Montclair State University’s controversial plans to restructure its academic departments into interdisciplinary schools elevates a debate about college bureaucracy and disciplinary coherence that normally gets little attention. The underlying question posed by the plan is this: What is the value of a department?
Earlier this week, the university’s draft plan to reorganize 15 disciplines in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences under four “schools” reached the pages of The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. The four new schools would each have a name that would be determined by faculty members and convey its broad focus. Current placeholder names include “the design and understanding of civic and social systems,” where majors like anthropology and political science will be housed, or “human narratives and creative expressions,” which will be the new home of English, philosophy, and foreign languages. In the process, the university may eliminate academic departments as a bureaucratic structure — along with department chairs.
The salient question is how the structure of academic bureaucracy affects the reach and appeal of disciplines: Are academic departments a vital home base for disciplines that would otherwise get lost in bigger, more amorphous multidisciplinary schools? Or are they just another insular bureaucratic structure that isolates disciplines and, for the humanities and social sciences in particular, hampers students from better understanding how English, history, or anthropology connect to real-world jobs and “wicked” problems?
The debate at Montclair State also touches on intersecting challenges facing liberal-arts programs, says Joy Connolly, president of the American Council of Learned Societies. Declines in enrollment and an unfavorable narrative about the value of majors have contributed to a shrinking share of students majoring in the humanities, often because career trajectories are uncertain. But advocates can’t simply fall back on “telling a better story” about their disciplines, she says. Academics need to think actively about how to restructure what they offer.
The professoriate is also changing. New generations of scholars are increasingly focusing on interdisciplinarity, seeking double appointments, moving into interdisciplinary centers, or tackling research questions that cross disciplines. “So does that affect the way we should organize ourselves in departments? Maybe it should,” Connolly says. Maybe the university of the future is a series of disciplinary groupings or area studies. Maybe undergraduate programs and research initiatives are designed to tackle problems, and are not imagined to be permanent. “These questions, they’re so complicated and they bump up against questions of accreditation and new models for the distribution of faculty and graduate students, and what we think an undergraduate education looks like in an age of AI.”
Faculty members, she says, need time and space to work these questions out, but they’re often already busy teaching courses and maintaining their research activity. “It’s too much, it’s not possible,” she says. “I would like to see more university administrators clear serious time and offer resources to faculty so that we can have an intentional discussion.”
Anti-Disciplinary?
The goal of Montclair State’s restructuring plan is to foster interdisciplinarity and make academic fields more relevant, says Jonathan Koppell, the university’s president, who is also a political scientist. Koppell says that enrollments in the college have been healthy, but driven almost entirely by psychology, while those in the humanities have been in decline.
The details of the plan are still being discussed by a university committee, he says, and the existence and role of departments isn’t resolved. But an outline of the plan attributes the departmental structure for inefficiencies and a lack of transparency in course planning and scheduling, student data, and strategy. “The goal is to harmonize all units and make them strengthen each other,” the document says. By putting disciplines together under broader multidisciplinary schools, “our goal is to create these opportunities for intellectual combination, leading to more powerful frameworks for contemporary challenges.”
“What we’re saying is that there is nothing inherently anti-disciplinary about organizing in a way that is not based on discipline-driven departments,” Koppell says in an interview.
The plan wasn’t universally perceived that way. Some faculty members see it as an attempt to reduce the power of academic departments, and perhaps even close liberal-arts programs. Jeffrey Miller, an associate professor of English, suggested as much in an interview with The New York Times and in an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal earlier this week. Miller accused university leaders of seeming “so eager to deny their students … the educational opportunities that many of the administrators themselves received.”
Koppell bristled at the notion. “We’re not eliminating any majors,” he says. “We’re not eliminating any faculty positions. We’re not anti-disciplinary.”
Other faculty members were more muted in their critiques, though they still harbored doubts. Christopher Matthews, chair of the anthropology department, says that he doesn’t necessarily object to a restructuring. “I’ll be in a school with a bunch of other social sciences, which seems fine, but I don’t get what we’re doing in terms of solving a problem,” he says. He was also skeptical of eliminating department chairs because they do a lot of essential but hidden work, and he predicted that the university would eventually find that it had to replace them with new administrators. (On Wednesday night, the University Senate passed a resolution asking the university to retain chairpersons as part of its restructuring.)
It’s also not clear that successful interdisciplinary programs can be created by pushing disciplines together into schools, Matthews says. He started an interdisciplinary program in Native American studies with a historian and religious-studies scholar. “That didn’t require a school,” he says. “We did find each other because of an interest, and maybe the school would have helped that along? I don’t know.”
Reorganizations sweep through higher education periodically, particularly among institutions under pressure, and often with the rationale of reducing administrative costs or promoting interdisciplinary interactions, or sometimes to follow an emerging industry focus. Koppell came from Arizona State University, which has set up interdisciplinary programs and colleges. But in most instances, academic departments are often retained, and just shifted around.
Koppell says it is “empirically false” that “the only way to organize an academic enterprise is to have departments created around disciplines.” Koppell says he has never worked in a political-science department, and his discipline has a number of “active subfields that don’t interact enough together”: Americanists, constructivists, international relations, and so on. Would scholarship be more fruitful if the political scientists, psychologists, anthropologists, and literary scholars who are focused on related topics were grouped together?
Moreover, he argues, common departmental structures can pose disincentives to collaboration, mainly in how they set up a competitive environment for student credit hours or university resources. If departments want to jealously guard their enrollments and majors, “you don’t have any motivation to work with people in another department to create a degree program that spans boundaries,” Koppell says.
‘Sense of Belonging’
But the existence of departments — and departmental chairs — seems to have become the key sticking point in the reorganization at Montclair State.
Kate Temoney comes at the debate wearing two hats: On one hand, she is the chair of the university’s religion department, a discipline increasingly under threat because of low enrollment. On the other, she co-chaired the college’s restructuring committee. She says that, from the beginning, the university intended to support the disciplines, but still had to respond to declining public confidence in the outcomes of a liberal-arts major. “In my mind, it was always about, How can we survive in this climate? How can we leverage our strengths? How can we streamline what we’re doing?” Temoney says. The notion that this is about closing liberal-arts majors, she says, is simply “not true.”
If everybody leaves the table a little bit unhappy, that means you did it right.
At the same time, all of the restructuring proposals her committee had fielded from the faculty included departments — and for good reasons, she says. “Departments are part of the ways that we do build that sense of belonging with our students,” she says. “They understand they’re part of a department and the other majors that they’re with, and we build a culture around that.”
Part of the faculty concern rests on career issues: Some professors at Montclair State are worried about how tenure and promotion might be handled with committees of people from other departments; Temoney, as a scholar focusing on genocide in a small religion department, has always had people from other disciplines evaluating her work.
Also, Temoney adds, there are valid concerns about the potential elimination of department chairs, as they play an essential role as a “steward of shared governance” among faculty, students, and administration. The University Senate resolution noted that “power dynamics are deeply embedded in academic organizational settings,” and yet chairpersons offer a way for instructors and staff to safely send concerns up the organizational ladder. They also maintain an empathetic ear for the “challenges and opportunities that often remain invisible to deans or directors” and advocate for students seeking advisement or help with a problem.
Temoney believes that the university will eventually hammer out a new structure, and that chairs and faculty members need to be involved in the process. “It’s going to be the classic negotiation,” she says. “If everybody leaves the table a little bit unhappy, that means you did it right.”
