Smith offers as an example generations of South Africans, who, he says, were shaped by the church and state's white supremacy. While that panel looks beyond the university to probe the meaning of reconciliation, other events take on conflicts within the academy. Workshops scheduled for this spring, for instance, will apply some ideas discussed during the symposium to the Emory community. Though intellectual engagement across the disciplines is a basic goal of the year, organizers recognize the barriers to successful interdisciplinary work. Time constraints can also discourage faculty from interdisciplinary work.
Faculty seem less and less to have a life outside the university.
The conflict among those personal and professional roles is part of the cost of caring about academic excellence. The concern is that their caring not become pathological. When the environment changes, it's no longer adaptive. And that may be the case with the pressure to publish so extensively in a narrow field that interdisciplinary research sometimes becomes a hindrance to achieving tenure. The tendency to count the numbers of publications rather than evaluate their quality compounds the problem.