THE AIMS OF GRADUATE EDUCATION
by
Steadman Upham, President
Claremont Graduate University
Keynote address delivered to the Society for Design and Process Science Workshop on Global
Transdisciplinary Education, June 11, 2001, Pasadena, California.
Three or four times each academic year I find in my mail an important, but
flimsy piece of newsprint from the University of Chicago. It is the Record, an
unpretentious but marvelously rich publication recounting issues in the intellectual
life of that venerable institution. Generally, the October issue of the Record
contains, among other things, a reprinting of the “Aims of Education” address to
the incoming class. The ritual of this speech, practiced now for more than 38
years, is to inform first-year Chicago students about the values underpinning their
liberal arts education and the traditions embedded in the university in which they
have chosen to enroll. The most recent address was given by Robert Pippen1, a
professor in the Committee on Social Thought, and follows in a long line of
eloquent statements that begins a four-year process of socializing new students at
Chicago to the liberal arts tradition.
I begin my remarks to you today in this way because I believe in the power,
if not the accuracy, of archetypes. In this case, the “Aims of Education” address at
the University of Chicago is a powerful archetype of the conceptual framework
that guides instruction today at most of the 3,000 or so liberal arts colleges and
universities in the country. It also provides a useful point of entry for my
comments to you this morning because the University of Chicago is an institution
that is known for its unique intellectual style—that distinctive way of thinking and
acting that comes from exposure to ideas anchored in purposeful analytical
frameworks. The “Aims of Education” address is part of that framework, and its
delivery to beginning first-year students instigates a process of inculcating the
“Chicago style” that continues as long as students and alumni remain in contact
with the institution.
I am not an alumnus of the University of Chicago. My academic
background is more blue-collar: B.A. in English and Spanish from the University
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of Redlands, and M.A. and Ph.D. in anthropology and archaeology from Arizona
State University. Yet I have felt the power of the “Chicago style” in perhaps an
even more important way. My doctoral advisor and major professor, the late Fred
Plog2, received his Ph.D. from Chicago. Moreover, Plog’s major professor, Robert
McCormick Adams3, was also Chicago-educated. Adams received his bachelor’s,
master’s, and doctoral degrees from that institution and served for nearly 30 years
on the Chicago faculty. Importantly, Adams’ major professor was Robert J.
Braidwood4 who also was educated at the University of Chicago (Ph.D. 1943), and
remained there to teach for more than 40 years. Twenty-five years ago, the
transgenerational influence of these scholars transformed my approach to science
and my view of the world. As a result, I am acutely aware of how a powerful and
compelling intellectual style from afar can be transmitted to students at any
university. This is, of course, the transcendent influence of a teacher.
In American archaeology, the Chicago style is manifest by a commitment to
explaining change and continuous variability in human behavior across time and
space. It eschews the use of categories, like age and phase sequences (e.g., Stone
Age, Iron Age, Bronze Age; Pueblo I through IV; and so on), and focuses, instead,
on the identification of cultural processes and on the unity of cultural systems. In
the late 1960s the Chicago style gave rise to what is known in American
archaeology as “processualism,” a robust explanatory framework that grows out of
logical positivism and is generalizing, empirical, and scientific.
I still draw on the analytical skills and explanatory frameworks shaped by my
graduate school experience. It is exposure to this framework, perhaps more than
any other intellectual stimulus, that motivates my thinking. As a professor, it was
formative to all of my teaching and research. Today, I find it relevant to my work
as a university administrator. I have devoted the last 14 years to university
administration—first as a graduate dean, then as a research v.p., and now as
president of the country’s only comprehensive, exclusively graduate university.
Whether as researcher, teacher, or university administrator, I continue to think
about continuous as opposed to categorical variation, general cultural and
behavioral patterns, and the unity of knowledge.
