I once had a provost who felt that academic departments hindered the university as they tended to silo the faculty. He would argue we should eliminate departments and that would increase cross-disciplinary work. That went nowhere of course.
He missed a critical point. While departments play an official role in hosting academic programs, they importantly serve as the main community for the faculty within the department. You see your colleagues in the department in meetings, at seminars and just walking by them in the hallways. They are your peers and the ones who hired you and judge your promotion and tenure cases. You will argue with them but you all share a common mission to make your department as strong as possible, so you can attract even better colleagues.
At Oxford, most faculty have a position at one of the 36 colleges, and faculty community comes in the college instead of the department. Many faculty walk from their department offices to have lunch in their college. The colleges are interdisciplinary, there are only at most a couple of computer scientists in each college. My visiting fellowship is with Magdalen College, not the CS department though I plan to spend some time there.
Does the Oxford system lead to more interdisciplinary research, or less research in the field? Not sure, and it's hard to run a controlled experiment.
We all have two communities, one where we work, but also our academic community, the people who do research in the same areas, the people in our field that we collaborate with and see at conferences and workshops. The ones we try to impress with our own research so they may accept our papers, give us grants, nominate us for awards and write good letters for us. That's the real challenge of interdisciplinary research--you hope to impress researchers in both fields, but really you just impress those in the intersection.
In computer science our academic communities are pretty small, usually the conferences where we publish regularly. I was having a conversation with another computer scientist at Oxford. I asked him which conference and he said ICALP B. I said I've published in ICALP A, completely different!
And as someone once said, the unique feature of this "market" is that our customers are the same as our competitors.
ReplyDelete> You see your colleagues in the department in meetings, at seminars and just walking by them in the hallways.
ReplyDeleteThe second two (if not all three) are far less true post-COVID in my department. Few faculty show up to campus other than to teach or give a talk, I rarely see an open office door. Zoom options for meetings mean there are faculty who I see in person once a year or less.
1) There was already a work-from-home tendency but Covid sped it up.
ReplyDelete2) Back in 1987 a chairman told me that at a chairman's meeting ther was a talk on `how to get your Tu-Th faculty to talk with your MWF faculty'
3) When I taught an interdisplinary HONORS course there were honor-lunches where i met people outside of my dept. Even outside of STEM! It was great to hear what they worked on and what their issues with students were (I was surprised to find out that there were students majoring in Art History who were not passionate about it.) Did any of these meetings result in interdisplinary research? No. But I think that might be the wrong measure. Just knowing what people outside of your area are doing is good in and of itself.
Maybe departments should organize events in interesting places for relationship building similar to companies. Like take the faculty and their family to a resort in Mexico for a few days during a break, and department pays for part of it. Or other events that might interest them.
ReplyDelete"there are only at most a couple of computer scientists in each college"
ReplyDeleteThis sounds like the colleges conned the computer scientists into becoming the token "fix the printer" guys
"Northern Conservative Fundamentalist Baptist, Great Lakes Region, Council of 1912, or Northern Conservative Fundamentalist Baptist, Great Lakes Region, Council of 1879?"
ReplyDelete