studies and in other inherently
interdisciplinary programs, university arrangements that
are far more educationally radical may be more desirable,
but these arrangements are far too radical for most
academic leaders to imagine. Still, we must think more
creatively about our relationships to the disciplines and to
university structures more generally.
I offer a few modest proposals that move us beyond
narrow disciplinarity without succumbing to the
seemingly obvious option of interdisciplinarity. My
proposals are intellectual exercises with a purpose as I
contend that we must be willing to play out possibilities if
we are to avoid the lure of interdisciplinarity. At the same
time, I call attention to the reticence that often stymies
creative alternatives, calling out fears (among
administrators, faculty, and in the larger community) that
inspire resistance to such restructuring, in order to
encourage us to understand and overcome our all-too-

ready turn to interdisciplinarity as the most viable
response to contemporary challenges to higher education
and the scholarly community.
Reconfiguring the Academy: A Few Modest Proposals
The organization of the early university offers a basis
for two proposals for reconfiguring the university
curriculum. The first returns to pre-disciplinary
arrangements. Early in the history of modem secular
education, universities inherited the holistic
organizational structures of monastic systems of
education from which they emerged. Klein explains.
As the modem university evolved fi-om the
medieval cathedral schools, a unified whole had
come to include both letters and sciences in the
customary divisions of the trivium (grammar,
logic, and rhetoric) and the quadrivium (music,
geometry, arithmetic, and astronomy). The idea
was not that a student should study everything
and forgo specialization but that specialization
would occur in a community of general studies,
'a little city.' The integration of knowledge was
to be the occasion for the union of men [sic], an
ideal embodied in the twin notions of a
community of disciplines of knowledge
{universitas scientiarum) and a community of
teachers and students {universitas magistrorum
et scholarium) (1990, p. 20).
The trivium of the liberal arts addresses matters of
language on a small, medium and large scale. Grammar is
the study of small-scale language concems (e.g., does this
subject go with this predicate?), logic is the study of mid-
scale language concems (e.g., can this assertion be validly
inferred from the preceding assertions?), and rhetoric is
the study of large-scale language concems (e.g., does this
organizational scheme and do these examples fit this
particular audience and occasion?). The quadrivium of the
liberal arts is concemed with matters of number and
theories of number in relation to dimensions of
experience: arithmetic (theory of numbers), geometry
(theory of numbers in space), music (theory of numbers in
time), and astronomy (theory of numbers in space and
time).
In the pre-disciplinary days of university education,
teaching across the arts would progress from the simpler
arts to the more complex (e.g., from arithmetic to
geometry, or from grammar to logic to rhetoric). The
process of educating students in the trivium and
quadrivium would not have been a perfectly discrete
process, as teachers would likely have had to backtrack
occasionally, especially if the art being taught (e.g.,
astronomy) contained one or more of the other arts (e.g.,
geometry, arithmetic). But both a logical and
chronological rationale govemed the way the arts were
divided; and for the way teachers and students might best
progress through them.
The trivium is concemed with symbolic behavior,
e.g., symbol creation, symbol use, interpretation. This
allows for teaching a broad range of subject matter within
each art, e.g., teaching the emotions appropriate to a
eulogy or the laws appropriate to a specific legal
document when teaching rhetoric, and for building upon
previous skills, e.g., using logic to inform and support
one's rhetorical performance. It also allows teachers and
students to make useful connections between and across
all seven of the liberal arts, e.g., in the ability to design
adequate or aesthetically pleasing lyrics to accompany a
musical score.
A radical suggestion, then, to deal with the problems
associated with disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity,
would be to rearrange the modem university. Consider the
following scenario: disciplines and departments that are
largely concemed with matters of the trivium and
quadrivium (Mathematics, Astronomy, African-American
Studies, English, Conununication, History, Philosophy,
Women's Studies, etc.) could be disassembled, and their
faculty retained. A coordinator in each of the seven liberal
arts (dean or chair) would arrange to have these faculty
members teach one or more of the liberal arts, depending
on their skills and interests. Much of the subject matter of
courses could stay the same, but the professors' focus and
the university's focus would be on the successful teaching
and leaming of the liberal arts themselves. Faculty
scholarship would still need to achieve high standards and
require attention to discipline, since the latter would still
be the reality of the suirounding situation, but liberal arts
faculty would no longer be required to publish solely in
their "home" disciplines and its joumals. Assessments of
scholarship and teaching in the liberal arts could then be
most concemed with the goals of rigorous, extensive, and
thorough research in the scholar's chosen area of concem,
and effective and artful scholarly performance (including
classroom documents ¡md performance). Vocational and
technical departments/majors/tracks e.g.. Nursing and
Accounting, as well as the hard sciences, e.g.. Biology,
Chemistry, and perhaps also the Social Sciences, e.g..