It is here that the “Aims of Education” address is again relevant to my purpose
today. The idea of liberal arts education as preparation for life in the world is a
powerful contemporary archetype. It has acquired an almost grail-like quality,
belying the fact that the liberal arts tradition is more than 2,000 years old. The
liberal arts tradition derives from an ancient school of thought that drew its
strength from the trivium and quadrivium (the seven original liberal arts of
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grammar, rhetoric, and logic [the trivium], and arithmetic, geometry, astronomy,
and music [the quadrivium]). Somewhat later, scholasticism of the Middle Ages
“aimed to prepare students not simply for gaining a livelihood, but for the pursuit
of science tempered by philosophy and theology.”5 Thus, more than a millennium
ago universities recognized the power of the liberal arts to educate the individual
for a life of the mind, or as a popular slogan of today’s admissions officers goes,
“to earn a living, and to live a life.”
Teaching and research in the contemporary university have moved well beyond
medieval scholasticism, but the legacy of scholasticism’s structure remains. We no
longer rely on the trivium and quadrivium, but we continue to teach the liberal arts
by subject—that is, by categories like language, literature, mathematics, history,
economics, anthropology, and so on. The liberal arts thus represent the
transmission of knowledge in categories of learning. Yet we live in a world of
continuous variability, and categories—no matter how refined and sophisticated—
cannot capture meaningful variation across time and space. All categories are
discontinuous by definition; they limit one’s ability to understand change because
they emphasize boundaries, not transitions. Moreover, the categories themselves
condition the way we learn and communicate—as biologists would say, categories
canalize our thinking. Because categories are defined by boundaries, categorical
thinking also limits our ability to integrate and synthesize data and information
across categories—categories and the knowledge they contain become constraints
in the search for a more continuous, holistic, and integrated understanding of the
world. In other words, a category or discipline-based approach to education is a
limiting feature if the goals include the integration and synthesis of knowledge.
Enter intellectual styles. In letters, science, and the professions, matters of
intellectual style prevail. They shape and define schools of thought and distinguish
institutions and people. Chicago, Black Mountain, Bloomsbury, Oxbridge, and a
host of other names denote particular styles of learning, thinking, and knowing.
Intellectual styles have the power to overcome the constraints of categorical
thinking imposed by the historical traditions of the liberal arts. In fact, the
development and transmission of an intellectual style of thinking, knowing, and
acting may actually be more important than the transmission of content-based
knowledge in the different liberal arts subject areas. After all, knowledge is
perishable; it is revised and restructured as new knowledge is acquired. But an
intellectual style is enduring because it is adaptable; it provides a format for being.
During the last two years, I have become particularly interested in intellectual
styles. Initially, I was drawn to this issue because of the people I met who had
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earned degrees from the university I currently lead. A vast majority were
synthesizers, holistic thinkers, and problem solvers who were able to look across
the disciplines to find the knowledge and wisdom they needed to succeed. At first
I thought that something unique in the teaching and research at Claremont
Graduate University had shaped the intellectual styles of these individuals. As it
turns out, I was only partly right in this assumption. I now recognize that this
intellectual style is transdisciplinary, something that is not unique specifically to
Claremont (although Claremont Graduate University has a tradition of this kind of
teaching and research), but can be a property of graduate education at any
institution.
Graduate education may follow sequentially from the undergraduate years, but
it need not continue a slavish adherence to the categorical thinking of a disciplinebased liberal arts undergraduate education. Instead, graduate education has the
opportunity to go beyond the categories to create a more continuous representation
of the world. It has the potential to add a new element to its already prodigious
capacity to create specialists. But to do so, it must step beyond a discipline-based
approach to learning to focus on knowledge domains that cut across traditional
academic fields. This is not interdisciplinary or even multidisciplinary scholarship,
but is instead, a transdisciplinary approach to teaching and research.
Some time ago, George Kozmetsky presciently observed that the term
“interdisciplinary” was outmoded. He suggested instead that the growing
interconnections among academic disciplines and the explosion of knowledge
emanating from the use of technology have transcended specific academic fields.
