janz, b. - but it doesnt make sense to me

8/14/2019 Janz, B. - But It Doesnt Make Sense to Me

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"BUT IT DOESN'T MAKE SENSE TO ME!"FRUSTRATIONS IN INTERDISCIPLINARITYAND THE LffiERAL ARTS

Bruce JanzPhilosophy/Interdisciplinary Studies

Augustana University College

The Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in the Liberal Arts (CIRLA) hasas its mandate to advance the dialogue about the nature and application of theliberal arts and sciences and interdisciplinary teaching and research, in postsecondary education in Canada and around the world. CIRLA attempts toaccomplish its mandate in diverse ways: through the publication of Dianoia(which until this issue has been under the Social Sciences and HumanitiesResearch Council of Canada funding CIRLA receives, but henceforth will beseparate), through the sponsorship of colloquia and conferences, and through theestablishment and maintenance of research forums and tools such as theelectronic mailing list CIRLA-L, the CIRLA gopher, and other initiatives.

NOW THAT THE ADVERTISEMENT IS OUT OF THE WAYActually, I thought it was important that the readers of Dianoia realizethat this journal is part of a larger commitment to research and dialogue, and

that the various initiatives support each other. Having said that, though, readersshould also know that involvement with CIRLA or Dianoia is hardly anunambiguous activity. The mandate is far from an evangelistic crusade designedto convert the academic world to the true faith of liberal arts education. Whilewe have a certain commitment to the liberal arts (or we would not have agreedto spend hours on administrative and editorial tasks, instead of writing withinour own disciplines), there are real questions and tensions, even frustrations, atissue in this form of education. That may be why liberal arts education remainsinteresting-after all this time, the problems have not been worked out.

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Some of these problems and tensions arise from the actual practice ofliberal arts and interdisciplinary education. CIRLA and Dianoia did not appearfully formed on the bald prairie of Alberta. Both arose from the educational andintellectual convictions of people at Augustana University College. Augustanaprides itself on teaching excellence in liberal arts and innovation ininterdisciplinarity. As recently as five years ago it seemed that no one wastalking about the value and the tensions of the liberal arts, at least in Canada.In response to this lack, Dianoia was launched and CIRLA was formed to workthrough the issues.

All this looks good, but as always, practice is less glamorous than ideals.My own intuition of what liberal arts means involves (in both faculty andstudents) the active questioning of ideas and the willingness to not be lulled intoa sense of complacency by a well-told story.

Alas, this ideal is depressingly far from reality, as I found out in a recentattempt to teach a third-year intellectual history course in an interdisciplinaryfashion. My colleague (an economist) and I decided that we wanted to both givea coherent narrative of the last three or four hundred years of thought and socialpractice, and at the same time destabilize that narrative. We did this, in part,by telling the stories of the history of philosophy (my discipline) and economics.Each of us would then raise questions for, and prod the sensitive spots in, thenarrative the other had presented. We used contemporary'l!lusic and art tohighlight the fact that the tensions between the grand explanatory s t ~ r i e s weacademics tell are felt at a popular level. We tried to show the "cracks in ourown stories, the things that members of our own discipline ignored ormarginalized in order to have a story that makes sense. In short, we tried toargue that while we need to make sense of things (and disciplinary explanationsare a good way of doing this), there are shortcomings to all good stories, andthe process of understanding has to take into account the cracks as well as thecontinuities.

Sounds great in theory. Student evaluations, however, were less thanenthusiastic- "But it doesn't make sense to me" was a frequently echoed refrain.There was great resistance during the term to the process of destabilizingdisciplinary narratives. Now, this could have been because we taught poorly.However, for me at least, students seem generally satisfied in my other courses,often with very similar material. My economist colleague reports the samething. The explanation must lie somewhere else.

What happened? I think we have illustrated here the tension in the "newlook" liberal arts. Students are required at Augustana to take an integrativestudies course. These are team-taught courses that attempt to establish aconversation between two or more different ways of knowing (usuallyrepresented by disciplines). The students tend to resent having to take theseSpring 1995 91


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courses, and the course evaluations show it. Why do they not like thesecourses? There could be a number of reasons:

1. Students may generally not like having to take anything outside of theirchosen major.

2. Students may regard the course as one in which professors are workingoutside their areas of expertise, and therefore are less sure of the material.(Professors, it should be said, have also voiced the same concern.)