Psychology and Sociology, could still retain a system of
disciplinary organization and assessment, but might make
use of liberal arts courues and faculty to the extent they
find useful (for more on the challenges of "locating" the
social sciences, see Anton, 2004).
A second radical oirtion would be to replace what are
now often called "general education" requirements with
communication-based courses, especially courses relevant
to the trivium and theories of media that extend these arts.
Instead of offering the typical smorgasbord option where
students must take a bit of coursework in a variety of
different disciplines, colleges could require initial courses
addressing complex practices of meaning-making and
how these practices shape every other thing we thinlc
about and do (including arithmetic, geometry, music, and
astronomy). Because how we communicate affects every
other area of study, the first task of study would be to
leam more about how human communication works, how
it fails, how persuasion happens, and how to use and

critique conventions of speech, writing, and (other)
media. Only after a thorough investigation of these
questions, complicating rather than simplifying the
phenomenon of communication, and only after sufficient
practice in communication skills, would students be ready
for pursuing specific areas of interest, one of which might
be even more advanced study of communication theories
and practices.
Klein (1990) points out the dangers of the sort of
argument I make here - one that privileges one
perspective, in this case communication, above others.
She notes the dangers of ethnocentrism and disciplinary
imperialism, but also the impossibility of the ultimate
dominance of any one view (especially any one view that
does not already enjoy widespread acceptance, such as
communication studies). She writes, "While resisting
attempts to usurp their data and theory in the name of
interdisciplinarity, disciplinarians may well assert their
own imperialistic claims" (p. 79). As an an example, she
cites John Deely (1980, p. xvi) who touts semiotics as
"the only game in town" - an "inherently" unified
doctrine of signs that reconceptualizes and transforms the
traditional disciplines." She also acknowledges Wayne C.
Booth's (1981, p. 37) argument that imperialistic claims
like these have value because they force matters into "the
courts of communal discourse" where intellectual cross-
pressures may yield new outlooks. It is in the spirit of
Booth's comments that I offer up my arguments.
A less radical option, and one with more real chance
of success, would be to encourage people in positions of
power such as administrators, established faculty, and
collectives of faculty, to assert the value of the liberal arts
and to resist simplistic notions of both disciplinarity and
interdisciplinarity. Because disciplines are currently a fact
of life and because they act as insurance against
intellectual extinction, some form of "on paper"
disciplinarity will be necessary. We should not forget,
however, that disciplines are mainly constructs of
convenience, historical achievements capable of alteration
but also, as achievements, able to exert a force that cannot
be ignored or wished away (Fish, 1998, p. 247).
Disciplines may also be thought of metaphorically as
musical notes or scores. Musical notes were created to
write down what musicians created, but music existed and
can exist without notes. Similarly, disciplines are useful
for categorizing what scholars have done, but scholarship
existed and can exist without disciplines. In many cases,
disciplines have artificially sliced and diced the activities
of scholars, including communication scholars, even
beyond the needs and demands of academic
bureaucracies. Such segregations, which include narrowly
disciplinary publication requirements and physical and
temporal distancing, undermine the diversity of everyday
intellectual experience and contribute to academic
impoverishment and isolation.
Courageously Resisting Both Disciplinarity and
Interdisciplinarity
Fear is often to blame for both overemphasizing
disciplinarity and the tum toward interdisciplinarity as an
altemative and as an "objective." Fear can be spread by
review boards, administrators, faculty, and the
community, especially when times and university budgets
are tight. Understandably, university leaders fear the loss
of funding dollars and their own reputations, and can
inadvertently undermine scholarship and teaching in an
effort to display accountability to the communities they
serve. For example, formal requests for funding, formal
reports on sabbaticals, tenure and promotion portfolio
design, yearly faculty activity reports, and formal
strategic planning, all take up far more faculty time,
physical energy, and psychic energy than they did forty
years ago. Interdisciplinarity often adds to this workload
as joint appointments and new interdisciplinary entities on
campus extend and complicate the administrative duties
of faculty
Leaders of universities also fear looking different
than other schools even when unique arrangements may
be best for students and faculty because they will have to
explain to reviewers these less traditional arrangements
whose assessments are linked to funding. Scholars who
are part of "younger" departments and disciplines such as
Communication Studies, Women's Studies, Ethnic
Studies, etc., may be less bound to conventional academic
arrangements and scholarly allegiances because they are
still "sorting out" the place and claims of their areas of
expertise not to mention struggling with internal
departmental diversity. The differences in methods,
philosophies of knowledge and teaching, as well as
diversity of resources required in such subgroups may
lead to heated debates over funding and undermine
cohesion across the university. This also does not help
administrators.
