Unpacking the ‘Home Principle’ - A preliminary discussion Emma Ruttkamp-Bloem

1. Unpacking the ‘Home Principle’- A preliminary discussionEmma Ruttkamp-Bloem

2. THE ISSUE • The core of the home principle is the belief that academic departments are the custodians of their subjects at the university. • This implies that departments are consulted whenever • their subject – or aspects there-of – is taught to students at any level of their study • or research is done in their subject in other departments, or in centres or institutions at the university. • The issue is just as much one of academic integrity and accountability to one’s subject, as it is one of respecting expertise across disciplines. • The challenge is to find a way to reconcile these sometimes (but not necessarily) contradicting issues in the most practical, collegial, and academically responsible manner possible.

3. Keep in mind … The interplay between academic integrity, accountability to a subject, and respect of expertise is crucial. Let’s just for a moment, before we start unpacking arguments in favour of the home principle, consider what the university would be like without it … What would happen if there were no regulations concerning whom teaches what, or the expertise of one’s research partners in interdisciplinary research? I am not referring here to interdisciplinary research - I will speak on that later on and fully agree that it offers one of the most vibrant chances of growth for many disciplines – rather here I am asking what the quality of our training will be if we fail to instil in students a sensitivity to the differences in perspective, different practices of study, that different disciplines bring to the same area of study or terrain – think of how many disciplines study the phenomenon/ issue / concept (for each discipline a different description) of ‘justice’, of ‘knowledge’, of ‘the self’, of ‘society’, etc. … I consider this question again at the end of my discussion In what follows I present two arguments in favour of the home principle – the argument from academic integrity, and the argument from the nature of intellectual inquiry

4. The argument from embedded academic integrity / academic values embodied in academic practice • Academic work is divided into academic disciplines / subjects that are organised into departments that present modules / courses and do research. • Oxford English dictionary: “Etymologically, discipline, as pertaining to the disciple or scholar, is antithetical to doctrine, the property of the doctor or teacher; hence, in the history of the words, doctrine is more concerned with abstract theory, and discipline with practice or exercise. …A branch of instruction or education; a department of learning or knowledge; a science or art in its educational aspect." (OED, 4:734-735). • ‘Discipline’, therefore, in the first instance perhaps, refers to the mastery of students of subject matter according to the practices of a certain discipline – thus the focus is first on learning (to be … a philosopher, a psychologist, a historian, a political scientist) (Dirks 1996); and in the second instance to the subject matter and also to the ‘knowing subject’ (McKeon 1994, Post 2009) • “When we speak of a discipline, therefore, we speak not merely of a body of knowledge but also of a set of practicesby which that knowledge is acquired, confirmed, implemented, preserved, and reproduced. Disciplines ‘mark the point at which’ this knowledge and these practices ‘are institutionalized, or, so to speak, the word is made flesh’.” (Post 2009) (See also Klein 1993)

5. Furthermore the notion of an academic discipline / subject contains or implies specialisation which in turn implies at least • a unique ensemble of intellectual activities – ‘the practice of study’ in a discipline (Dirks 1996) including methods /skills of analysis and inquiry - that focuses on a specific subject matter, • a group of dominant theories that determine debates about as yet unresolved issues in a specific field, • significant research results accepted as legitimate by fellow colleagues in the discipline, • a set of specific ground-breaking texts in the discipline, • and a range of particular issues and significant questions or problems that drive the discipline’s intellectual investigations. • The ensemble of human activities bundled together under the rubric of an academic department links to other similar departments at other universities that do the same work in educating students and executing research projects. • These academics at different universities all over the world join in societies to promote their subject and they run journals for publishing their research.

6. Thus it is obvious that the requirement for teaching any such specific academic discipline at undergraduate or postgraduate level at a university is expertise in an area covered by the discipline, which implies advanced training in the particular discipline (e.g. Bruffee 1993 – the ‘authority’ that academics have, rests on expertise in their subjects). • Experts teaching students must be independent and active research practitioners in the subject, preferably having a doctoral degree, or being definitely on their way to acquiring one. • Experts must teach students skills and discipline specific knowledge such that students are enabled to think and do what experts familiar with all the things and activities that make up an academic discipline / subject, are thinking and doing.

