Letter from the Director | Summer 2006
Memorial Day 2006
Memorial Day 2006: And so approaches our favorite time of year-the time when we all imagine that we can get some work done. For many academics, summer means leaving the city and a chance to enjoy the reassuring sound of wood chippers and lawn mowers. This is not the case for the vast majority of our eight million or so immediate neighbors (and ISERP staff). Nor is it the case for much of our research-which remains centered on New York. This issue of the newsletter features a small sample of some of the urban-specifically NYC-focused research and activities at ISERP. The projects highlighted in these pages arise from interdisciplinary collaboration and deploy novel methodological approaches to provide new insights into old problems. We do not think that this is coincidental but instead note that the methodological strategies used in these projects arose as a response to specific disciplinary problems.
Sudhir Venkatesh (Sociology) has worked for some time to bring the Revson Fellowship to ISERP. Each year, the program brings to Columbia ten of the most important city activists, doers, leaders, and innovators whose work has made substantial contributions to the life of the city-through law, film, social activism, and program creation. While Revson Fellowships are designed to provide Fellows with new intellectual and social tools for their careers and work, we anticipate that influence will flow both ways. Fellows bring to our community enormous reservoirs of practical knowledge, street science, and creativity. ISERP hopes to build on the Revson connection to deepen our research engagement with the city and to help shape urban public policy in the years to come.
In addition to the Revson program, ISERP continues to develop and expand the set of interdisciplinary curricular and training programs that we believe play a crucial role in advancing social science. The logic of these programs is becoming increasingly clear. Firstly, it is now commonplace to notice that disciplinary barriers can hinder developing knowledge. Intellectual advancement often takes place at the intersections of two or more disciplines. This includes not only fields borrowing ideas, methods, and approaches from each other but offering new paradigms from which to see the traditional puzzles of a discipline. Secondly, isolated disciplinary training during the PhD phase is unlikely to develop the assets needed for collaborative interdisciplinary research at the faculty level. These assets (e.g., appreciation for other disciplines and awareness of diverse methods) are often presumed to be generated after graduate training-the time when interdisciplinary collaborations typically begin. This seems more difficult to achieve, however, than developing these capacities at the formative stage of academic careers. Thirdly, when undergraduate education is strictly disciplinary, it is likely to be less successful. Undergraduates seem better able to acquire knowledge and think critically when coursework integrates ideas and approaches from multiple disciplines. Thus, in producing future faculties for undergraduate education, graduate training needs to produce professors who understand and can incorporate ideas and methods from different fields into their teaching. All of these elements point toward the need to develop interdisciplinary skills and training programs. At the same time, we need to be careful. Critics of disciplinary training often embrace an image of knowledge acquisition that completely disavows discipline in favor of a vacuous interdisciplinary stew. We find that this approach impoverishes rather than enriches our knowledge base. The trick is to not ignore disciplinary differences but to build on them.
ISERP will be open all summer. Projects are on-going. Feel free to come by. We have air-conditioning.
Peter Bearman, Director
Institute of Social and Economic
Research and Policy
