History of Science Colloquium met Cyrus Mody
Interdisciplinarity then and now
The late 1960s and early 1970s were a difficult time for academic scientists across much of Western Europe and North America. In many countries, stagnating economies meant a dramatic reduction in state funding for science; and in most of them the youth counterculture demanded, sometimes violently, a new approach to science. In the United States, these crises were exacerbated by the dependence of academic researchers - especially in engineering and the physical sciences - on funding from the military. Virtually no school had been more successful in attracting military research funding during the 1950s and early 1960s than Stanford University; as a result, virtually no school suffered more than Stanford from cutbacks in defense funding and student protests against military-funded research. Historians have written at length on Stanford's success as a Cold War university pre-1970, and its success as an entrepreneurial university post-1980. Little is known, however, about how Stanford navigated the crises of the 1970s. Mody will show that one strategy was to seek refuge in the rhetoric, practice, and institutions of interdisciplinarity. 'Interdisciplinary' was a buzzword at Stanford (and many other schools) circa 1970 in much the way it is today. Yet the interdisciplinarity of that era arose to solve specific demands of the counterculture that aren't relevant today. To what extent, then, is today's interdisciplinarity confronting problems of the past, rather than of the present?
History of Science Colloquia
With the History of Science colloquia, the Descartes Centre for the History and Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities offers a forum where international speakers, both Master's students and senior researchers, can present and discuss their research results and their plans for future research.