From: crawford@thyme.cs.ucdavis.edu (Rick Crawford)
Newsgroups: sci.environment
Subject: Re: Interdisciplinary Science
Date: 10 Nov 92 02:23:23 GMT
Organization: Department of Computer Science, University of California, Davis

In article <1992Oct31.165224.9196@slustl.slu.edu> guy@slustl.slu.edu (Guy Smith) writes:
>In article <burt.720502852@aupair.cs.athabascau.ca> burt@aupair.cs.athabascau.ca (Burt Voorhees) writes:
>>But we do need interdisciplinary work in order to deal with the
>>really complex systems which we are going to have to deal with
>>in the future.  So there does need to be some way of encouraging
>>people to develop broad interests, and a way of training them
>>to effectively pursue those interests.
>
>One aspect of academia that tends to discourage interdisciplinary work is
>rigid departmental boundaries (we hired you to do ...., not to fool around
>with xxxx). The problem is clearly not insurmountable but it does
>exist. When departments are set up to serve specialist needs, generalists
>tend to have a harder go of it. In my experience, you are much more likely
>to get a position if you fit into a well defined slot. Departments in
>my field (Geophysics and Geology) seem to generally look for a person
>to fill a predefined research specialty (or maybe one of several) and
>if you don't fit the predefined criteria, your chances of being hired are
>significantly lessened.

For those who get past the initial hiring filters at the Univ. of Calif.,
our performance is nominally rated in 3 categories:  research, teaching,
and public service.  As you might expect, although teaching and public
service get periodic lip service, our research performance is the primary
criterion.  I suggest that, aside from the inherent psychological snobbery
of academia, one major reason for the primacy of research is that it
*appears* more amenable to "impartial, objective" assessment.

In particular, it's easy to *quantify* how many articles you published,
and give a quantitative measure -- purportedly of their impact --
by using a citation index.  Because of the info. glut, most people
can't even keep up with developments in their own specialty, so
they tend to read less outside their own field.  Thus, use of the
citation index in performance evaluations tends to measure the
visibility of an article to researchers *in the same field*.

I would prefer some broadly-based, if subjective, measures that would
weight public service much higher.  Otherwise, academia will continue
its slide into cultural irrelevance as our 2-tier society continues
to split between the haves and the have-nots, and between those who
create technology and those who "consume" it (or, increasingly,
those who are consumed *by* technology).

I suggest that communication modes like Usenet offer perhaps
the best hope for lowering the threshold of activation energy
required to undertake interdisciplinary, collaborative research.

With the election of Clinton/Gore, there is much hope for an explicit
(rather than a default, pork-barrel) national *technology policy*.
Along those lines, I include some text announcing a new report from
the World Resources Institute:

  * The report, entitled Backs to the Future: U.S. Government Policy
  * Toward Environmentally Critical Technology, was authored by George
  * Heatton and Robert Repetto, and is billed by the Institute as "the
  * first attempt in this country to define and identify areas of
  * technological advance that would markedly reduce the environmental
  * burdens of economic progress."
  *
  * The authors focus on government policy because it strongly
  * influences the development of new technologies, "from research
  * dollars and procurement decisions to infrastructure design and
  * standard-setting," an Institute news release added.
  *   ...
  * Backs to the Future's recommendations, the release said, include
  * the creating of a national research and development (R&D)
  * institute, altering the missions of the national laboratories, and
  * changing criteria for funding environmental R&D.

-rick
Newsgroups: sci.environment