Interdisciplinarity
and the Disciplines
John
Witte, Jr Jonas Robitscher Professor of Law and Ethics and Director,
Program in Law and Religion
The Academic Exchange What do you identify as key elements in
a solid model of interdisciplinary studies?
John Witte One critical criterion is whether that
interdisciplinary scholarship enhances the understanding of the
texts, traditions, or subject matters of the two or more disciplines
participating in the interdisciplinary dialogue. The point of
interdisciplinarity is not to create a new discipline. The point
of interdisciplinarity is to enhance our understanding of the
respective disciplines participating in the dialogue. Does our
understanding of law, for example, get enhanced by the invocation
of the methods, the texts, and the insights of literature or
economics or religion? If law is enhanced, that interdisciplinary
approach is salutary. If law is distracted from its mission,
it is not.
AE You have remarked that interdisciplinary scholarship
can be used as a proxy for pursuing political correctness, conservative
retrenchment, or public-policy reform that might not be viable
standing alone. Could you elaborate?
JW It's a general indictment of interdisciplinary
scholarship not at Emory specifically, but across the country.
Interdisciplinary work can become a proxy for agendas of political
correctness, introducing spurious new sources into the canon,
expanding methodological techniques with respect to texts or
respect to understandings of what the tradition teaches. That
can be very edifying and can cultivate new understandings and
new bodies of scholarship, but it also has to be viewed with
a degree of skepticism, lest the rigors of the tradition or the
canon or traditional methodology be compromised. For example,
the indictment of law and religion is it's just a bunch of Christians
trying to proselytize the Jews. The common indictment of law
and economics is it's a bunch of right-wing folk who are seeking,
under the guise of neutral methodology, to propagate their conservative
philosophy. From what I have seen, these criticisms are inapt
at Emory.
AE What other pitfalls are commonly encountered in interdisciplinary
work?
JW One is the danger of a bland intellectual ecumenism--an
attempt to flatten every discipline, text, tradition into one
collective discourse, one set of methods. The second danger is
the creation of a new discipline called interdisciplinarity,
which competes for resources, students, and faculty with traditional
disciplines such as medicine, law, theology, or psychology. If
interdisciplinarity becomes its own, self-perpetuating, bureaucratic
machine, I think we have failed in interdisciplinary scholarship
altogether.
[Superficiality is also] a danger. I've certainly seen it in
many interdisciplinary conferences and in certain legal conferences
which attempt to deal with a new topic in a provocative way.
Even granting that every new methodology takes a while to get
started, it can become an invitation for silliness and untutored
speculation. Interdisciplinary studies can in extreme cases encourage
and even legitimate dilettantism. I worry, frankly, for myself
when I've done work in theology or history, and for others who
dabble in law, whether we're really equipped to undertake that
kind of rigorous use of those tools as necessary to make them
effective, and to do them the honor that they're due.
AE What are the ways of safeguarding against those
potential pitfalls?
JW One is resisting the creation of a new discipline
called interdisciplinarity. Two, healthy, rigorous skepticism
about any new interdisciplinary initiative. Every interdisciplinary
initiative has to earn its spurs through cogency of argument
and demonstration of its utility and efficacy for the particular
discipline.
AE What do you think would be a good interdisciplinary
ethic for Emory?
JW There is a pervasive sense among people who do
interdisciplinary scholarship on campus, including myself, that
Emory's research specialization ethic has been resistant to interdisciplinary
scholarship. People are very jealous about retaining their administrative
boundaries. Everything from the financial
aid office to the registrar's office is used to working with
a system that has particular disciplines, particular majors,
particular schools, and any attempt to cross those boundaries
laterally or create bridges across them are bureaucratically
always resisted. That is still the case at Emory, notwithstanding
the fact that we prize interdisciplinary scholarship, have pockets
of it that are extraordinarily good, and have in the central
administration and the deans a healthy, robust endorsement of
interdisciplinarity. It takes a while for that vision to trickle
into the day-to-day operations.
But what exactly that ethic should be is an open question. I
see President Chace and Provost Chopp as powerful ambassadors
for interdisciplinarity. They know what it is, they have done
it themselves, and they are serious about rendering Emory a more
receptive institutional vehicle for interdisciplinarity.
AE Should interdisciplinary scholarship be egalitarian,
or is it ever appropriate for one discipline to become dominant
in the collaboration between different branches of study?
JW Interdisciplinary scholarship has the great danger
of encouraging monopolization, and that needs to be resisted.
There is no universal theory of knowledge, no universal theory
of truth, no universal theory of beauty, no universal theory
of justice. There are multiple theories with varying levels of
cogency, universality, and efficacy that need to compete. Some
disciplines lend themselves more readily to multiple answers
to subject matters. I think of law, of theology, of biology as
universal sciences. These things deal with questions of justice,
of faith, of the body that are universal because they affect
all persons individually and in community. It does not mean they
can answer all questions, and it certainly does not mean their
methodology lends itself to monopolistic takeovers of the particulars
of literature or economics or any other sphere.