Why educational institutions need to shed academic tribalism

Addressing complex global issues requires interdisciplinary collaboration, challenging academic tribalism and promoting interdisciplinarity for comprehensive solutions and progress.

Complex issues and phenomena such as global warming and climate change, poverty, migration and displacement cannot be addressed by a single discipline. They need to be studied from an interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary perspective so that we can grapple with them comprehensively and meaningfully. Global warming and climate change, for instance, need to be addressed by experts drawn from different disciplines such as Glaciology, Hydrology, Oceanography, Geology, Geography, Geoinformatics, and Engineering and Technology. Similarly, migration and displacement need to be discussed by experts from Political Science, Geopolitics, Economics, Sociology, Ecology, Human Rights, and Literature.

Unfortunately, academia is subtly biased in favour of “academic tribes and territories” (Becher and Trowler 2001). Against this backdrop, we need to highlight the ongoing debate between ‘generalists’ and ‘specialists’. While the generalists, even as they are grounded in their respective disciplines, strive to strike a conversation with their counterparts in other departments to promote interdisciplinary thinking and collaboration, the specialists prefer to confine themselves to their respective areas and guard their territory. Disciplinary boundary crossing is an anathema to them.

In Academic Tribes and Territories, Becher and Trowler address the issue and point out that “the tribes of academe ... define their own identities and defend their own patches of intellectual ground by employing a variety of devices geared to the exclusion of illegal immigrants.” But academicians should shed their silos syndrome as a fragmented and piecemeal approach to the pursuit of knowledge will not produce tangible results.

At this juncture, we need clarity about what exactly is meant by interdisciplinarity and the reasons to embrace it. We also need to distinguish it from its cognate: multidisciplinarity. There are subtle but crucial differences between the two. Both call for the presence of various disciplines but the level of integration between them is differential. While the integration of different disciplines is quite high in interdisciplinary programmes and projects, it is limited in the case of multidisciplinary endeavours. The former aims at amalgamation and synthesis of ideas and theories and the latter is rather reluctant to shed its disciplinary character. In short, while interdisciplinarity insists on integration of ideas, multidisciplinarity focuses on juxtaposition with limited space for integration. In Interdisciplinarity: History, Theory and Practice, Klein points out that the coming together of different disciplines in multidisciplinary endeavours is “essentially additive, not integrative”.

Why are academicians reluctant to undertake interdisciplinary projects? There are five major reasons. First, the epistemological clash, sometimes incompatible, between different disciplinary perspectives is a hurdle and a challenge. Second, getting to know a new discipline involves time and energy, and many prefer to expend their energies in their own disciplines and territories where they already have a foothold. Third, there is hardly any incentive for undertaking innovative interdisciplinary projects. Fourth, when it comes to research projects and publications, editors are inclined towards papers in conventional disciplines. As a result, interdisciplinary projects get sidelined. Finally, interpersonal issues crop up while undertaking interdisciplinary projects with issues relating to seniority and ownership of the project occasionally rearing their heads.

What should be done to shed academic tribalism and foster interdisciplinarity? First, higher educational institutions should, under the Choice-Based Credit System, offer interdisciplinary courses in domains such as AI, Nanotechnology, and Digital Humanities. Teaching pedagogy too could be interdisciplinary. A course like Philosophy and Literature could be co-taught by faculty from the two departments. Second, allied departments could come together and organise interdisciplinary seminars and conferences. For instance, Chemistry and Life Sciences could come together and explore common topics such as enzyme catalysis, kinetics, energy and metabolism. English and Political Science could organise a conference on a topic like language and ideology. Language departments such as Tamil, Hindi, French, and English can pool their resources and explore themes in comparative literature and translation. Third, research scholars and postgraduate students should be motivated to explore interdisciplinary topics for their projects. Finally, border-crossing leading to interdepartmental networking. So interdisciplinary collaboration should be recognised and incentivised.

Academic tribalism breeds a culture of hierarchy, insularity and traditionalism. Therefore, academia should ensure that the curriculum is innovative, interdisciplinary and holistic and encourage and help shape our students into multifaceted individuals.