RoveretoThe+Matrix+1

The Matrix 1

**The Lack of Interdisciplinary Programs and Research in Our Education System **


The sustainable diploma: A truly interdisciplinary education that teaches the importance and implications of ecology(**top center**), sciences(**top left**), engineering(**left**), economics(**middle left**), culture(**lower middle and middle right**), and public health(**right**) **Bottom Left:** RPI's Biotech and Interdisciplinary Research Center. **Bottom Center:** The interdisciplinary plan for the sustainable control of water-related infectious diseases.

In college we have majors that students are divided into, each with specific class paths, which more or less funnel directly into career paths. While this may seem to be a reasonable way to go about education, what it really accomplishes is the lack of communication and understanding between fields later in one's career. The college and university institution as it exists today is focused on producing people educated deeply in one specific subject, while minimizing or altogether ignoring broader - spectrum education. This is especially true for science programs (Golde 1999). Interdisciplinary programs are focused more on the broader education of the individual. The narrow-mindedness that today's higher education format breeds in students needs to change if current sustainability issues are to be solved and future problems prevented.

The Problem:
The problem with the United States’ university system can be indexed most clearly at the doctoral level, where original research must be done and the product of this research is analyzed in order to determine if a doctorate degree is earned. Annually, over 40,000 Ph.D.s are granted by over 350 universities in various disciplines in the United States alone (Golde 1999). The main issue, however, is not the amount of people earning Ph.D.s but rather the type of training and education received. Science doctoral students are most often trained extremely narrowly in a subspecialty in their given field, instead of getting a larger breadth of knowledge and experience than in their undergraduate years. This perpetuating problem is caused by the principles at the very core of our doctoral education system.


 * 1) Singular academic departments are the primary hub for control of doctoral education. The drive for recognition from within their field fosters a drive to produce research for their field (Golde 1999).
 * 2) Students work with individual faculty members that exercise great power over the direction of students’ studies. Most often, the doctoral advisor’s research provides the foundation for a students’ dissertation, providing strong incentives to follow that advisor’s research direction (Golde 1999).
 * 3) This actually extends past the educational institution to the source of its funding. Since WWII, the federal government has located the majority of federally-funded research within universities, instead of within independent labs, the general procedure in other nations. The research grants are awarded to faculty members, who use this money to pay for students’ tuitions and research expenses, further strengthening the ties between advisor and doctoral student (Golde 1999).

Interdisciplinary studies are those that include the information and thought processes of at least two different fields. These fields may be traditionally closely related, like chemistry and biochemistry, or distant both from an information and conceptual standpoint, like anthropology and engineering disciplines (Golde 1999). This term applies not only to a style of education, but also to the cooperation and participation of people from multiple fields on a specific issue. However it is important to differentiate between cooperation and collaboration. When professionals from separate fields each work on a topic, and make their research available to each other, that is cooperation, which is not really interdisciplinary research. The “interdisciplinary” type of research is when all the different disciplines involved in the project work in tandem, lending their knowledge as well as their methodology and reasoning process. This integration of both knowledge and thought process across different fields is the basis for true interdisciplinarity (Golde 1999). Though it is impossible to state solid statistics on a concept like interdisciplinarity, there exist numerous examples that prove not only the utility, but the very necessity of interdisciplinary cooperation in today’s world.

Sustainable Control of Water-Related Infectious Diseases:
One ongoing example of the crucial role interdisciplinary research and action must play in effecting positive change is in the control of water-related infectious diseases. In the past, and even now, infectious disease intervention has proven to be less than sustainable over long periods of time. Dengue fever was wiped out in the Americas for decades before reemerging in a more virulent form (Batterman et al. 2009). The inability to keep these infectious diseases under control is a direct result of a weak grasp on the complexity of the situation. Current and past interventions to reduce the incidence and emergence of infectious diseases have been crippled due to their focus on the obvious immediate, short-term risk factors, or proximal causes of infection transmission. Their lack of attention to the more removed and difficult to understand causal factors is the source of unsustainable solutions (Ewel, 2001).

As of 2004, 80% of death and illness in the developing world is water related, and diarrhea and malaria account for 34% of the mortality in children less than 5 years old (Batterman et al. 2009). The number of deaths from water-related disease approaches 5 million annually. These deaths, most of which should be preventable, occur among the roughly 1.2 billion people worldwide without access to safe drinking water and the 2.5 billion without access to sanitation services (Batterman et al. 2009). The concept of sustainable water use is defined by the authors of the article on these water-related diseases as “use of water that supports the ability of human society to endure and flourish into the indefinite future without undermining the integrity of the hydrologic cycle of the ecologic systems that depend on it (Batterman et al. 2009).” This definition lends itself to a focus on sustainable water management, when differs drastically from the traditional focus on human water usage.

Normally, the problem of water sanitation and clean water distribution is undertaken on an individual discipline basis:
 * The ecologist studies the microbial counts in the water and their pattern of distribution,
 * The engineer designs the sanitation plant and drainage systems,
 * The anthropologist studies how a group’s beliefs affected how they perceived water and its purification,
 * The economist figures out how to make a sanitation system cost-effective and how to get citizens to pay for the service,
 * People in the public health field study the effectiveness of pesticides or other disease control techniques on the health of a population.

