More on restructuring higher education .... go multinational!

Professor Sheila Croucher likens academic departments to nation-states, and provides a fantastic argument on why that model will not work.

She wants us to go multinational--well, not by starting branch campuses in the Dubais and Bangalores of the world, but by doing away with this old, parochial, department nation-state model.

Croucher writes:

[Disciplinary] identities and departmental attachments are somehow irrational, or that their promoters and defenders have bad intentions. Traditional disciplines and departments have met, and may continue to meet, important needs and serve valuable purposes—for the individual faculty members within them, the chairs who lead them, the institutions that house them, and the students who are educated by them. Disciplines, like nations, constitute a community of kind—of shared interests, ideas, and intellectual commitments. Members of disciplinary communities share a language (some literally); they share a history, heroes, sacred texts, symbols, vocabulary. Having been powerfully socialized into those communities, most faculty members find a stable, fulfilling source of intellectual and perhaps social belonging in their disciplines, and are likely to see departmental status as the means of preserving their interests.
Yet, as has happened with nation-states in a global era, there are now educational and practical reasons to question the utility of existing models.

As one who has been educated in, and has worked in, many disciplines (electrical engineering, urban planning, economics, environmental resource management, geography) I suppose I could be one of the easiest to be convinced :) 

As Croucher points out, "discipline" does not equal "department" ... Croucher adds:

As universities ponder transcending the conventional model of academic nation-states, those with concerns about their attachments to disciplines need to be assured that these forms of belonging are valued and can be preserved. In fact, scholars of interdisciplinary learning, such as Veronica Boix-Mansilla, have emphasized the need for rigorous engagement with disciplinary knowledge to advance interdisciplinary learning. Integrative or interdisciplinary learning is not antidisciplinary. Similarly, those faculty members who fear that departmental status is the only possible path to safety and security need to be assured with open conversations as well as transparent and democratically conceived policies that that is not the case.
If the international system (comprising a wide diversity of nations, states, ethnic groups, and identities) can recognize and give way to new, multiple, and fluid forms of attachment and governance, surely agreeing on some form of academic reconfiguration is feasible. First, however, people need reminding that "discipline" is not a synonym for "department," that disciplines themselves do, or should, regularly adapt to changing contexts and undergird rather than detract from integrative efforts, and that the freedoms and fairness important to us all can and most certainly should be preserved, whatever the emergent structures.

Yes, Prof. Croucher!

If only I could convince my esteemed colleagues!