Interdisciplinarity in Higher Education in the United Kingdom

Interdisciplinarity is both a permanent and a transient issue in higher education. It is permanent in the sense that any structuring of knowledge into fields or disciplines creates the possibility of questioning, altering or transcending those structures. But it is transient in the sense that interest in it seems to come and go, as a consequence of a range of factors both internal and external to the higher education system. In this transient sense, interdisciplinarity came to prominence in the United Kingdom in the 1970s, a decade which saw not only the publication of an influential OECD report on the subject (OECD, 1972) and the beginnings of work on faculty cultures (Gaff & Wilson, 1971), but the growth of a sociological critique of the nature of disciplines (Lakatos & Musgrave, 1970; Young, 1971; Barnes, 1974) and a number of more specific studies of interdisciplinary courses in the United Kingdom (Doyal, 1974; Cotterrell, 1979), including a Nuffield Foundation report in which I was involved (Squires et al., 1975). For reasons which I will explore later, interdisciplinarity seems to have fallen from prominence in the 1980s, so that any article written about it now takes on a retrospective air, as implied by the title of the more recent book edited by Levin & Lind (1985), Interdisciplinarity Revisited. However, I want to try to go beyond a merely retrospective account of what has happened or not happened in the last 20 years, and the factors which have influenced such trends in the United Kingdom. I want to suggest that our view of interdisciplinarity may also have changed. In particular, I shall argue that the analysis of the topic in the 1970s was, with hindsight, deficient in two main ways: it tried to analyse interdisciplinarity without an adequate prior analysis of the nature of disciplines; and it largely failed to locate interdisciplinarity within the general pattern of undergraduate studies in the United Kingdom. The result was a curiously decontextualised view of interdisciplinarity, as something that had its own essence, rather than as something relative to, and located within, existing epistemological and institutional structures.