Fostering an Interdisciplinary Campus Community: Faculty Hiring Committee-Work as Successful Interdisciplinary Collaboration

Abstract

In modern higher education, nurturing successful interdisciplinary collaboration is both an institutional priority and a grand organizational and cultural challenge. Recent scholarship describes the many and varied challenges inherent in the enactment of interdisciplinarity; it also explores how these challenges can be mitigated to spur successful interdisciplinary engagement. While much attention has been focused on interdisciplinary scholarship and pedagogy, might interdisciplinary service collaborations also play a role? This qualitative case study probes a particular type of interdisciplinary collaboration—a cross-disciplinary committee convened to hire interdisciplinary faculty members. Using interview and observational data to uncover the lived experiences of committee members across campus at one U.S.-based R1 institution, this study explores service-work as a potential site of positive experience and successful interdisciplinary collaboration. Illuminated by the Shared Cognitive-Emotional-Interactive (SCEI) platform for interdisciplinary research collaboration by Boix Mansilla et al. (2016), findings reveal myriad positive outcomes tied to faculty’s service participation, probe the multifaceted reasons that faculty choose to participate, and explore how they experience this work. Analysis also uncovers limited cognitive yet significant emotional and interactive markers of and factors that facilitate a successful interdisciplinary collaborative process. Evidence of these markers and factors serves to “reframe” interdisciplinary service as an instance of successful interdisciplinary collaboration, a site of faculty learning and a context that fosters campus connections among faculty. In uncovering these benefits of interdisciplinary collaborative service, this work suggests ways in which it may serve as a missing link to build and strengthen an interdisciplinary campus community.