Another book by a Stanford professor that we should look at for institutional change, Here’s some of it on Google Books.

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Strober, Myra, Interdisciplinary Conversations: Challenging Habits of Thought. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010.

“The difficult task of faculty and administrators is to retain the benefits of disciplinary specialization while at the same time fostering interdisciplinary collaboration.” (2)

Recognizing funding as a big obstacle, she focuses on other issues: “disciplinary habits of mind, disciplinary cultures and interpersonal dynamics. It is also about what faculty and administrators can do to overcome these barriers to create productive interdisciplinary conversations.” (2)

“…it turns out that talking across disciplines is as difficult as talking to someone from another culture.” (4)

“To be interdisciplinary one must first be proficient in a discipline” (12)

For a brief history of disciplines, see page 13. Some of the earliest universities were in Italy, France and England, 11th and 12th Century. To be a discipline, a body of knowledge must have identity (departments across universities) and exchange (a market for new doctorates.) (15). What makes graphic design a discipline? Let’s look into that.

Interdisciplinarity is “a form of inquiry that integrates knowledge and modes of thinking from two or more disciplines…to produce a cognitive or practical advancement (eg. explain a phenomenon, create a product, answer a question, etc). By Veronica Boix Mansilla (15)