Global ChangeIntersection of Nature and Culture

In this week’s issue of Nature: The urgent need for more interdisciplinary, solutions-driven university research

Wednesday, November 11th, 2009

The president of the University of Alberta, Indira Samarasekera, argues in the current issue of Nature (subscription required) that we need to push university research towards more-interdisciplinary, solutions-focused work that helps the world deal with major financial, social, and environmental issues.  She makes the point that traditional, pure research is also needed but that we now have to do both well.

Although she doesn’t mention teaching, I’d argue that this kind of interdisciplinary transformation, focusing on major contemporary problems and the balancing of pure and applied inquiry, also needs to happen on the curricular side of campus.

Here are a few of her thoughts…

Some excerpts:

Over the past year, academic leaders from around the world have met to contemplate the future of higher education and university research, against the backdrop of global financial upheaval.  As president of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, I have participated in some of these international roundtables. My conclusion? It is time to construct a new social contract between research universities and their public and private partners: one that both promotes the pursuit of basic research and encourages solution driven work.

This push towards more solution-driven research funding, which pre-dates the recession, is a source of growing concern for many academic researchers, and for good reason. They are worried about the potential devaluation of basic-science research and arts scholarship, which have led to profound advances in human knowledge and to major commercial successes. Such ‘blue-skies’ research was, until recently, considered the mainstay of universities and a crucial part of the education of undergraduate and graduate students, and it must remain so.

But academic thinking and funding mechanisms have not kept pace with the dual imperatives of blue-skies research and solution-driven research. It is time to bridge this gap.

The most urgent problems demanding scientific and technological research attention today are global — from international security to energy, environmental sustainability and economic recovery. To be fast and effective, we must stimulate and support interdisciplinary, inter-profession and inter-sector approaches, funded internationally.

Some specific points:

• The establishment of “collaboratories” partnering higher education with industry and government can facilitate new kinds of solutions-driven research.
• Funding sources need to become responsive and nimble, such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which provides $100,000 seed grants (based on brief grant proposals with quick turnaround time) and follow-up funding up to an additional $1 million for successful or promising projects.
• She argues that inertia and inflexibility are major impediments.  But this misses another structural obstacle:  Promotion in higher education has been based traditionally on excellence and publication within specialized disciplines.  Higher education’s reward system still runs orthogonally to the kinds of collaborative interdisciplinary work that’s needed.

Related post: “The University’s Crisis of Purpose”

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