Dr. Kozmetsky suggested that we discard the term interdisciplinary and instead use
the term transdisciplinary to organize and pursue our scholarly interests within the
university. What this means in my view is that we begin to think about the
university as a place of ideas, not as an organization of academic disciplines. This
should not be difficult to accomplish since most of the teaching and research at the
graduate level already revolves around big ideas and broad domains of learning
and knowledge that transcend traditional academic fields. Transdisciplinary
thinking forces us to think across, beyond, and through the academic disciplines
represented at the graduate university to encompass all types of learning and
knowledge about an idea, issue, or subject. A transdisciplinary perspective forces
us to rise above and go beyond the limits imposed by related or cognate academic
fields found in “mere” interdisciplinary thinking.
When I talk this way, some colleagues fear that I am advocating a graduate
education that eschews a strong commitment to the advancement of the academic
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disciplines. They fear further that the rise of such scholarship will promote work
that is difficult to evaluate, escapes normative standards of review and evaluation,
and provides a habitat for “academic rogues.”6 In addition, they see the
transdisciplinarity I advocate as having a primary focus on research and knowledge
that lies at the boundaries between two or more fields.
In fact, a commitment to a transdisciplinary graduate education is quite the
opposite. It does not begin at the boundaries of academic disciplines, but with the
key texts and core ideas of a field of inquiry. Transdisciplinary scholarship is not
dependent on the borrowing of methodologies or the combining of disciplinary
specialists for an “attack” upon a problem. Rather, it begins the other way around.
It begins from the core issues and central questions of a field. When one identifies
such issues and questions, they are, by definition, transdisciplinary—they cannot
be contained, identified, described, or explained by the approaches, methods, or
lexicon of any single academic field. Moreover, when advancements are made or
new knowledge is created in a transdisciplinary framework, it contributes to the
key texts and core ideas of many different fields. It is primarily through
transdisciplinary scholarship that whole new fields of knowledge are created.7
So what does such a change suggest for graduate education? Graduate
education, of course, is not a monolithic enterprise; it has many purposes and
dimensions. At the master’s level, students are exposed to the breadth of a
discipline and to the elements of application and practice. Doctoral education has
historically produced specialists, individuals who have created new knowledge in a
field by delving deeper into the subject than anyone before. Graduate programs
also aim to cultivate discerning scientific, professional, and aesthetic judgment in
students while socializing students to the professions. But graduate education, writ
large, is part of the country’s research infrastructure and, as such, has generalist
goals beyond the individual. For example, graduate education actively broadens,
deepens, and expands knowledge of a subject, field, or discipline; it develops and
refines research skills and methods; it extends professional competencies; it is
devoted to the conduct of original research to create new knowledge; and it uses
the scholarship of application to refine and improve good practice.
My modest proposal to you this morning is that graduate education explicitly
incorporates the integration and synthesis of knowledge to this list of goals. In the
future, “the world will be run by synthesizers, people who are able to put the right
information together at the right time, think critically about it, and make important
choices wisely.”8 In my view, these are the “aims of graduate education.” Just as
the University of Chicago begins each academic year with the “Aims of
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Education” address, graduate universities must step forth with a vision for the
“Aims of Graduate Education” that is predicated on a commitment to the unity of
knowledge along with its other already established and worthy goals.
Graduate programs must accept this challenge by moving beyond disciplinary
scholarship. The idea of transdisciplinarity creates as a core value in graduate
education the interconnections that join different branches of knowledge via their
core issues and central questions. Transdisciplinarity is a countervailing force to
repel intellectual and scholarly fragmentation. Edward O. Wilson puts it bluntly
when he says that “the fragmentation of knowledge and resulting chaos are not
reflections of the real world, but are artifacts of scholarship.” Graduate
education’s "artifacts of scholarship" should be the reassembly of meaning from
the silos of learning imposed by the boundaries of academic disciplines.