Yet none of these approaches, performed in isolation from one another, have been able to produce a reliable and sustainable solution to the problems with water-related diseases. Without a joint initiative from many disciplines, the problem cannot be addressed in its entirety and will thus continue unabated (Batterman et al. 2009).

The stakeholders in this massive matrix issue can be shown to include everyone, as the core issue is the perpetuation of a restricted mindset that impairs problem-solving capability in the very professionals that are needed to work on sustainability issues (Golde 1999). The students are the most obvious stakeholders, but teachers, administrators, and even the populations of the areas where sustainability projects are being studied or developed also have a stake in the correction of these educational problems (Ewel, 2001).

Solutions:
In recent years, fortunately, there have been great improvements in both the inclusion of interdisciplinarity in education as well as in research and action. Interdisciplinarity, a core aspect of engineering and social science programs for a long time, has now spread to other fields, most notable the fields of science, which were previously active in isolating themselves from each other. There are now many universities that emphasize their participation and utilization of interdisciplinary studies more than ever before, RPI included.

In a study conducted between 2002 and 2003, a survey was conducted to determine the interdisciplinary activities of researchers. It was found that 62% of graduate students surveyed reported having at least one interdisciplinary collaboration, while 49% of professors claimed to have done the same (Rhoten 2004). These rates show how the perception of interdisciplinary education and research are improving in scientific areas, although there is still much improvement to be made.

Some indications that the interdisciplinary research and action outside a university setting is improving is present as well, as evidenced by a plan for the better analysis of the intertwined problems in the control of water-related infectious diseases, based on interdisciplinary collaboration and a systems approach to the problem based on interactions and feedback, as shown by the figure below.



//Fig. 2. Conceptual framework of multidisciplinary health - based systems approach, from "Sustainable Control of Water - Related Infectious Diseases: A Review and Proposal for Interdisciplinary Health - Based Systems Research." __Environmental Health Perspectives__ 117 (2009): 1028.//

In the education section, there is still room for improvement. One major aid would be the cooperation of two or more academic departments in the offering of doctoral research. This would allow for a larger knowledge base necessary for effective and relatively simple interaction between the involved disciplines in interdisciplinary research (Golde 1999). The availability of dual degrees at the doctoral level would soon follow. Even at the undergraduate level, collaborative senior projects between different departments could be designed. These projects could be used to foster the necessary communicative and collaborative skills students will need to have to be able to solve complex problems. Changes like these at the university level would have a huge impact on the ability of researchers and professionals to have a more comprehensive and more accurate understanding of problems facing humanity and the planet. Once they can better visualize the intricacy of the problems, they will be infinitely more effective in solving them.

Works Cited:
Batterman, Stuart, et al. “Sustainable Control of Water – Related Infectious Diseases : A Review and Proposal for Interdisciplinary Health-Based Systems Research .” __Environmental Health Perspectives__ 117 (2009): 1023 – 1032.

Ewel, Katherine C. “Natural Resource Management: The Need for Interdisciplinary Collaboration.” __Ecosystems__ 4 (2001): 716 – 722.

Golde, Chris M., and Hanna Alix Gallagher. “The Challenges of Conducting Interdisciplinary Research in Traditional Doctoral Programs.” __Ecosystems__ 2 (1999): 281 – 285.

Rhoten, Diana, and Andrew Parker. “Risks and Rewards of an Interdisciplinary Research Path.” __Science__ 306 (2004): 2046.

Interesting Links:
Ghast, Alice. “The Multidisciplinary Forest of MIT: From Twigs to Canopy.” Interdisciplinary Research at MIT: Making Uncommon Connections. May 3, 2005. Retrieved October 23, 2005. < [] >

Koeller, David. “Experts, Novices, and General Education” Dialogue Symposium. September 2006. Retrieved Oct. 24, 2010.< [] >

McCants, Anne. Letter.“The Need for Interdisciplinary Education.” __MIT Faculty Newsletter__ 21 (March/April/May 2009) Retrieved Oct. 24, 2010.< [] >

Rensselaer Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies:[]

Collage Images:
Diploma: []

Ecology (Fall Scene): []

Chemistry (Flasks): []

Engineering (Triangles and Protractors):[| http://www.engineersweek.com/Engineering%20Image1.jpg]

Economics (Coins): []

Culture (Man and Canal): Fig. 1. A drainage canal constructed by local community efforts in Zaria City, Nigeria, a malaria region, from Batterman et al. "Sustainable Control of Water - Related Infectious Diseases: A Review and Proposal for Interdisciplinary Health - Based Systems Research." __Environmental Health Perspectives__ 117 (2009): 1024.

Multidisciplinary Approach to Water - Related Infectious Diseases (bottom center): Fig. 2. Conceptual framework of multidisciplinary health - based systems approach, from "Sustainable Control of Water - Related Infectious Diseases: A Review and Proposal for Interdisciplinary Health - Based Systems Research." __Environmental Health Perspectives__ 117 (2009): 1028.

Culture (Indian Woman): [|http://ecc.pima.edu/~sdobyns/images/j0400407.jpg]

Public Health (caduceus): [|http://health.vctx.org/HealthDepartment%5Ccaduceus.gif]

Interdisciplinary Mind (upper right):

[]

RPI Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies (bottom left): [| http://www.burthill.com/FILES/projects/733_550/RPI_Biotech_2.jpg]