| existential, and interdisciplinarity is, at bottom, a professional and institutional issue. Interdisciplinarity is attainable to the extent that professors are professionally motivated and institutionally supported to practice it. Professors may not be so motivated and institutions may not be supportive. But interdisciplinarity is not, as a thing in itself, subversive or transgressive or transformational or even new. In many respects, interdisciplinarity is a ratification of existing arrangements. And it can become a rationale for future arrangements that are less accommodating than the ones professors live with now. So what are academics talking about when they talk about interdisciplinarity? Is it really interdisciplinarity? Do they care about interdisciplinarity as such? Or is there something else that they are anxious about for which talk of interdisciplinarity serves as a kind of screen discourse? One reason to suspect that interdisciplinarity is not what people are really talking about when they talk about interdisciplinarity is that when you ask them why interdisciplinarity is important, they often answer by saying that it solves the problem of disciplinarity. But this is a non sequitur. Interdisciplinarity is simply disciplinarity raised to a higher power. It is not an escape from disciplinarity; it is the scholarly and pedagogical ratification of disciplinarity. If it is disciplinarity that academics want to get rid of, then they cannot call the new order interdisciplinarity. They also cannot call the new order anti-disciplinarity. It might be called postdisciplinarity, but that is asking for trouble. Maybe academics are stuck. Being stuck can certainly be |
pops into a professor’s head when she sees a vaguely familiar face in the hall. “Yes, I am still here,” is the usual answer, “and I’m working on that Incomplete for you.” There was also, traditionally, very little hard information about where students went after they graduated. Graduate programs today are increasingly asked to provide reports on job placement—although, for understandable reasons, these reports tend to emit an unnatural glow. An employed graduate, wherever he or she happens to be working, is ipso facto a successfully placed graduate, and, at that moment, departmental attention relaxes. What happens to people after their initial placement is largely a matter of rumor and self-report. English was one of the fields surveyed in the two studies of the PhD. It is useful to look at, in part because it is a large field where employment practices have a significance that goes beyond courses for English majors. What the surveys suggest is that if doctoral education in English were a cartoon character, then about thirty years ago, it zoomed straight off a cliff, went into a terrifying fall, grabbed a branch on the way down, and has been clinging to that branch ever since. Things went south very quickly, not gradually, and then they stabilized. Statistically, the state of the discipline has been fairly steady for about twenty-five years, and the result of this is a kind of normalization of what in any other context would seem to be a plainly inefficient and intolerable |
