Cloth $90.00 ISBN: 9780226069296 Will Publish October 2013
Paper $30.00 ISBN: 9780226069326 Will Publish October 2013
An e-book edition will be published.

In Defense of Disciplines

Interdisciplinarity and Specialization in the Research University

Jerry Jacobs

 In Defense of Disciplines
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Jerry Jacobs

328 pages | 20 line drawings, 17 tables | 6 x 9 | © 2013
Cloth $90.00 ISBN: 9780226069296 Will Publish October 2013
Paper $30.00 ISBN: 9780226069326 Will Publish October 2013
E-book $30.00 ISBN: 9780226069463 Will Publish October 2013
Calls for closer connections among disciplines can be heard throughout the world of scholarly research, from major universities to the National Institutes of Health. In Defense of Disciplines presents a fresh and daring analysis of the argument surrounding interdisciplinarity. Challenging the belief that blurring the boundaries between traditional academic fields promotes more integrated research and effective teaching, Jerry Jacobs contends that the promise of interdisciplinarity is illusory and that critiques of established disciplines are often overstated and misplaced.

Drawing on diverse sources of data, Jacobs offers a new theory of liberal arts disciplines such as biology, economics, and history that identifies the organizational sources of their dynamism and breadth. Illustrating his thesis with a wide range of case studies including the diffusion of ideas between fields, the creation of interdisciplinary scholarly journals, and the rise of new fields that spin off from existing ones, Jacobs turns many of the criticisms of disciplines on their heads to mount a powerful defense of the enduring value of liberal arts disciplines. This will become one of the anchors of the case against interdisciplinarity for years to come.

Harvey J. Graff | author of The Dallas Myth: The Making and Unmaking of an American City
“I congratulate Jerry Jacobs for the rigor of his research and the strenuousness of his arguments. There is revealing new information and necessary clarity and clarification in these pages. His critique of some of the most egregious assaults on the disciplines is especially noteworthy and the case studies are valuable. This is a book that we need.”

Contents
List of Figures
List of Tables
Preface
 
1 Introduction
 
Part 1 Academic Disciplines, Specialization, and Scholarly Communication
 
2 The Critique of Disciplinary Silos
 
3 Dynamic Disciplines
 
4 Specialization, Synthesis, and the Proliferation of Journals
            (coauthored with Rebecca Henderson)
 
5 Silos versus Web
 
6 Receptivity Curves: Educational Research and the Flow of Ideas
 
            Part 2 Interdisciplinary Alternatives
7 Antidisciplinarity
           
8 American Studies: Interdisciplinarity over Half a Century
 
9 Integrative Undergraduate Education
 
10 Implementing Interdisciplinarity
Appendix: Data Sources
Notes
References
Index
For more information, or to order this book, please visit http://www.press.uchicago.edu
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