3. Students often do not have any specific prerequisites for these courses,and therefore this may be their first introduction to thinking betweendisciplines.

4. Students may just like linear stories that make sense, and integrativestudies courses lack that linearity and coherence.The fourth reason I suspect is the one behind some of the students'

hostility. Many of us (not only students) are more comfortable with stories thatmake sense, that build from the simple to the complex, that have no cracks.The history of academic story-telling in what we call "disciplines" reinforces thistendency; through our various disciplinary narratives we gain an unshakablefaith in the ability of one discipline (our own!) to make sense out of everything,or at least everything in a certain area. By inviting disciplines to talk to, andcritique, each other, we a r ~ ~ n g i n g students to question that conviction. Wecall it teaching s f i l a e i i t s - - t ~ think; the students see it as setting sail on a sea withno shores.

What I earlier called the "new-look" liberal arts is an attempt to draw thestrengths from the centuries-old tradition of liberal arts and sciences education,and wed them to new ways of critically thinking through ideas. Put negatively,it is an attempt to cover some weaknesses of (or answer some questions in) theliberal arts with interdisciplinary understanding, and vice versa.

To what sort of (potential) weaknesses or questions am I referring? Thereare the ones you would expect: suspicion on the part of more specializeddisciplines toward a perceived lack of focus in interdisciplinary study; the sensethat liberal arts education is impractical, or worse, the luxury of the wealthy,idle, or unmotivated; the difficulty in modem times of ascertaining the goals andbeneficiaries of a liberal education; and the constant public and governmentsuspicion concerning liberal education that does not unequivocally lead to (orbetter yet, create) identifiable jobs.

Also, there are potential weaknesses that arise in practice: how do youmove from multidisciplinarity to interdisciplinarity? How is interdisciplinaritypossible when faculty have been trained within disciplines, and are mostcomfortable staying there? Do we need interdisciplinarity if we incorporate92 Dianoill


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basic skills such as speaking, writing, and critical thinking into courses in everydiscipline?These "weaknesses" become apparent in a modern age that has changed

the focus of education, or more specifically, the sense of the value of education.But to understand the modern tensions in the liberal arts, it will be necessary 10understand some of the origins of the liberal arts.

THE MEDIEVAL NOTION OF LIBERAL ARTS"Liberal arts" is a very old concept. Medieval universities, while they hadtheir higher specialties, purported to give the arts student a well-rounded

education in the seven "liberal arts": the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, logic), andthe quadrivium (arithmetic, astronomy, geometry, music). The specialtiestheology, law, medicine-assumed this basic grounding, at least in the earlyMiddle Ages. Originally, then, students needed some fundamentals before theycould move on to the "higher" (i.e., more applied) disciplines.The progressivist understanding of the liberal arts, though, must betempered with the conviction that there is a cOnunorraHfy to the liberal arts.

This commonality is expressed well in Dianoia's mission statement (inside frontcover): "separate disciplines do not have to l o o ~ for common ground: insofaras they are part of education, they already share this common ground .But what commonality is there? We might talk of the unity of humanexperience, but originally it seems that the unity was more a matter of methodand expression than experience. In the medieval version of liberal arts,commonality came from Aristotle's systematic categorization of all knowledge.There was no commonality of substance or content between areas of inquiry (for

example, the studies of terrestrial and celestial motion had nothing in commonat all); every area began with its own unique presuppositions. The commonalitywas found in deductive method (which is why logic was important) and inexpression (which is why grammar and rhetoric were important). Thequadrivium, then, was important as the most abstract applications of deductivemethod and expression. So knowledge was fragmented, bound together only bythe skills and methods of discovery and inference provided by the liberal arts.

