Spanning Boundaries of Knowledge and Organization: Collaborations for Mind and Management in Higher Education

Abstract

Higher education faces two interrelated challenges in a world of increasing demand for life-long learning, as well as for helping to address persistent societal issues such as poverty, and the forces of economic and cultural globalization. The first is intellectual, concerned with linking the contrasting and intersecting worlds of knowledge based in research and professional practice, in order to educate students as effective problemsolvers (Schon, 1987). The second is organizational, focusing on ways of relating academic specializations within the campus and across the campus–community boundary in response to needs for knowledge that transcend disciplinary boundaries (Boyer, 1990; Walshok, 1995). Predicting the degree to which these changes may take place in the United States is risky. They were described as a natural evolution in higher education nearly 40 years ago in Kerr’s (1963) classic description of the multi-versity as the institution that accommodates widely varying societal needs for knowledge, technology and credentialed expertise. Kerr’s vision seems now more rhetoric than reality. Many of the elite universities are driven by self-referential prestige focused on ‘big-ticket’ research, which spawns imitative efforts among other campuses, even in other countries, aspiring to raise their academic rankings. Pedagogy and organizational structure maintain their historical form with the ubiquity of didactic teaching, the primacy of research over practitioner knowledge, and the higher status of single-discipline departments over multidisciplinary and applied units. However, research on professional expertise and reflective practice supports the need for pedagogy that accords equal status to formal, didactically taught knowledge grounded in theory and research along with knowledge acquired through experiential means, often tacit and grounded in communities of professional practice (Brown and Duguid, 1991; McClintock, 1999; 2000; Schon, 1987; Sternberg and Horvath, 1999). This pedagogical goal is intertwined with an organizational Volume 8(2): 351–359 Copyright © 2001 SAGE (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)