7. Experts in a specific academic discipline are appointed in teaching roles because universities judge them best qualified in understanding the inner workings and content of the discipline and thus best equipped to guide studentsin their studies of the discipline. • This implies guiding students according to decades or even centuries of expert judgement to become adept in mastering the issues, contents, results, and methods routinely employed to fulfil a variety of functions in the discipline. • A significant part of this expertise required for teaching is acquired and must be renewed through doing research on an on-goingbasis. • Therefore, these same experts are also appointed to be the researchers in their academic discipline at a specific university.

8. For this reason academics and the departments they have been appointed to are indeed the ‘formal custodians’ of their specific academic disciplines. • And that is exactly what the home principle actually means: • Universities require experts in a specific academic discipline to teach students / do research with an interest to acquire mastery in that particular part of the scientific-intellectual world. • One issue that complicates the interpretation of such a definition of the home principle, is that • students typically study more than one subject or academic discipline, • and the requirement of their profession and preparation for life might require them to have only part of the available expertise of a specific subject / academic / discipline. • Thus, any university that honours the academic values set out above and that wishes to respect its own academic integrity must answer this question: • Are the teachers of any module that contains significant parts / elements of a specific discipline / subject, like philosophy for example, properly trained to teach all aspects thereof or to do research in the discipline?

9. Conclusion: • ‘Properly trained’ means at least • Trained to the equivalent of 5 years of undergraduate and postgraduate education, as required of the lowest level of an academic appointment, i.e. lecturer • Able to prove scholarship gained through practical experience and engagement with the discipline which is equivalent to 5 years of training in the discipline Bottom line is though that the persons who must decide on whether someone is ‘properly trained’ are experts within the relevant discipline If this is not the case, the university / faculty has to be able to explain why experts in a discipline are allowed to teach students / engage in research in their own disciplines under a different set of conditions than what is in place for those teaching / engaging in research in another discipline than their own

10. In the light of the above, moving to practicalities, any university must have ways to facilitate proper dialogue between equalmembers of different departments to ensure that overlaps and porous borders between the courses taught by specific departments are satisfactorily dealt with to everyone’s satisfaction. • At UP this is already incorporated in the structure of forms completed to effect any introduction of a course or any change to an existing course • Problems …perhaps not thus interpreted, more often interpreted in terms of consulting colleagues teaching in the same programme …. • But what to do when academics outside a specific department engage in formal academic ways in the work that forms the proper domain of that other department, when they do academic work that members of the other department have been trained to do? • In these cases dialogue between academic colleagues as equalsmust ensure that the ‘trespassing’ colleagues give a reasonable and convincing account why they should be allowed to continue to do so without the involvement, participation, or ‘oversight’ of the department concerned. • If that kind of account is not forthcoming, those academics are violating the academic integrity of another department.

11. What to do if one is either not treated as an equal in a dialogue, or a dialogue spirals into disagreement? • This is not a reason not to engage in dialogue (Rhetorical question: why do academics like so much to use ‘practical obstacles’ – and sometime highly unlikely ones to boot - as excuses not to act responsibly and with accountability to their subjects?) • Rather this will, in a university geared towards the home principle, be an issue that must be resolved at Board of Faculty or Senate levels • Neither dialogue, nor referrals such as the above, will ‘waste hours of time’ (those ‘practical obstacles’ lurking again?) if academic practices in the university are built on mutual respect and are geared towards negotiation • Neither will the insistence on dialogue stilt interdisciplinary research – on the contrary, dialogue is part of such research, and moreover, interdisciplinary research is built into the very nature of intellectual inquiry as I show in the next argument

12. The argument from the nature of scientific / intellectual inquiry • Intellectual inquiry or ‘science’ is not a single unified and monolithic enterprise. • The complex structure of intellectual inquiry is best explained by the notion of three complementary conceptions of intellectual inquiry that function at different levels of analysis, i.e., • a minimal conception of intellectual inquiry based on certain basic rulesshared by all disciplines, • an intermediate conception of intellectual inquiry where disciplines cluster together on the basis of their shared interests and similarities of terrain of study, • and a maximalist conception of intellectual inquiry, transcending the previous two conceptions, where the nature and functioning of each individual discipline is determined by the total community of academics working in that specific discipline.

