Frank Kogan

I think there would be real difficulties in connecting something like The DDR (if we can call it that? Too late, I just did) with the academic world, certainly in Britain, and I guess that some of the same problems apply in the US.

1) The basic one is the pressure on academics to produce work which conforms to certain protocols, which even if they were not specifically designed to isolate them within disciplines, and to set them off from the outside world, might as well have been, since that's the effect they have. This pressure is I think worse now than it was ten years ago: if publishing more peer-reviewed journal articles aimed at other specialists is what it takes to get promotion in a very competitive environment, time spent doing something different is time wasted. Obviously this isn't true of everybody, and there are academics who reach a level of fluency in their writing so that turning out a book review, or a newspaper article, or a blog post, isn't too great a burden.

2) As other people have commented, interdisciplinary is really only a buzz word for marketing certain types of research to funders: I could consider myself an 'interdisciplinary' researcher, since I have published on political theory, philosophy, the visual arts, literature and literary theory. But in reality, very little of what I've published would be recognised as a contribution to 'philosophy' or 'political theory' by the people who work in those disciplines full time. In pessimistic moods I worry that academic disciplines are concerned primarily with perpetuating themselves through time , and that this primarily means producing young researchers who are sufficiently like the older ones. I have excellent qualifications, and it took me a long time to get the equivalent of a tenured job: it took several people whose opinions I trusted to persuade me that this was partly because my work wasn't obviously central to the way people saw the discipline i.e. my profile looked funny, so when it came to hiring, people were suspicious of you. In the end, I had to change not just the way I presented what I did, but what I did.

3) The kind of 'outcomes' (academic research jargon: i.e. what you want the DDR to DO) that I suspect you're interested in, Frank, (make people think harder, connect people together, open paths) could only ever be of secondary or concomitant interest from an academic point of view. The worst thing about the system in which I work is that there are no institutional incentives for the things most people who go into the profession care about, and specifically for teaching undergraduates! We are assessed, judged and evaluated largely on the research papers which go to other professionals in our disciplines -- time spent caring about anything else simply isn't recognised. Even when individuals overcome this (which certainly as far as teaching goes, they do quite a lot in my experience, since it brings its own rewards) I can't see an HE institution (in the UK, anyway) recognising something like the DDR as an asset, because it would be aiming for things which can't be easily measured (either in terms of research papers produced, or more commonly these days, in terms of other money raised). Interdisciplinary research units tend to be set up either to attract postgraduates paying high fees, or because the criteria set by research funding bodies happen to specify interdisciplinarity. Follow the money: because of the squeeze on HE funding in the UK, universities are only interested in spending money on things which will attract more money.