ARCHIVE - September, 2001

The Changing Organization of Knowledge and Its Consequences
Richard Jessor, Institute of Behavioral Science

[These remarks were prepared for the Chancellor's breakfast, August 29, 2001.]

My focus here is on recent changes in the nature of inquiry and in the organization of knowledge. Those changes have reverberating implications for the University of Colorado: for its organization into colleges and departments, for its hiring practices, for the locus of tenure, and – perhaps most important – for its instructional or teaching mission.

The traditional organization of knowledge on campuses like this one is in packages, called “disciplines”, whose boundaries were more or less clearly circumscribed. Only a few hardy souls ever ventured beyond those boundaries, and even they tended to wait until they had tenure. The interstices between or among disciplines remained largely unexplored. The idea of discipline as the fundamental way of organizing knowledge, and of departments as the locus for disciplines in academe, achieved a kind of sacrosanct timelessness. Yet disciplines and departments are relatively recent, 19th and 20th century ways of parsing the intellectual world.

And, indeed, it is this very way of parsing the world – the organization of knowledge around traditional disciplines – that has been increasingly challenged these past several decades all across the scholarly world. Entirely new fields of inquiry, with names that did not even exist in the academic lexicon earlier, have emerged: fields like neuroscience, and cognitive science, and behavioral science. These emerging fields not only transcend the disciplinary organization of knowledge, they present a challenge to its sufficiency and, indeed, to its appropriateness. The thrust toward these emerging inter- or trans-disciplinary organizations of knowledge has come from the quest for a firmer grasp on nature, as well as from the responsiveness of inquiry to the problems of society. They present a campus like ours with the challenge to change.

According to Phil Abelson, writing in Science, “change will not come easily” (1997, 277, 747). He says that: “The rigid departmental structure has become outmoded. Many of the best opportunities for significant scholarship lie in multidisciplinary areas.” The prestigious Kellogg Commission recently sent a letter to the presidents and chancellors of state universities and colleges. The Commission noted that “...society has problems; universities have departments” (Science: 1997, 277, 747). A year later, in another editorial in Science, a neuroscientist commented that “The modern university is partitioned along academic lines that no longer reflect today’s intellectual life ... modern knowledge systems are inseparably interdisciplinary.” (Science, 1998, 282, 237).

Whether the departmental organization of academe will soon become an anachronism remains to be seen. But the University of Colorado has shown remarkable prescience and innovativeness in establishing, very early on, the necessary infrastructure: new institutes and centers to foster emerging fields of inquiry. We must do even more to sustain a receptiveness to change and to encourage the appearance of new interdisciplinary fields. For example, changes in faculty hiring practices require thorough consideration. At Wisconsin, the provost implemented a so-called “cluster hiring initiative”. He noted that “new areas of knowledge and complex societal issues do not always fall neatly into departmental disciplines and structures.” Changes in the locus of tenure are also implicated. Should departments be the sole custodian of tenure? The criteria for retention and promotion must be revised and enlarged beyond mainline, intra-disciplinary excellence.

But for me the largest challenge posed by the changes discussed above is to transform our teaching, our instructional mission, in a way that mirrors the change in the organization of knowledge. Not to do so is to remain mired in the past and to deprive our students of a 21st century understanding of the natural and social world. Are we up to that challenge? After 50 years at the University of Colorado, I have no doubt that we are. But should we continue to move forward with small incremental actions, or is comprehensive action needed that will transmogrify how knowledge is pursued and transmitted on this campus? This issue warrants our urgent attention.

IN THIS ISSUE:

The opinions expressed in these articles are those of the authors, and do not represent those of the Boulder Faculty Assembly, CU faculty at large, or the University of Colorado.

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