Introduction

In 2006, the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes, along with the University of Chicago, held a conference entitled “The Fate of Disciplines.” Grounded in the long history of disciplinarity in the academy, the conference sought to theorize relations between residual and emergent disciplines and to contemplate the future shape and texture of disciplinary formations and the university structures that contain (and, some would say, constrain) them.

The conference’s keywords set the terms of discussion. More than fixed “content” or objects of study, and not reducible to a “method,” academic disciplines tend to exist in uneasy relation to the institutional structures, such as departments or schools, created to administer them. Conference speakers concluded that disciplines, neither separable from nor reducible to such institutional moorings, exist in tension with the institutional structures that sustain them, and it is in this tension that their transformative promise lies.

The other keyword, “fate,” signaled a sense of the foreordained, predetermined nature of the disciplines’ future—a future that is in some way a destiny, fixed in the natural order of the cosmos, and a natural outgrowth of the past. As Andrew Abbott observes in Chaos of Disciplines (2001), calls for disciplinary change and transformation have been part of the American university system since the 1920s. Indeed, such calls have been one of the academic disciplines’ most enduring characteristics. Over a quarter century ago, Clifford Geertz observed how disciplinary boundaries had dramatically blurred even in his lifetime, and he concluded in 1980 that the procedures then used to analyze our objects of study had merged to the point of forming what he termed “a vast continuous field of interpretation.” The modern American research university came into being from 1880 to 1910, with Johns Hopkins, Chicago, Stanford, and Rice as examples. This event coincided with the emergence of major professional associations governing the disciplines, including the Modern Language Association in 1883, the American Historical Association in 1884, and the American Anthropological Association in 1902.

But challenges to these disciplinary formations of the research university and the professional association were almost immediate. Interdisciplinary committees were common on university campuses by the 1940s, and emendations of the disciplinary system in the form of area studies emerged during the same decade. The enduring intellectual lure of what often were termed "shadow disciplines" has led scholars from Lynn Hunt to Judith Butler to caution against wholesale rejection of traditional disciplinary forms. As Hunt reminds us, it is the certainty of disciplinary borders that makes new disciplinary configurations imaginable. New practices, according to Hunt, will not mean anything if the humanities dissolve into an “undifferentiated pool of cultural studies.” Butler expressed concern that eroding the prominence of well-established disciplinary structures such as departments enables the erosion of professional norms like tenure, academic freedom and faculty dissent.