Admission Counselor and recent Pitzer grad Adam Lev Rosenzweig '09 wrote a letter to the editor published in the Chronicle of Higher Education.  I first met Adam way back in the Fall of 2006 when we both took "Victorian America".  He would often say smart things on the intellectual level of the letter below, and in response I would smile dreamily at him.

...anyway, the point of his letter (I think) is to defend interdisciplinarity, at least in social sciences and at colleges like Pitzer.  To separate the disciplines would relegate the histories of women, sexual minorities, and ethnic minorities to second-class status.  All of those threads should be valued in college courses.

"The Virtues of Interdisciplinarity"

To the Editor:

The tone of alarmism surrounding the wholesale reorganization of academia is unnecessary. Jerry A. Jacobs's thought-provoking article ("Interdisciplinary Hype," The Chronicle Review, November 27) counts most of its supporters in the field of the sciences, and practically all at the professional research level. I would at least make the case for interdisciplinarity at the undergraduate level.

Graduate schools will train their students in the applied methods of their fields. Indeed, I agree with Professor Jacobs's assessment that the creation of "centers" and "institutes" most likely embodies the most practical solution to the interdisciplinary debate at the professional research level. There is evidence that during students' introduction to higher education, however, it is helpful to cast a broader net. Take the example of medical schools, which are famously admitting more and more students with undergraduate backgrounds in the liberal arts and humanities—fields that Professor Jacobs has shown to exhibit significantly higher rates of cross-disciplinary citation.

Regarding American studies, Professor Jacobs inappropriately assumes that the goal of American studies has been to identify a "unified theory of American culture." That idiom, echoing the storied "unified theory" in physics, reflects the science-centered perspective of the current disciplinary conversation. In American historiography, the "unified theory" equivalent is known as "consensus history," and has been intellectually out of fashion since the middle of the 20th century. It is clear that American studies gives space and voice to groups in American society that have been marginalized by traditional American historians. Relegating those scholars and their subjects to "area studies" (the return to monodisciplinary scholarship) only supports the feeling that, while their stories are valid, they are somehow not "American." Therefore, indeed, good American-studies scholars would balk at the advancement of a unified theory.

I can only hope that undergraduate liberal-arts institutions like the one I am privileged to work for continue to lead the way in valuing the intellectual diversity of our interdisciplinary faculty who, after all, are training the students who so eagerly seek positions at the feet of you established university professors.

Adam Rosenzweig
Admission Counselor
Pitzer College
Claremont, Calif.