Bridging the disciplinary divides

Northeastern is looking for a few good men and women—thirty, to be exact—who will help the university strengthen its interdisciplinary scholarship.

Under a new initiative from President Aoun, the university has launched a three-year hiring plan aimed at bringing in thirty senior faculty members who will, as Provost Ahmed Abdelal puts it, “aspire to combine their knowledge and mastery of different fields with others’ in ways that create new areas of scholarship and entirely new disciplines.”

The new initiative complements the university’s Academic Investment Plan, begun in 2005, which is aimed at hiring a hundred faculty.

Unlike those hires, which will place professors in specific colleges, the thirty interdisciplinary faculty will be available in a general pool. This novel approach is expected to further collaboration among different departments.

Although, as Aoun notes, it is already common at Northeastern “to bring together excellent scholars from different disciplines to mesh their knowledge in an effort to create new knowledge,” the president says the university “must continue to find ways to break down the barriers that can exist between schools and departments.

“Our goal is to create a culture where collaboration in research and scholarship across the disciplinary divides is second nature,” Aoun says.

Abdelal adds that strength in inter­disciplinary research will help to boost Northeastern’s goal of finding solutions to societal issues.

“Those issues are too complex to be addressed by individual discplines," Abdelal says. "They are occuring at the intersection of traditional areas of scholarship and research. We want to attract others who share this philosophy."

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