Interdisciplinarity and Faculty Careers

• In Event: 262 - Section on Science, Knowledge, and Technology Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 05.

Abstract

Many incentives encourage faculty to do interdisciplinary research. However, faculty career paths are defined by disciplines and departments, and career advancement is determined through evaluations by disciplinary experts. Interdisciplinary work may be risky for faculty, especially those in disciplines with well-defined boundaries that establish what is (and is not) legitimate disciplinary research. To assess the risk of interdisciplinarity to faculty careers, we examine the career arcs of faculty at Stanford University from 1993 to 2008. We use natural language processing techniques to construct a text-based measure of interdisciplinarity that compares the language in a faculty member’s published papers to the discourse of broader disciplines. Using semi-parametric survival analyses, we show that interdisciplinarity is associated with an increased risk of departure from the tenure line without tenure, especially in disciplines that are highly paradigmatic.
By focusing on individual scholars and their careers, we explore an under-theorized aspect of how interdisciplinarity does (or does not) occur in academia as a result of individuals’ motivations, evaluations, and career outcomes. The literature on interdisciplinary scholarship often focuses on institutions and the organization of knowledge production. This gives little attention to individual scholars and their motives, in spite of the fact that faculty research is self-guided, and faculty themselves decide whether or not to engage in interdisciplinary research.

Authors

• Eliza Evans, Stanford University

• Daniel A. McFarland, Stanford University