Words are funny things. Or maybe it’s that people are funny about some words: some words engender emotional responses far in excess of their meaning. It’s at that point that sometimes it’s worthwhile to avoid those words altogether and come up with alternatives.

One of our favorites is planning. Hard for a SCUPer to admit, but to some “planning” connotes a lack of action, the proverbial report on the shelf. On the contrary, planning is a very active enterprise. It is the act of making informed choices.  When we talk to people about making informed choices – about academic programs, institutional mission, the program for a facility – then planning makes a lot more sense, and they don’t tune out as much. The steps involved in good planning – defining the issue or problem, collecting relevant data, analyzing alternatives, setting priorities and making choices to do some things and not do others – are what go into the informed part of making informed choices. Using the phrase puts a bit more emphasis on outcome, not just process.

We’ve been thinking a bit about another hot button word – interdisciplinary. The connotations can be scary – sharing labs, sharing grants, putting tenure at stake. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interdisciplinary for a very interesting discussion about the barriers to interdisciplinary activity in higher education.) But the push toward consolidation is as indisputable as the new "interdisciplines" that have formed: biomedical engineering, neuroscience, cybernetics, and so forth.

Are there alternative words or phrases that we can substitute, that might reduce the negative reaction to the notion of cross- or multi- or interdisciplinary research and learning? What about integrative research? We’re looking for more – any ideas?

This fairly lengthy article is about cross-disciplinary perspectives and language differences making it difficult to create cross-fertilization that would come from productive conversations across disciplines. Much of it could as well pertain to administrative departments, planning processes, and so forth. The book this author recently published also looks interesting.

Many university administrators would like to remedy this situation. Over the past 10 years, numerous research universities' strategic plans have called for increased interdisciplinary work. Nonetheless, there is little evidence that it is happening.

The three common explanations for a lack of faculty interest in interdisciplinary work are that the academic reward system militates against it (hiring, promotion, salary increases, and most prizes are controlled by single disciplines, not by multiple disciplines), that there is insufficient funding for it, and that evaluating it is fraught with conflict. These are significant barriers.

However, while doing research for my new book, Interdisciplinary Conversations: Challenging Habits of Thought, I found an even more fundamental barrier to interdisciplinary work: Talking across disciplines is as difficult as talking to someone from another culture. Differences in language are the least of the problems; translations may be tedious and not entirely accurate, but they are relatively easy to accomplish. What is much more difficult is coming to understand and accept the way colleagues from different disciplines think—their assumptions and their methods of discerning, evaluating, and reporting "truth"—their disciplinary cultures and habits of mind.