There are several things to note about the medieval version of the liberalarts. First, "liberal" implied "abstract." It was assumed that if the studentcould master the abstract, the concrete would come as a matter of course.Individual members of a class, whether that class was biological or logical, wereinsignificant; if you knew that a set had a certain characteristic, finding out howindividuals in that set varied was irrelevant. The disregard for the concrete wasbuilt into the structure of liberal arts education, and explains why the problemSpring 1995 93


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of individuation was such a major preoccupation for philosophy in the lateMiddle Ages.

Second, "liberal" also implied "foundational." I f students had thegroundwork, they should be able to build up the superstructure of knowledge.Liberal education came with all the implications of any foundationalism-thatbuilding on the foundation guarantees knowledge, that progress is possible, thatstructure assures the reliability of content.

The metaphor of the foundation calls up images of architecture. Afoundation suggests that a body of knowledge is a static thing, built for centuriesof use, like medieval cathedrals. A good foundation means that a structure willhave permanence. Permanence meant that the structure could be built larger andmore elaborately. A liberal education in its original sense, therefore, assumesthe progressive, permanent nature of knowledge.

Third, as the name suggests, the "liberal" arts had something to do withliberty, or freedom. These arts were liberal in two ways. First, they were thearts that a free person could undertake (the original meaning of the term "liberalarts"). This sense of the term "liberal" points to class divisions. The liberalarts were the pursuit of r e l a ~ i v e l y well-off freemen. They were possible becausesome people had access to family wealth, or had some other form of income.Not everyone was liberated in the sense that the liberal arts required. Slavesand women, for example, were left out, as were those who did not have thefinancial resources to support this type of education.

As well, the liberal arts could be seen as the "liberating" arts, in that theyfreed the student to have access to knowledge. The second definition suggeststhat if students had the necessary intellectual tools, they could explore any areaof knowledge. But what were these tools? They were the tools of abstraction,inference, analysis, and expression of a coherent argument that would persuadean opponent. They were tools that, while not necessarily useful only inconfrontation, certainly historically found their use there. The medieval systemof education was more akin to warfare than anything else-the lecturers gave thestudents ammunition by reading and explaining the texts of the Bible, Augustine,Aristotle, Peter Lombard, or whoever. Fully armed, the students waged mockbattles called disputations, in which all issues had two sides and masters andstudents tried to thrust and parry their way to logical victory. The liberal artswere the tools of war, not of peace, and they taught confrontation, notcooperation. Construction of a viable position on anything always came at theexpense of the destruction of an opponent.

Finally, a liberal arts education was not the goal of education, but theprerequisite. Although it rarely happened (due to financial pressures), a bachelorof arts was supposed to be preparation for practical arts like medicine or law,

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or even more abstract ones, like theology. Many teachers in the faculty of Artsstayed for only two or three years, and taught to make money while they wereworking on a higher degree. Scholarship that came out of the liberal arts oftentended to be inferior in quality, although there were some important exceptions(see Kenny and Pinborg, 1982: 11-17). Thus, even at the beginning, the liberalarts were seen as a necessary prerequisite for more lucrative pursuits.

The historical sketch above may seem to throw a negative light on theliberal arts, in that I seem to be implying that the liberal arts are simply abstract,heirarchical, class-driven, and combative. Are they not useful? Of course theyare. My point is simply that the liberal arts are the product of a historicalprocess that has a certain beginning. While this beginning does not necessitatepresent-day practice in the liberal arts, it is still useful to reflect on the positiveand negative aspects of the origins of the liberal arts, and how those originsecho down to the present day.

The liberal arts, then, have an ambiguous philosophical heritage. Aneducation in the liberal arts of the Middle Ages was thoroughly rooted in anAristotelian understanding of the compartmentalization of knowledge, andconvinced its students of the relative unimportance of i I1dividual experience totruth, and of the split between the theoretical and the prlletical. On the otherhand, the students also gained a keen sense of the importance of the place ofdiscourse in thought (after all, they became experts in dialectic and disputation).The medievals recognized that knowledge had some commonality, even if it wasonly logical. And, contrary to the Renaissance slurs against the Middle Ages,a great deal of important work was done on the nature of the human mind,social organization, spirituality, and other areas of human concern.

