Carolina's Interdisciplinary Evolution

Graduate education at Carolina was interdisciplinary in nature, even before it was conceived as we know it today.

Before the Civil War, graduate study at Carolina drew its design from the undergraduate liberal arts college. In other words, students interested in advanced studies simply added an additional year of liberal arts classes to their undergraduate load.

In effect, the breadth of early graduate work at Carolina stemmed from the University’s firm commitment to the liberal arts, rather than from a conscious desire to foster an environment for cross-disciplinary graduate studies.

Later in the nineteenth century, University educators began seeing flaws in the shared model for undergraduate and graduate study. Carolina administrators were also influenced by new developments in graduate education across the country, particularly the founding of Johns Hopkins University, an event considered to mark the beginning of contemporary graduate education in the United States.

Johns Hopkins’ 1876 opening essentially redefined American graduate education by establishing the research-centered standard after which countless graduate programs would model themselves. Graduate study was no longer an extended version of undergraduate work, but instead, a definable entity in its own right.

Accordingly, graduate education at Carolina entered a new phase of development as administrators set out to create a separate graduate program that pivoted on scholarly research. The University’s first contemporary graduate program was established shortly after the opening of Johns Hopkins in 1876.

Carolina’s new approach to graduate education required all graduate students to complete a research-based thesis or dissertation, an endeavor that required considerable specialization, especially when compared with the undergraduate curriculum.

Graduate education at Carolina quickly grew more and more specialized as students and faculty began choosing projects and disciplines aligned with their particular interests. Moreover, graduate study at this time in Carolina’s history was decentralized and highly discipline-based. It simply provided a set of rules and regulations, with little central coordination or leadership.

Although graduate education became centralized in 1903 when University President Francis P. Venable (1900-1914) created the Graduate School, graduate work continued to be discipline-specific with an ever-narrowing focus. While the Graduate School, as an administrative body, worked to ensure consistency across disciplines, facilitating collaboration among departments was not yet a priority.

Monumental global events such as World War I, World War II, and the Cold War catalyzed even greater specialization in graduate education as federal funds poured into the University for highly specific research purposes. Although much of this money was earmarked for the sciences, all disciplines were in some way affected by such funding.

Increases in federal research funds fueled a rapid expansion of higher education throughout the mid-20th century as newly funded programs and subjects proliferated. The growth of specialized graduate research programs helped launch an era of unprecedented scientific advancement. But at the same time it raised questions about the consequences of specialization in graduate education.

In response to the tremendous growth that occurred at Carolina during these years, Graduate School Dean C. Hugh Holman (1963-1966) observed: “Many of the organizational structures by which learning on advanced levels has been compartmentalized in this University are beginning to show signs of stress. The lines of demarcation among disciplines have always been arbitrary to some extent, and they are growing hazier in instance after instance. Only if we are alive to the implication of new theories of knowledge, new methods of study, new subject matters, new forms of investigation can we sense with any certainty when an organizational arrangement is no longer workable, and when it has become necessary for us to establish formal communication with others in adjacent or in remote fields.”

Such changes, Holman concluded, “demand of us a kind of attention which we have not previously been giving to the instrumentation of research. It behooves us in a world of specialists to know our specialty and to communicate its nature and its needs to others among us, and yet never sink into a narrow and exclusive specialization.”

The need to guard against too narrow specialization and to foster cooperation among disciplines was later reiterated by one of Holman’s successors, Lyle V. Jones (1969-1979), who was concerned not only with the impracticality of limiting knowledge to established disciplines, but also with the detrimental effect that such strict concentration would have on graduate students’ learning and career possibilities.

Much of Jones’ concern stemmed from the fact that, by 1970, federal agencies had sharply cut funding for advanced research in institutions of higher education: consequently, as Jones pointed out, “Graduate programs that shortly before had been enthusiastically supported now were criticized for being too narrowly specialized.” Furthermore, “The scholar whose training prepared him only as a specialist in a traditional academic discipline was no longer in demand.” As Jones explained, however, “This is not meant to imply that we must substitute breadth for depth of graduate training, or comprehensive education for specialization.”

Now cognizant of the value of interdisciplinary approaches to graduate level research, Jones’ successors, Dr. Henry Dearman in particular, began designing programs that would encourage students and faculty to collaborate across disciplines.

Numerous interdisciplinary programs and fellowships such as the Weiss Urban Livability Program, the Royster Society, and the Latané Program have since been created in pursuit of these aims. These programs, in conjunction with countless other interdisciplinary academic centers and departments, have allowed the Graduate School to respond to current needs and future trends in graduate education.

-Laura M. Micheletti

© 2002, The Graduate School, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
All text and images are property of The Graduate School at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Contact Sandra Hoeflich at shoeflic@email.unc.edu to request permission for reproduction.

Contact Alexandra Obregon at aobregon@email.unc.edu if you have technical problems with this Web site.