What Does Interdisciplinarity Even Mean Anymore?

Harvard administrators have a few favorite phrases: civil discourse, intellectual vitality, and — now — interdisciplinarity.

Look no further than our University’s foray into the medical humanities — an emerging field that applies humanistic insights to the study of health and wellbeing — as an indication that the interdisciplinary hype has gone too far.

Of course, this field and other interdisciplinary endeavors have much to offer prospective students and researchers. But pushing two separate subjects isn’t a guarantee of new knowledge — and it’s certainly no substitute for a rigorous liberal arts education.

Harvard College should be a home for those whose interests aren’t neatly delineated by disciplinary confines. Pre-med students can and should study Shakespeare and Morrison, and humanities professors should be able to apply their expertise to medicine with Harvard’s support.

But interdisciplinary insights don’t always trump disciplinary ones.

Harvard undergraduates don’t need a profusion of secondaries, professorships, or academic centers that cover every combined subject you can dream up. The best way for a STEM concentrator to study humanities is through a foundational course in the humanities — not one tailor-made for those with a background in science.

At an institution like Harvard, intellectual cross-pollination is natural. Pre-med students taking humanities courses will make the interdisciplinary connections on their own — they don’t need a prefabricated, watered-down course to force it upon them.

To encourage interdisciplinary insights, Harvard should instead invest in multidisciplinary study — not threadbare Gen Eds and gameable distributional requirements.

The General Education Program is hardly worthy of the name — hyper-specific course topics fail to offer students a firm foundation in “Ethics & Civics” or “Aesthetics & Culture.” And students in search of easy A’s too often treat Gen Ed offerings as a means of boosting their GPAs.

Harvard’s existing distribution requirements are flawed, too. With a requirement to take one course in each of three broad categories, Harvard students have become experts at finding the least challenging offerings or those — like ASTRON 2: “Celestial Navigation,” which fulfills the “Science & Engineering & Applied Science” requirement — that offer a milquetoast approximation of the requirement in question.

If Harvard is serious about multidisciplinary learning, its requirements don’t show it. Its attempts leave students with neither a trace of true connection between disciplines nor the substance of either one.

There are a myriad of ideas out there to make students engage fruitfully with various fields: Columbia University’s Core Curriculum builds a rigorous foundation in the humanities with the intent to “transcend disciplines,” and Yale University’s distribution requirements are more extensive than ours.

For once, Harvard might have something to learn from our neighbors in New Haven. Perhaps we need a pared-back core curriculum of a few well-designed classes that span the liberal arts. Maybe all we need is a reform of the Gen Ed program.

Either way, let the divisions between the arts be liberal — not nonexistent.

This staff editorial solely represents the majority view of The Crimson Editorial Board. It is the product of discussions at regular Editorial Board meetings. In order to ensure the impartiality of our journalism, Crimson editors who choose to opine and vote at these meetings are not involved in the reporting of articles on similar topics.

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