13. The minimal conception of intellectual inquiry: • There are certain basic rules that underlie activities and interaction in the diverse enterprises undertaken by disciplines / subjects institutionalised at universities. • These rules are ‘basic’ because they guide the human quest for intelligibility and optimal understanding of the worlds around and within us and thus underlie all forms of scientific / intellectual inquiry. • They include guidelines and methods for specialised problem solving, for justification of findings, for formulating accounts of how current findings are related to previous ones, and for formulating accounts of why academics in the discipline must accept current findings • They are specified and elaborated, and new ‘instruments’ or methods for solving problems devised, as they are applied in the course of scientific practices in the discipline / subject. • They may be applied by practitioners in a specific discipline / subject to their own as well as to different fields of study where related but different aspects of reality, of humanity, or various different kinds of problems are studied. • The sharing and borrowing of methods, techniques, results, and theories suggest that there are more similarities between individual scientific disciplines than certain basic rules for activity in those disciplines

14. The intermediate conception of intellectual inquiry: • The intermediate conception of intellectual inquiry is that of clustering of individual disciplines as the result of disciplines temporarily grouped together through shared interests. • The similarities and overlaps between disciplines are not permanent or fixed, as new relationships and overlaps are constantly forged based on new developments in diverse disciplines. • Inter-disciplinary influences include borrowing and using instruments and tools developed in other sciences, as well as the transfer of methods, theories, and results. • An obvious example of tools or instruments shared by disciplines are the role of mathematical , statistical, and computer science techniques used for analysis in an ever-growing variety of disciplines. • Which aspects, the extent, and depth to which scientists use the tools provided by mathematics, statistics, and computer science vary considerably in widely differing sciences like botany, psychology, and economics. • Similarly, theories and results are often shared in many disciplines. • For example, nuclear physics plays an important role in different disciplines in the natural sciences, just as theories of interpretation are shared by a variety of human sciences.

15. The maximal conception of intellectual inquiry: • On the other hand, different clusters of sciences may have little more in common with one another than the few basic rules, or certain shared methods or theories. • Sometimes the detailed interpretation of what precisely is ‘shared’ can lead to further distance between sciences, creating a feeling of fragmented discourses that are virtually incomprehensible for people not conversant with the esoteric language of a particular science. • This often observed inability of communication between academics from different fields of study can be explained through a maximal conception of intellectual inquiry. • This third level of analysis requires an explanation of the ability of disciplines to self-organise into communities of academics / scientists. • Such self-organisation is the result of disciplines organising themselves into regional, national , and international societies, with related publication and funding of resulting specialised research. • This community of academics / scientists determines the nature, standards, accepted findings, and workable theories of their discipline on a continual basis. • As community they decide what kind of research is do-able, what the current state of the art is, and what is well-established in the discipline.

16. Conclusion: • Competent judgements within a particular scientific discipline are possible because scientists learn from history, experience, and other disciplines (at all three levels of intellectual inquiry specified above). • Such learning always happens from the basis of their original training though, and thus interdisciplinary research does not give academics ‘carte blanche’ to disregard the home principle. • The key remains dialogue that enables academic activity that is accountable to the discipline / subject at issue. • Turning to practical matters again: • When members of a specific discipline borrow a technique or use a method from another discipline, or appropriate some result or theory drawn from outside their own subject, they do so without violating academic integrity. (This is simply intellectual activity at either the minimal or the intermediate level of intellectual inquiry – this is interdisciplinary research.) • Violations only occur when more than this is at issue – e.g. when academics (pretend to) teach students – at whatever level – mastery of the styles of thinking, interpreting, and doing in a discipline they were not educated to be expert in; or when ‘watered-down’ versions of methods or theories or styles of thinking in one discipline are offered in another.

17. Conclusions • The definition of the ‘home principle’ advanced here is: • Universities require experts in a specific academic discipline to teach students / engage in research with an interest to acquire mastery in that particular part of the scientific-intellectual world. • Consider this comment by Robert Post: “To invoke the authority of a discipline … is … to appeal to what Kant might call the regulative idea of a unitary and ‘formalized method of knowing and expressing the knowledge of a given subject-matter’. • Any literate member of the American academy fully appreciates the authority of such an appeal. • And yet, of course, most of us also realize that ‘the notion of disciplinary unity is triply false: minimizing or denying differences that exist across the plurality of specialties grouped loosely under a single disciplinary label, undervaluing connections across specialties of separate disciplines, and discounting the frequency and impact of cross-disciplinary influences’” (Post 2009). • None of the arguments offered above is guilty of any of these falsities …