My students may be justified in feeling frustrated, but perhaps the realsource of that frustration comes from the realization that the liberal model ofeducation itself has its own cracks. As a professor, I may be looking for thesame thing my intellectual history students are: a nice linear story, a method thatonce applied would guarantee a certain kind of product-the liberally-educatedstudent. But before giving up on making sense of the liberal arts, I have onetrick left in my bag. Maybe the liberal arts can be retooled using a newtemplate: interdisciplinarity.

INTERDISCIPLINARITY AND THE LIBERAL ARTSInterdisciplinarity does not assume that knowledge is constructed on a

foundation, but rather that it is located in the interstices of traditional disciplines.Interdisciplinary research and teaching tends to be concrete, rather than abstract,and as such occurs in the creative tension and interplay that happens when

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disciplines address a common issue or engage in some dialogue. Each disciplinebecomes that which constructively illuminates the presuppositions andcommitments of the other, rather than attempting to subsume aU other disciplinesunder one way of knowing. Interdisciplinarity assumes cooperation, notconfrontation, and at its best is democratic, rather than hierarchical. And formany, interdisciplinarity is the goal of education, the place where the mostinteresting research is conducted.

This makes interdisciplinarity sound like the cure-all for the limitations ofthe liberal arts. However, it must be recognized that there are problems andlimitations inherent in interdisciplinarity itself. How, for example, can we avoidthe danger of simply mining other disciplines for the benefit of one discipline?Can we avoid a "transdisciplinary" totalizing vision (or would we even wantto?), which makes all disciplines the handmaids of one new "meta-discipline?"(see Klein, 1990 and my review in Janz, 1994). Is it possible to come to astronger realization of t h ~ ~ d e n t i t y of particular disciplines in cooperativedialogue with other disciplines,'or does the field necessarily become competitiveand isolationist? And, perhaps most importantly, does interdisciplinarity actuallywater down research and teaching, making dilettantes and amateurs of us all?It may be that the rootedness of the historical liberal arts is needed to focusinterdisciplinarity and provide the initial basis for dialogue (similar issues areraised in Bonner, 1994).

Like my students, I have to come to terms with the fact that there is nogrand unifying narrative that "makes sense" out of education once and for all.Liberal arts education in the modem university is being transformed, and a newmodel for understanding knowledge is emerging. The emphasis on interdisciplinary research and teaching is a move in that direction, but it has to benoted that this represents a change in the nature of liberal arts teaching, fromfoundation to interrelation, from abstraction to intersubjectivity, from precondition of knowledge to touchstone of knowledge, from suspicion to cooperation. At the same time, it is also not a change at all, but a recovery, arepetition (in Kierkegaard's sense), an attempt to restate for a new time whatwas valuable about a past practice.

The point, then, is that things are not as simple as they seem. Liberal artsdoes not have the unequivocally positive history that we might think. And,interdisciplinarity has its problems as well. Some kind of self-consciousdialogue is necessary between the two.

Well, will any of this satisfy the recalcitrant students in our interdisciplinary history of ideas course? Perhaps not. Maybe I'm not looking fora cure at this point, but just an explanation for their frustration and a way toframe the right questions about liberal education. These ruminations do tell methat more thought has to be put into the new-look liberal arts before we can96 Dianoia


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claim to have perfected anything. But then, maybe perfection is overrated-afterall, it can also mean stagnation.

WORKS CITEDBonner, Kieran. 1994. Interdisciplinary dialogue and the tension between

thinking and the university order: An exercise in radical interpretiveinquiry. In Dianoia 3(2)/4(1) Spring: 1-24.Janz, Bruce. 1994. Review of Interdisciplinarity: History, Theory, and Practice,

by Julie Thompson Klein. In Dianoia 3(2)/4(1) Spring:138-140.Kenny, Anthony and Jan Pinborg. 1982. Medieval Philosophical Literature. In

The Cambridge History ofLater Medieval Philosophy. Edited by NormanKretzmann, Anthony Kenny and Jan Pinhorg, 11-42. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.

Klein, Julie Thompson. 1990. Interdisciplinarity: History. Theory, andPractice.Detroit: Michigan: Wayne State Press.

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janz, b. - but it doesnt make sense to me

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