Okay, to be fair, “beware” kind of applies to all of academia at this point, but I think this one is worth mentioning, and I happened upon it by chance:

‘New’ refers to the improbability of any one discipline or mode of thinking (e.g. Marxism, postmodernism) producing a similar result, and that ‘no one (other than the interdisciplinarian) takes responsibility for studying the complex problem, object, text, or system that falls between the disciplines or that transcends them’ (Repko & Szostak, 2016, p. 324).

This passage comes from a 2020 college textbook, the Third Edition of Introduction to Interdisciplinary Studies by Allen F. Repko, Rick Szostak, and Michelle Phillips Buchberger. Now briefly, for context, before I get to my main point: Interdisciplinary studies, per (leftist) academe, is the contemporary “solution” to the modern world’s societal issues. While there’s still a place in society and policy-making for the traditional disciplinarian specialists of yesteryear — the engineer and the mathematician — only the interdisciplinarian will be able to see the big picture, and offer the “more comprehensive understanding” of a particular problem or concern. The engineer and the mathematician only have their focused expertise to offer; they are but “blind men” unable to take in the full scope because of their narrow (read: narrow-minded) training.

When an engineer reveals that there have been serious breaches in quality control at Boeing it is the interdisciplinarian who takes into account Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (which is equally as important as mechanical engineering) and asserts that yes, quality control is necessary, but even more so are the anti-racism and anti-bigotry initiatives of DIE.

When a mathematician points out crime statistics, disproportionately indicting a certain protected class, it is the interdisciplinarian who draws from their political science training and reminds everyone that this is really a congressional problem, in which Republican lawmakers have failed to fund new welfare programs, or reform the criminal justice system to produce equitable outcomes.

Back to the textbook passage: Because the world (read: the West) has long-operated on a disciplinarian mindset, failed systems like Marxism or postmodernism didn’t fail simply because they are bad theories. Rather, they failed because of a host of other issues, unidentified only because a trained interdisciplinarian wasn’t around to tell the economists or the historians—those dread disciplinarians—what actually happened.

Therefore, if approaching “Marxism” or “postmodernism” with an interdisciplinary mindset, these theories would, in all “probability,” produce a totally “new” result—this time, yes this time, it could really work! The meme below perfectly sums up the interdisciplinarians of the textbook, pushing communism, and all the while missing the total irony:

Accurate. pic.twitter.com/5gIRVNXPen

— Olivia Murray (@americaliv1) April 1, 2024

Image: Free image, Pixabay license, no attribution required.