There are other sources of fear as well. Worried
parents can influence the way legislators, administrators,
and faculty members see a school or university's
"mission." The inclination of parents toward disciplinary
"job-training"/pre-professional approaches to intellectual
development may lead students to pursue courses of study
that actually leave them less able to adjust to the technical
and ethical demands of a fast-changing society and tight
job market. In addition, faculty may instill fear in
colleagues and in aspiring scholars by stressing the
importance of adopting a recognizable disciplinary or
subdisciplinary label. As a result, aspiring scholars will
tailor their studies to a narrow swath of texts/studies
recognized in one area, and by one small group of people,
in the hopes of being seen as an expert and getting a job.
Such illiberality often does not help job candidates, nor
does it suit the liberal arts, which then becomes a

collection of narrowly trained specialists looking to
"interdisciplinarity" as a fix. It is no surprise that Kenneth
Burke, celebrated in both English and Communication
departments/"disciplines" as a scholar of rhetoric, spent
time with brilliant intelle cts, and wrote extensively, but
only took a few university courses. Perhaps only someone
so "undisciplined" and 5e//^disciplined could have read as
widely and as deeply, and become so vastly educated in a
territory of mind that can't help but balk at the discipline
of disciplines and departments and university hierarchy.
Final Thoughts
Interdisciplinary studies cannot correct the problems
of disciplinary study. As Fish (1998) points out,
interdisciplinary studies are ah'eady all around us, and the
problems of disciplinarity remain. People in disciplines
already "borrow" information and techniques from other
disciplines, they expand into intellectual realms claimed
by other disciplines, and some even work to establish new
disciplines, including disciplines of counter-professionals/
experts (Schon, 1983, p. 340). Fish fmds nothing
necessarily reprehensible about these activities:
sometimes a discipline is worth establishing or
maintaining, and sometimes it is time to let disciplinary
claims or status go. But he also recognizes that these
activities in no way lead to "liberation, freedom,
openness," or a "broader" more "holistic" view of
humanity. As he puts it, "The American mind, like any
other, will always be closed, and the only question is
whether we find the form of closure it currently assumes
answerable to our present urgencies" (pp. 249).
If Communication Studies, Women's Studies, and
other recently formed disciplinary fields wish to make
their way in the university system, then we should not
capitulate to the popularity of interdisciplinarity, nor
should we blindly reinforce disciplinarity at the expense
of thoughtful scholarship and teaching. We must do what
we can to quell the fears of administrators, the public, and
aspiring scholars and colleagues. We can put up a healthy
resistance to "being disciplined," even as we exist within
a particular department in a particular university, and we
can practice self-discipline in our ovra teaching and
scholarship. This means being the kind of
teachers/scholars who take an interest across a wide range
of knowledge without having to do so under a specially
named course or program of interdisciplinary study, and
without having to take students into these courses or
programs of study before they are ready. Doing these
things, and persuading others in positions across the
university and in the community to do the same, will help
keep our fiawed but functional university systems
productive and fiexible enough to address the intellectual
and educational needs of this historical moment.
Note
I would like to thank John Waite Bowers, my e-pen-pal, for
conversations over the years about a whole host of fun topics and for his
thoughtful critical feedback on this and other projects. I would also like
to thank Patty Sotirin and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful
suggestions and editing.
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Valerie V. Peterson is an Associate Professor of Communication
who writes about visual communication, rhetoric, communication
theory, sex and sexuality, popular culture, and pedagogy. Her published
work includes academic articles, book chapters, encyclopedia entries,
and other writings on such topics as rhetorical and communication
theory, visual rhetoric, argtunent and identity. Sophistic thought, sexual
politics, the Ellen TV sitcom, the Joy of Sex, and the Kama Sutra. She is
the managing editor of Explorations in Media Ecology and teaches at
Grand Valley State University. She can be contacted at
petersov@gvsu.edu.

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