By Jerry A. Jacobs. These days, the term "interdisciplinary" is increasingly assumed to be synonymous with "innovative." The popular notion seems to be that the solutions to real-world problems require the insights of cross-trained researchers, or at least interdisciplinary teams. Indeed, interdisciplinary initiatives are springing up on campuses everywhere. 
For example, Arizona State has reorganized its college of arts and sciences along interdisciplinary lines, and Brown University’s program to support an extra year of graduate interdisciplinary training, which received a $2-million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, is in its second year. Read more...

Date: 10 Apr 2014
Start Time: 10:00 am
Location/venue: Room 208, Attenborough Building University of Leicester Leicester, England, LE1 7RH

The workshop is designed to examine how we can best utilise and integrate different disciplinary perspectives from the vibrant multidisciplinary field of Alcohol Studies into modules on the history of alcohol. It will also discuss the development of digital learning and teaching resources to support such modules. More...

By Alejandra Dubcovsky. I love the sciences. Because my father was a scientist, I grew up surrounded by talk of running gels, western blots, and poorly calibrated centrifuges. I desperately wanted to be a scientist. First and foremost, to prove to my dad that I could—he was convinced that science was not for me. But also because its importance was easily understood by others. I did not have to explain why I wanted to study science or even what I wanted to study. Throwing out the word "science" seemed to calm anyone’s anxiety about my future. That anxiety is at the heart of current debates about the growth and importance of the STEM fields—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—and, in turn, the decline of humanities majors. Why should students major in English when they could be engineers? Don’t computer-science majors make much more money than those who study philosophy? What does a classics major even do? Science matters, period. The humanities, on the other hand, are interesting at best and superfluous at worst. Or so the current debates, which pit STEM against the humanities, lead us to believe. More...