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NEW Reconfiguring the Social Sciences at Research Universities READ HERE

In the NY Times, Yale's Nicholas Christakis presents some new ideas for shaking up the social sciences at leading universities.  He writes;

"It is time to create new social science departments that reflect the breadth and complexity of the problems we face as well as the novelty of 21st-century science. These would include departments of biosocial science, network science, neuroeconomics, behavioral genetics and computational social science. Eventually, these departments would themselves be dismantled or transmuted as science continues to advance."

Given that he runs an interdisciplinary research center, such a move by his Deans would strengthen his empire!  But, let's leave self interest behind and evaluate his conjecture.  Some universities such as USC appear to agree with him as many of their top economists are not in their economics department but instead are scattered across other schools and centers across campus.  Cross-university competition will allow us to test his core hypothesis.  In contrast, other Universities such as MIT  and Princeton  keep almost all of their economists in the econ department.   This variation allows for a test of where does excellent social science emerge and when are synergies across fields especially valuable.

Dr. Christakis is making one enormous assumption.  Can experts in one field judge what is excellent work in another field?   In his ideal "big tent", who is the director of the institute?  Does this worldly intellectual have the capability of identifying excellent work in fields far from her own field of expertise?   It is my humble opinion that such "renaissance men" do not exist.  

My UCLA Institute of the Environment  is an interdisciplinary center.  As a tenured member of this Institute, I face an ongoing challenge of evaluating researchers whose work is far from what I know.  I certainly enjoy working in an interdisciplinary environment but I can see how many economists would find this frustrating.  In a diverse university setting, some people will self select and want to sit with people just like them while others will benefit from working in a more diverse intellectual environment.   The author of this piece simply assumes that "intellectual diversity" is always good for idea production.  This ignores the benefits of specialization.

Dr. Christakis also ignores the implications of his suggestion for Ph.D. training.  While students love such interdisciplinary programs will they actually get a good job when they graduate?  The key what-if asks, "what job would the same student have received had she gotten a Ph.D. in the core department rather than going to the interdisciplinary degree program?".  

So, I think that some high endowment relatively low ranked schools will try to rise in the rankings by embracing his strategy. Such field experiments will offer a test of whether he is right or not.

If Deans at good places are ambitious, they could figure out how to configure some space on campus to be a short term Hoover Institute where on campus faculty working on similar issues would sit together for a year and over coffee and lunch would  make progress through informal discussions and working groups.   This would allow for the win-win of facilitating the social connects that the author alludes to while keeping the best parts of the traditional department system.  Such a system would allow  create a within university tournament encouraging teamwork across departments.

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