Single Review on past events

Bob Brecher, Mentor of Julia Boll, from the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics & Ethics (CAPPE) at the University of Brighton’s Faculty of Arts opened the winter term 2013/2014 with a highly interesting talk on “Interdisciplinarity”.

He strongly opts for interdisciplinarity, even though he understands that many people welcome the comfort of small worlds of specialisms, “especially in an academic milieu in which we already come under threat from a whole array of forces and in which the neo-liberal revolution is daily forcing us to abandon academic values and practices in favour of whatever the so-called market dictates”.Nevertheless he thinks that it’s a mistake to stay in one’s disciplinary bunker. Why? For two basic reasons: “First, our disciplinary bunkers are far too fragile to withstand the neo-liberal hurricane. And second, because interdisciplinarity is a form of co-operation – and co-operation is perhaps the one defence we have against that hurricane, the one weapon we have with which to repel the neo-liberal revolutionaries, in the universities as elsewhere. In short, interdisciplinarity – at least as I conceive it – is a political project, as it concerns the nature and future of a community.”

In the case of Bob Brecher it is not only a political project, but also a story drawn from his career: the story of how the Humanities School at Brighton came to pioneer an interdisciplinary humanities programme.
The Humanities Department was originally formed out of the sections history, geography, English and religious studies (what used to be Brighton College of Education) before that institution became part of the Brighton Polytechnic. At the end of the 1970s, people who had spent their professional lives training teachers found themselves teaching degrees. And Bob Brecher´s colleagues who left were not replaced, hence the Humanities Department quite rapidly shrank. At the same time, and for all sorts of reasons, applications were decreasing and it was increasingly difficult to get enough students to survive.
So, according to Bob Brecher, two things had to be done: “First, we needed to attract students. And to do that, we had to offer them something different from what they could expect at other institutions. In short, we had to give people reasons to come to study with us at Brighton Polytechnic rather than going to a university.” And that is exactly what they did. “In the first place, we opened our doors to mature students and to people who did not have conventional qualifications. In the second place, we offered students the closest thing we could to what they would get at “the best” universities: small classes, individual tutorials and close supervision.”

But what does this have to do with interdisciplinarity? Bob Brecher and his colleagues agreed to decide the content of the Humanities degree thematically and to be explicit about how then various disciplines contribute differently to such themes. So, in the first year, all students had an introductory course in the various disciplines comprising the Humanities: philosophy, history, literature, etc. Thereafter, they had a choice of interdisciplinary themes which they would study for the next two years: Self and Society; War, Genocide and the Holocaust; the Modern World; Class, Party & State. All these two year courses were co-written and co-taught by two or three colleagues from different disciplines.

“We make use of our specific disciplines to teach students to distinguish what is relevant from what is not; to distinguish refutation from repudiation; to synthesise information, analyse problems and construct arguments. We make explicit what the various humanities disciplines have always claimed as their implicit role; and we teach them to think critically.”

Since then, these two-year options have been re-branded as independent degrees, each of which offers a choice between two, sometimes three, different two-year strands which have different disciplinary proportions and/or even different disciplinary contributions. Why? Because having in the late 1980s and early 1990s an annual intake of perhaps 60 students, they now have an intake of 170. “What began as a defensive measure is now flavour of the month, simply because (a) we have shown that it works; (b) it continues to be attractive to potential students who are looking for something different and has by now achieved something of a national reputation among schoolteachers, career advisors and so on; and (c) because the university needs as many students as possible that it is relatively cheap to teach.”

And with respect to the job market: Which employer does not want people who can think for themselves, work in teams and all the rest of it? “Focussing on students rather than on academic disciplines, educating people to be able to think clearly and relevantly, and to express themselves intelligently, is something that is good for students and politically desirable…..isn’t it?”

“Interdisciplinary work moves from the world to the university more directly than single disciplinary work might (but need not) move.”

More information about Bob Brecher: http://arts.brighton.ac.uk/staff/bob-brecher