Scholarship at the graduate level should emphasize the unity of knowledge and
underscore the importance of bringing together diverse approaches to questions of
common intellectual concern. Common interest in these domains of knowledge
provides the basis for intellectual connectivity among researchers that transcends
specific disciplines. In other words, a transdisciplinary academic model facilitates
the creation of overarching intellectual connections that simultaneously advance
inquiry in the core issues and central questions of many different academic
disciplines.
One goal of this effort is to create frameworks for teaching and research that
literally transcend the major areas of inquiry represented at the university, thereby
linking faculty and students from widely different intellectual traditions,
disciplinary norms, and schools of thought and practice. In other words, the
graduate university can actively work to structure its inheritance from Medieval
scholasticism to move beyond the intellectual tyranny of categorical thinking
imposed by the liberal arts. The graduate university thus can become a center of
research and teaching that is systemically integrated for the purpose of creating and
transmitting knowledge, improving practice, and advancing understanding.
NOTES
1
ROBERT PIPPEN, “Liberation and the Liberal Arts: The Aims of Education.” The University of Chicago
Record, volume 35, number 1, November 2000.
2
FRED PLOG, 1944 -1992, American archaeologist, grad. Northwestern Univ (B.A.), Univ of Chicago (M.A.,
Ph.D.). He served on the faculty of UCLA, SUNY-Binghamton, Arizona State Univ, and New Mexico State Univ.
He chaired the departments at Binghamton, ASU, and NMSU and was a founding member of the Southwestern
Archaeological Research Group (SARG). He was among the most influential of the “new archaeologists,”
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advocating the formal use of research designs, sampling and statistical methods, and regional archaeological
surveys. His writings include Beyond the Frontier: Social Processes and Culture Change (1967), The Archaeology
of Arizona (1973), The Study of Prehistoric Change (1974), numerous influential scholarly articles on the subject of
culture change, and many textbooks.
3
ROBERT McCORMICK ADAMS, born 1926–, American anthropologist, grad. Univ. of Chicago (Ph.B., 1947;
M.A., 1952; Ph.D., 1956). He served on the faculty of the Univ. of Chicago (1955–84) and was director of the
Oriental Institute there (1962–68). From 1984–1994 he was secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and served on
the faculty of Johns Hopkins University. He has done regionally oriented archaeological studies in Iraq, emphasizing
the analysis of settlement patterns, and written extensively on the role played by irrigation, warfare, and ecological
diversity in the evolution of the earliest states. His writings include Land Behind Baghdad (1965), The Evolution of
Urban Society (1966), The Uruk Countryside (1972; with H. J. Nissen), Heartland of Cities (1981), and Paths of
Fire (1996).
4
ROBERT J. BRAIDWOOD, born 1907-, American archaeologist. Braidwood was educated at the University of
Michigan (M.A.) and the University of Chicago (Ph.D.) where he studied architecture, ancient history, and
anthropology. He is a leader in the field of Near Eastern Prehistory; he is acclaimed for his investigations into the
origins and early consequences of a food producing way of life. His research consisted of assembling problemoriented interdisciplinary teams involving the natural sciences. His writings include many scholarly articles as well
as several important books, including Prehistoric Investigations In Iraqi Kurdistan (1960), Excavations In The Plain
Of Antioch (1960), and Prehistoric Men (1961).
5
OTTO WILLMANN (Transcribed by Bob Elder) in The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume I, copyright © 1907 by
Robert Appleton Company. Online Edition Copyright © 1999 by Kevin Knight,
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01760a.htm
6
CHANGE, p.9, May/June 2001.
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Witness the central questions from my own field of archaeology that deal with long-term culture change. They
spring from knowledge domains like the origins of agriculture, the development of cities and the rise of urbanism,
the origin and structure of exchange systems, and so on. Each of these knowledge domains gives rise to questions
that are transdisciplinary and require the marshalling of knowledge beyond the field of archaeology, from across the
arts and humanities, the social and natural sciences, even from the fields of management and information science.
8
EDWARD O. WILSON, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. New York: Random House, 1998.