Interdisciplinary Programs

NC State Interdisciplinary Programs promote a campus culture of interdisciplinary excellence and collaboration across academic boundaries.

Interdisciplinarity at NC State

At its heart, interdisciplinarity at NC State is about working together to accomplish what would not be possible individually. It is teamwork that leverages the lived and disciplinary perspectives of individuals.

Sometimes our interdisciplinary is what the National Academy of Sciences (2005) has called multidisciplinary, in which team members might “work separately on distinct aspects of a problem.” Multidisciplinary is often orchestrated. In other cases, our approach is transdisciplinary, wherein individuals come together to forge a new field, approach, or tool that transcends disciplines. Often, our interdisciplinarity sits between these extremes in contexts in which individuals with different experiences and disciplinary backgrounds work together, sometimes with multidisciplinary orchestration, sometimes more with the organic improvisation of jazz, and every so often, in ways that create an entirely new whole.

In universities, interdisciplinarity is often in the service of new curiosity-driven discoveries. This is part of our interdisciplinarity too, but our focus is on that interdisciplinarity in the service of helping to create better conditions for humans and other species. We live in a time of great change. In the context of that change, we seek to work through Extension and other forms of community engagement to listen to the public and understand the immediate long-term needs of the state and world. We also work with artists and other creatives to understand, in light of these needs, which kinds of futures might be possible, that we might work across disciplines toward those that we collectively desire.

Embedded in our work at NC State is not only an effort to employ interdisciplinarity in solving problems but also to teach in ways that model and involve this approach. In doing so, we teach students how to work together, but also how to play leadership roles, how to listen to each other, and how to think through the context in which to add values to their ideas so that those ideas leave the university grounds and make a change in society.

Interdisciplinarity is everywhere at NC State. It is embedded in the university’s origin. The university was founded in response to the discipline-spanning needs of the people of the state. More recently, one of the great legacy decisions of then Chancellor Randy Woodson, working with then Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Warwick Arden, was to fund and orchestrate the Chancellor’s Faculty Excellence Program clusters. Through this program, faculty worked with leadership to identify areas in which clusters of discipline-spanning hires would have the biggest impact on the university’s mission. The focal areas of these clusters tended to focus on either techniques (bioinformatics) or challenges (global change). Collectively, these hires brought more than eighty faculty to NC State; these faculty play a key role in disrupting the traditional silos of university research, teaching, and engagement. An article in the Chronicle of Higher Education referred to this investment as then Chancellor Woodson’s “big swing.”