Special to IPM
W HAT S ATYA N ADELLA CAN TEACH US ABOUT NEED FOR MULTIDISCIPLINARY FRAMEWORK TO BROADEN KNOWLEDG E The old binaries of education need to be revisited, interconnecting knowledge and people into networks of creativity is fundamental. by Shiv Vishwanathan
One does not see too much of such interactive thinking, especially in an India, where climate change is seen as a political problem to be solved by ad- vanced economies. Interdisciplinar- ity is the need of the hour and a necessity for the future. It requires firstly a sense of play as one dreams one’s way through a variety of disciplines, of seeing how a way of seeing can be a way of not seeing. Second, it is an attempt to see interconnections. One is reminded of a lecture by Alfred North Whitehead the philosopher. He came into his class at Harvard knocked his head and said “gentleman I have disturbed a distant star.” Interdisciplinary here is not a cler- ical link between two disciplines but a set of cosmic connections. UNDERSTANDING It is also a sense of being at one with the world, of understanding how one’s work merges with nature and be- comes an expression of joy. I remember George Santayana’s last lecture at Har- vard. The philosopher announced his farewell by saying “Gentleman, I have a date with Spring.” It is such a joyful cosmic celebration one needs for inter-disciplinarity to have a sense of mystery, of the sacred, to create a pursuit of the whole. In fact one of the sadnesses of modern schol- arship is that the whole is always less than the sum of the parts. Probably one of the greatest advocates of interdisci- plinarity was the polymath Patrick Geddes.
There is a suggestion that the old binaries of education be revisited, that a sociologist studying a computer pro- gramme might be able to work out pre-
One of the most publicised events in the last week was the release and publicity around Satya Nadella’s book. The Microsoft boss appears articulate, friendly, obsessed with cricket as a metaphor and as a way of life. Yet, beyond these much advertised quotes, Nadella made some intrigu- ing comments about knowledge. He talked about the joys and in- novative power of interdisciplinar- ity. He quotes another management guru Barry Hammel, who once ob- served that if he has a student doing mechanical engineering, he would sug- gest comparative religion as a second subject. KNOWLEDGE The need to interconnect knowl- edge and people into networks of cre- ativity is fundamental. Nadella adds that one needs mindsets to sustain a multidisciplinary framework and he emphasises the importance of team- work. A team work culture, he sug- gests, is the right culture for an interdisciplinary group. Interdisciplinarity is not an arid col- lection of subjects, but the joyful contri- bution of people working together. Nadella cites the example of people from design, electrical engineering, and computer science, a multiplicity of dis- ciplines working together in Microsoft. The same point was made in a more insistent way by Amitabh Behar of Aziz Premji University, who empha- sises the need for new metaphors, new techniques, new heuristics as a part of the educational process.
dictive models of inequality. Behar suggests that the new global job world needs combinations like biology with economics, physics with sociology. Today, global crises like climate change demand a synergy of disciplines to attack it. Photo Reuters Today, global crises like climate change demand a synergy of disciplines to at- tack it. Photo Reuters I was wondering how many politi- cians and bureaucrats were listening to these wise words, where one goes be- yond formal skills to aptitudes, where empathy is seen as a valuable perspec- tive. Sadly, as people talk of the crisis of a university, few take interdisciplinarity seriously. One makes a fetish about spe- cialists and devalues the humanities. In- terdisciplinarity is an attempt to return the Renaissance man to the idiot world of the specialist. One realises today that global crisis like climate change de- mand a synergy of disciplines to attack it.
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November 2017
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