372 CATALYZING INQUIRY
resources flush, it is easy for Department X or Department Y to take a risk on an interdisciplinary scholar.
But as is more often the case today, when resources are scarce, each department is much more likely to
want someone who fits squarely within its traditional departmental definitions, and any appointment that
goes to an interdisciplinary researcher is seen as a lost opportunity.
For example, tenure letters may be requested from traditional researchers in the field for an inter-
disciplinary worker; despite great success, the tenure letters may well indicate that they were unfamiliar
with the candidate’s work. Graduate students seeking interdisciplinary training but nominally housed
in a given department may have difficulty taking that department’s qualifying exam, because their
training is significantly different from mainstream students.
Another dimension of this problem is that publication venues often mirror departmental structures.
Thus, it may be difficult to find appropriate venues for interdisciplinary work. That is, the forms of
output and forums of publication for the interdisciplinary researcher may be different than for either
Department X or Department Y. For example, even within computer science itself, experimental com-
puter scientists that focus on system building often lack a track record of published papers in refereed
journals, and tenure and promotion committees (often university-wide) that focus on such records for
most other disciplines in the university have a hard time evaluating the worthiness of someone whose
contributions have taken the form of software that the community has used extensively or presentations
at refereed conferences. Even if biologists are aware in principle of such “publication” venues, they may
not be aware that such conferences are heavily refereed or are sometimes regarded as the most presti-
gious of publication venues. Also, prestigious journals known for publishing biology research are often
reluctant to devote space to papers devoted to computational technique or methodology if it does not
include specific application to an important biological problem (in which case the computational di-
mensions are usually given a peripheral rather than primary status).
Further, the academic tenure and promotion system is biased toward individual work (i.e., work on
a scale that a single individual can publish and receive credit for). However, large software systems—
common in computer science and bioinformatics—are constructed by teams. Although small subsystems
can be developed by single individuals, it is the whole system that provides primary value, and univer-
sity-based research that is usually driven by a single-authored Ph.D. thesis or single faculty members is
not very well suited to such a challenge.^75
Finally, in most departments, it is the senior faculty that are likely to be the most influential with
regard to the allocation of resources—space, tenure, personnel and research assistant support, and so
on. If these faculty are relatively uninformed or disconnected from ongoing research at the BioComp
interface, the needs and intellectual perspectives of interface researchers will not be fully taken into
account.
10.3.3.2 Structure of Educational Programs
Stovepiping is also reflected in the structure of educational programs. Stovepiping refers to the
tendency of individual disciplines to have different points of view on what to teach and how to teach it,
without regard for what goes on in other disciplines. In some cases, the methods of the future are still
undeveloped, or are undergoing revolution, so that suitable texts or syllabi are not yet available. Fur-
ther, like individual researchers, departments tend to be territorial, protective of their realms, and
insistent on ever-growing specialized course load requirements for their own students. This discour-
ages or precludes cross-discipline shopping. Novel training creates a need for reeducation of faculty to
change the design of old curricula and modernize the teaching. These changes take time and energy,
and require release time from other academic burdens, whether administrative or teaching.
(^75) C. Koch, “What Can Neurobiology Teach Computer Engineers?,” Division of Biology and Division of Engineering and
Applied Science, California Institute of Technology, January 31, 2001, position paper to National Research Council workshop,
available at http://www7.nationalacademies.org/compbio_wrkshps/Christof_Koch_Position_Paper.doc.