18. Issues that play into this definition include the academic integrity of specific disciplines as well as the nature of interdisciplinary inquiry • Academic integrity is incorporated into the home principle by acknowledging that academics in individual disciplines / subjects are the custodians of their subject by virtue of their training and research in that discipline / subject • Interdisciplinary inquiry is incorporated into the home principle by acknowledging that such inquiry is driven precisely by the hope held by practitioners of a certain discipline of extending their own discipline’s tools, methods, or results through interaction with practitioners of other disciplines, and thus academics take part in interdisciplinary research first as experts in their individual disciplines, and secondly as academics having certain instruments, methods, and interest in common with academics in other disciplines • The home principle must not be viewed as a “controlling feature” (Dirks 1996) of our education system at universities • Rather it must be viewed in terms of quality assurance and holding secure the core of what universities are about – i.e. offering intellectual inquiry at all levels in an atmosphere of academic respect and sensitivity to different perspectives different disciplines bring to the same terrain – and thus facilitating ‘learning to be’ vs. learning in general

19. What about ownership of disciplines (Anton du Plessis made this point to me)? • My answer in terms of both arguments above is that ownership is connected to mastery of ways of thinking and doing particular to a discipline – if one has such mastery, one has ownership • And, coming back to what would happen if the home principle is not in place – ‘mastery’ may not be a term one could link to learning in such a context … • If one has ‘learnt to be’, one has mastered the subject, and owns it • This may mean that both persons with 5 years training in a discipline and persons with practical proof of scholarship equivalent to such training – as determined by experts in the discipline – have ownership of a discipline, and some may not be comfortable with the latter • I think it is crucial to allow both kinds of ownership though (as long as the second kind happens with the blessing of the home department), precisely to stop the home principle from stifling sound interdisciplinary research or from becoming ‘controlling’ in the negative sense of the word • NOTE though that this acknowledgement does NOT imply that dialogue should not still take place – home departments must be aware and in favour of their discipline / subject – or aspects there-of – being taught or researched in contexts other than the home department context itself

20. Practical Suggestions A practice and culture of sustainable dialogue and negotiation must be among equals established and nurtured at universities. This means: • Acknowledgement by every academic at UP that the home principle issue goes to the heart of the core academic values that define how universities ought to function • Accountability to the academic integrity of the discipline(s) at issue is acknowledged by all parties • Mutual respect for expertise in different disciplines / subjects is in place among all parties • Any doubts about whether someone or some department ought to be teaching any contents or methods or researching any issues ‘belonging to another discipline’ are discussed in dialogue between colleagues as equals and the outcomes are negotiated in good faith and with respect for the core academic values and quality of learning of students at stake (and when dialogue breaks down, there are systems in place at Board of Faculty and Senate level to adjudicate) • The results of negotiation are expected to be noted in all documentation of academic decision making bodies related to the content and teaching of modules, as well as to research done in individual departments, centres or institutions at the university

21. References Bruffee, Kenneth. (1993). Collaborative Learning: Higher Education, Interdependence, and the Authority of Knowledge. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press. Dirks, Arthur L. (1996). Organization of knowledge: The emergence of academic specialty in America. Published on-line by author (http://webhost.bridgew.edu/adirks/ald/papers/orgknow.htm). Bridgewater, MA. Accessed [7/9/2012]. Klein, Julie. (1993). “Blurring, Cracking, and Crossing: Permeation and the Fracturing of Discipline,” in Ellen Messer-Davidow, et al, (Eds.) Knowledges: Historical and Critical Studies in Disciplinarity.Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. McKeon, Michael. (1994). "The Origins of Interdisciplinary Studies." Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 28, no. 1, 17-28. Post, R. (2009). “Debating Disciplinarity”. Yale Law School Legal Scholarship Repository1-1-2009.

22. Some Suggestions for Further Reading Becher, Tony, (1987). “The Disciplinary Shaping of the Profession,” in Burton R. Clark (Ed.) The Academic Profession: National, Disciplinary, and Institutional Settings. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 271-303. GulbenkianCommission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences (1996). Open the Social Sciences. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Klein, Julie. (1990). Interdisciplinarity: History, Theory and Practice. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Kline, Stephen Jay. (1995). Conceptual Foundations for Multidisciplinary Thinking. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Lattuca, Lisa. (2001). Creating Interdisciplinarity: Interdisciplinary Research and Teaching among College and University Faculty.Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. (1995). Facilitating Interdisciplinary Research. Washington, DC: National Academies Press. (http://www.nap.edu) Snow, C.P. (1998). The Two Cultures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Swidler, Ann and Jorge Arditi. (1994). “The New Sociology of Knowledge,” Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 20, pp. 305-329. Weingart, Peter and NicoStehr. (2000). Practicing Interdisciplinarity. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Wilson, Edward O.(1999). Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge.New York: Vintage Books.