How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment

(nextflipdebug5) #1
as a rhetorical strategy than as something in which you really
steep yourself in. It’s always a danger in interdisciplinary work.

An English professor offers a similar criticism when she describes as
“fast and loose” an interdisciplinary project concerning capitalism
and the economic and political power of native Americans: “A fast
and loose project would be throwing around some interdisciplinary
vocabulary...Itwould pull in Gayatri Spivak and Benedict Ander-
son and throw them into some kind [of] theoretical soup, maybe
just be tagging phrases and not really applying their theories in
any kind of deep way.” Although many have clear ideas about what
makes for bad interdisciplinary research, the greatest difficulties it
poses concern how to assess it fairly and with consensus.


Evaluating It Well


The standards used to evaluate interdisciplinary research are not a
simple combination of the standards of single disciplines. They are a
hybrid, and an emergent hybrid at that—one that has developed
through practice and deliberation. Because the criteria have these
emergent qualities, some panelists believe that interdisciplinary pan-
els are more open-minded than regular, single-discipline panels, that
there is a greater willingness to “listen to other people’s criteria and
sort of question your own... to change their minds or to recon-
sider.” Others believe that such panels are more conservative than
their disciplinary counterparts.^14 This conservative bias may be in-
fluenced by the members’ age; panelists tend to be older than the av-
erage applicants to most competitions. Older scholars have been
less socialized to appreciate interdisciplinary work. Mentioning a
controversial tenure case at her elite institution, an English scholar
remarks that “especially older colleagues are very unwilling even to
approach judging [this scholar’s] work. They just want to say, ‘We


208 / Considering Interdisciplinarity and Diversity

Free download pdf