Academics Anonymous: break down barriers between disciplines

The world is changing at an incredible rate. Pressing problems like climate change and the related social unrest are connected to an ever-growing population and dwindling resources. It has become clear that these vast problems cannot be answered by single academic disciplines, working within archaic institutional settings and throttled by systemic boundaries.

Working across disciplines is the key to answering the big questions, focusing on what is needed to solve problems, and transcending the boundaries of conventional approaches and disciplines. However, in academia we have put boundaries in place to stop this happening, and the pace of change to adopt new strategies is glacial at best.

Three ways we are stifling research

1. Traditionally, university campuses and departments are designed to keep disciplines apart in separate buildings. It's intriguing to contrast this to creative industries where shared social spaces are the norm. As well as these architectural barriers, we tend to hire and promote staff based on fundamentally flawed metrics that do not recognise or reward working across disciplines, application of research to the real world, or communication with wider society. To add insult to injury, we don't seem able to embrace the drive for interdisciplinarity in judging research success between universities.

2. The major funders are still discipline-specific. Our seven UK research councils are still divided up by topic, and research proposals are usually allocated to even narrower discipline-specific review panels within these systems. Although there have been some moves towards interdisciplinarity and multidisciplinarity (using two or more disciplines at once), it is still extremely difficult to get such research funded, as a new research council initiative demonstrates, with only three fellowships available.

To add to the problems, research councils are notorious for only funding safe proposals where you can prove that you are fairly sure of the outcome before you even start, hampering the creativity that is the powerhouse of good research. Then there is the huge confounding problem of widespread nepotism and sexism in peer-review where you are more likely to be awarded a grant if you are male and buddies with someone on the funding panel. All in all, perhaps not the ideal recipe for progressive research.

3. The UK education system focuses on streamlining students into highly specialised topics, rather than encouraging and rewarding generalists. This has left us in a position where our students are not well-placed to address the big questions currently facing us (as shown recently by economics students). Administrative difficulties hamper teaching across departments, let alone universities, and students are left with outdated training, provided by the wrong people, that is arguably not worth the money they are paying for it.

We need to rip up the rule books

When this topic comes up in the pub, I often hear colleagues say that the problem with working across disciplines is you end up with people who are not experts in anything.

In an era where the speed of progress in biosciences is accelerating, it's true that specialisation is necessary just to keep up with the data being produced. In fact, a whole new specialism, bioinformatics, has emerged to do just that. But the rebuttal to this is that we desperately need generalists to unify the specialist niches.

The really big problems of climate change, for example, can only be addressed by unifying thought from meteorologists, oceanographers, glaciologists, social scientists, behavioural scientists, political research, economists and so on. Unless we sort out the issues outlined above, we are facing a constant and unnecessary uphill battle to do the research that will save the world.

Universities used to be places full of troublemaking thinkers, but we have lost our edge and become irrelevant and outdated, sinking in systemic quagmires and "computer says no" attitudes.

Rewriting the rules

Here's what I'd do if I were the boss:

Hire and judge people on the quality and impact of their research, not on the journal they have published in.

Anonymise job and grant applications (for example using a two-step review system).

Allow interdisciplinary grants as standard that are reviewed by people from multiple disciplines.

Provide funding for pump-priming new collaboration attempts and risky "what-if" projects.

Bring experts from other institutions and industries into universities to provide specialised training to students while allowing academics to guide students in critical thinking and core skills.

Give students free choice of modules so they can graduate as generalists.

I would love to see those in power be brave enough to rip up the rule books of the systems restricting progression and rewrite the rules so that we reward the dot-connectors – and research once again becomes about creativity and discovery.

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