2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The need for and value of scholars thinking across boundaries have resulted in a growing movement in interdisciplinary graduate programs. Such programs challenge students and faculty to think beyond their disciplinary expertise and work on complex problems that require perspectives from multiple disciplines. Despite the rise of these interdisciplinary programs, the disciplinary silos that persist in university settings create several structural barriers that hinder interdisciplinary programs from achieving their full potential; these include conflicts in policies, procedures, and budget models across disciplines. While several of these conflicts have been explored by researchers in the early 2000s, the persistence of the challenges coupled with the urgency of interdisciplinary work to address global challenges warrant renewed attention to these issues. In particular, despite the challenges, faculty continue to engage in interdisciplinary graduate education, but limited research has explored what accounts for this engagement. To that end, this paper explores the perspectives of faculty recently facilitating an interdisciplinary graduate certificate program at a large, public land-grant university to understand faculty decisions-making related to interdisciplinary education.

To explore this issue, we use Lattuca and Pollard’s model of faculty decision-making to analyze semi-structured interviews with five faculty members of a current NSF-funded interdisciplinary graduate program. The framework describes the three influences of faculty decision-making: individual, such as values and beliefs; internal, such as departmental culture and supports; and external, such as job markets and national priorities. This framework provides a lens to understand how these influences positively and negatively affected their decisions to facilitate the program.

We find that with six participants, the data was saturated to indicate the limited university-level support given to faculty. Lack of time and recognition of efforts within individual disciplines or departments were consistently reported and reveal the need for incentive structures aligned with interdisciplinary values within academic institutions - a barrier that has remained constant for more than a decade. In contrast, what influenced the faculty to continue in the program was predominately the individual value for the area and the intrinsic motivation to support the success of interdisciplinary graduate students and their research. This dynamic places the onus of curricular change on faculty alone and risks their burnout. The results indicate that, consistent with past findings, faculty need to be better supported through their respective departments and institutions for sustaining interdisciplinary graduate programs, and that additional work is needed to fully understand the role of more indirect factors of academic environments impact faculty decision-making.