Academic Exchange
September 2000
Contents

The Academic Exchange asked Professor and Chair of Mathematics and Computer Science Dwight Duffus to moderate a discussion on the shifting nature of research in the university.
The discussion involved four other participants. David Bright, professor of classics and comparative literature and former dean of Emory College, pursues research in Greek and Latin poetry. Candler Professor and Chair of Cell Biology Barry Shur has research interests in cell and developmental biology, birth/congenital defects, and infertility. George Benston, John H. Harland Professor of Finance in the Goizueta Business School and professor of economics in Emory College, examines SEC financial disclosure, economies of scale in banking, savings and loan failures, and gender discrimination in annuities. Physics instructor Stefan Boettcher is a theoretical physicist with research interests in statistical and condensed matter physics and in quantum field theory. Duffus's research explores ordered combinatorial and algebraic structures.

Dwight Duffus Two questions to consider. First, does the drive to interdisciplinarity threaten the strength of our disciplines, with all these new mouths at the table, hungry for resources, from university resources to NSF or NIH funding? Second, are there commonalities among the various disciplines in the kind of intellect we bring to bear on highly focused, specific sorts of investigations, versus the skills required for gathering a group from different disciplines to focus on a problem?

Barry Shur That reallocation of resources could have a negative impact on individual, investigator-initiated resources in the sciences. I think the creative process is similar across the disciplines-it's all about focus. It's what you obsess about. It wakes you up in the middle of the night, and it's what you think about as you walk to and from your car. So if you take the finances out of the picture, then I don't think the sciences and humanities are different at all in terms of the intellectual process. People should have the freedom to pursue a problem and obsess over it and immerse themselves in it because they are interested in it. Not because it's product-driven, but because it's purely scholarly.

David Bright But that clause is a big one: "If you take the finances out." Because at that point, the nature of the question you are pursuing can be radically altered.

Stefan Boettcher There's hardly any discipline that has been thrown into more disarray than physics in that regard. In my area, high-energy physics, there once was money for doing all kinds of stuff. Now there's a lot of money pumped into the system for the purpose of retooling toward biology, biophysics. That creates a lot of pain and drains creative resources away from those departments. Even before I get to the grant-writing stage, I have to wrack my brain about how can I do something that I have never done before, that I'm not educated for, just to appeal to a funding agency. If I'm lucky enough to get money for that project, I'll end up spending 80 percent of my time on that research, so that for the remaining 20 percent I can do what I really want.

DB Are there any disciplines left that are still single disciplines? Is interdisciplinary an unnecessary distinction?

George Benston In my area it certainly is true. Even though the business school is not departmentalized, people don't get out of their areas. And the reason is publications. Everything is designed as to what the top two or three journals will accept, not as to what you want to do or what is your best work.

SB I think in physics there has been always a good sense of interdisciplinarity that came organically out of just tripping over something. Very often, in my own experience, especially when I've shifted fields within physics, it came over a coffee-table discussion. Chance encounters need to be facilitated. The problem that a lot of physicists have is they have their way of thinking about biological systems that's different from the terms in which the biologists are thinking. This type of communication cannot be established just by throwing money at it. It really has to be facilitated in small steps.

BS There's a critical distinction in the life sciences that hasn't been put on the table, and that's between having an interdisciplinary mandate and an interdisciplinary environment. On one side, there are mandated, funded interdisciplinary projects that are technical tour de forces more than they are intellectual tour de forces. They require resources and techniques from many institutions. As an example, they may define the genetic basis for a critical disease which leads to a highly visible Science or Nature article. On the other side, people who are at the cutting edge intellectually often work in small groups but still benefit from talking to
people outside of their immediate sphere on a day-to-day basis. In my experience, the best departments are those in which those different points of view interact in an interdisciplinary environment. I'm a big proponent of this type of atmosphere.

DB Do any of you advertise explicitly for people with interdisciplinary preparation or interest, or do you search in good conscience for a disciplinary person and just hope that in fact this will occur after they get here?

DD We've come to the brink and stopped short of interdisciplinary hiring and said, Well, is this person a physicist, a computer scientist, or a mathematician? Will he or she be able to survive well enough in at least one of these disciplines in order to publish enough to get tenure, to continue a career? We advertise explicitly for mathematicians and computer scientists eager to form collaborations with mathematical colleagues, but also with colleagues in the sciences.

DB When you bring people in like that, do they feel drawn to shrink back down a bit so as to have a record that will survive the scrutiny of the system and resist the very benefit that you saw in them, which is their collaborative brilliance?

DD I can certainly see that for an untenured person, that would be a concern. And frankly, we're inclined to hire young associate professors who have already made the tenure grade elsewhere.

BS Our recruitment efforts in cell biology have focused on getting the best person possible. We paint with a broad brush and get as many applications as we can. We advertise multidisciplinarily, but we don't have any particular agenda or area in mind. We end up getting somebody who probably is going to be the very best in a very defined, non-multidisciplinary area, but who hopefully has the ability and desire to then interact with other people. The primary incentive for us to hire someone is that they simply blow us away. In one case, this approach has worked very well in that this new faculty member became very interactive. Another person who came at the same time is probably one of our most productive investigators but is more reserved than the other faculty member. This recruitment strategy forces me to question whether I have any vision, since I'm not being driven to build a particular type of program. Or am I doing the right thing by just letting the best people make the best department because, in the end, you're only as good as your faculty?

GB We also do what you say. And it has the effect of killing interdisciplinary work. If a candidate says, I am interested in all of these things, you're not going to hire them unless they're incredible.

SB I think we advertise in physics specifically for more interdisciplinary people than we have. But it's hard to motivate somebody to come to such a position because often they would be the first ones coming into such a situation, and where's the environment? Who are they going to talk to if they come?

GB One of the problems of having true interdisciplinary programs is you have to have people who really want to participate, who have something in mind; not just throw people together and hope something will happen. They'll learn more; people who are really curious will enjoy that. But in terms of publications, it's unlikely. I don't think you can get away from departmentalization. It's been around too long. People are kidding themselves.

SB Departments do provide a certain inertia and expertise that gets carried over generations. As long as they roll in some slow-moving fashion, I think it's okay. Disciplines will go away and new ones will emerge.

DB But you don't want to wake up and realize suddenly that you have the best alchemy department in the country.

DD Yes, but I don't think there's any doubt that you can make a much larger research enterprise. For instance, the new Center for Behavioral Neuroscience at Emory. This is going to have a big impact on the face of this institution. There will be more people, more students, more visitors. This volume does imply that more is going on, and it promises the possibility of wonderful things. But we also know that disciplinary or interdisciplinary, there are only a few people in the world at any given time who are driving the work. And whether or not you get one of these great individuals producing the great ideas, are you increasing the likelihood that that's going to happen by creating this environment where you're constantly churning, or is it in the end counterproductive?

BS I think there are two types of contributions. There are spikes that are going to come independent of any environment. They are driven by the individual, regardless of the lack or presence of money. In contrast, there is a continual level of productivity going on in the background, but none of it is at the level of the individual spike. It's at a
second tier of contribution, but it's more consistent. I don't want to belittle the value of multidisciplinary research or program project grants; it's just that I don't think they will ever take the place of individual intellectual innovation.