By Myra Strober
Commentary

Economists have been much maligned recently for our failure to agree on how to get the economy moving again. Yes, we may disagree on short-term prescriptions, but we speak in a clear, unified voice about at least one issue: Innovation is essential to long-term prosperity. We also agree that research universities are key players in inventing and developing the creative ideas that fuel the economy's long-term health.

Yet universities neglect an important source of potential innovation: the cross-fertilization of ideas that comes from productive conversations across disciplines. Although people outside of universities seem to think that faculty members talk to one another across their fields of study (after all, they work in the same place, don't they?), in fact, substantive conversations are infrequent. Particularly at large research universities, scholars and researchers in different disciplines don't often interact, and when they do—for example, on university committees—they rarely say much about their work.

Many university administrators would like to remedy this situation. Over the past 10 years, numerous research universities' strategic plans have called for increased interdisciplinary work. Nonetheless, there is little evidence that it is happening.

The three common explanations for a lack of faculty interest in interdisciplinary work are that the academic reward system militates against it (hiring, promotion, salary increases, and most prizes are controlled by single disciplines, not by multiple disciplines), that there is insufficient funding for it, and that evaluating it is fraught with conflict. These are significant barriers.

However, while doing research for my new book, Interdisciplinary Conversations: Challenging Habits of Thought, I found an even more fundamental barrier to interdisciplinary work: Talking across disciplines is as difficult as talking to someone from another culture. Differences in language are the least of the problems; translations may be tedious and not entirely accurate, but they are relatively easy to accomplish. What is much more difficult is coming to understand and accept the way colleagues from different disciplines think—their assumptions and their methods of discerning, evaluating, and reporting "truth"—their disciplinary cultures and habits of mind.

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