Radboud University wants to focus more on cross-faculty and interdisciplinary cooperation. A fine idea, but quite a few obstacles still need to be overcome, according to research by the Radboud Young Academy.

An unhealthy lifestyle, climate change, or digitalization. These are just a few examples of complex societal issues that Radboud researchers from different academic fields and faculties are investigating together. This is also how Radboud University envisions the future. According to its new strategy, complex societal issues can only be better understood and solved this way. In addition, the university wants to invest in a much broader range of cross-faculty educational programs.

An important but also difficult ambition, concludes the Radboud Young Academy (RYA) in a recently published report. RYA members Tamara van Woezik and Femke Bekius investigated which factors stimulate and hinder interdisciplinary cooperation between faculties.

‘From our own research, we already noticed that interdisciplinary projects often require more effort than disciplinarily focused research,’ says Bekius, assistant professor of complex decision-making at the Nijmegen School of Management. ‘The same sentiment was heard in conversations with colleagues from other faculties.’

‘It is easier to set up a collaboration or write a grant with colleagues from other universities than to walk to the other side of the street and find people there,’ Bekius explains. According to the researcher, this is partly because the chances of success are greater when you apply for such a grant with multiple universities and, preferably, other societal partners as well. ‘The larger NWO or NWA grants specifically ask for that.’

Monodisciplinary university

However, quite a few internal factors also stand in the way of interdisciplinary cooperation on the university’s own campus. According to the RYA, a major bottleneck is that the Nijmegen-based university is highly monodisciplinary: almost all decisions regarding research, education, and organization are made at the faculty level. ‘It is difficult to step out of that,’ says Van Woezik, assistant professor at the Radboud Teachers Academy.

At some other universities, things are organized very differently. ‘Wageningen University, for example, has no faculties at all; it is organized around themes such as sustainable food systems or biodiversity and resilient ecosystems,’ Bekius says. ‘Interdisciplinary cooperation is much easier there, because you can already find all kinds of different disciplines within such an institute.’

According to the RYA, Nijmegen lacks a place where researchers from different disciplines can meet to brainstorm about interdisciplinary collaborations. Van Woezik: ‘At the moment, you have to put in a lot of effort to find each other and build a network, which is demotivating.’

According to Bekius, this ‘meeting place’ does not have to be a physical building. ‘It can shift across campus – call it a center, an institute, or a hub. It is mainly important that people know where to go with questions about how to approach this type of research, what skills and abilities you need, and where to find funding. For example, you could also organize seminars on themes where people from different disciplines can present something.’

Radboud University does not need to reinvent the wheel: other universities already have these types of interdisciplinary institutes, Bekius notes. ‘Think, for example, of the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Amsterdam. That is an interdisciplinary institute where people from different faculties work together on a specific theme during fixed days of the week. I was a research fellow there myself for a while and found it very inspiring.’

Higher chance of failure

Another barrier to starting interdisciplinary research, both researchers point out, is that the failure rate for this type of research is higher. Bekius: ‘Interdisciplinary research is usually not a matter of: we have this question, and then we need this and that discipline to solve it. Much more often, it is a matter of trying something out with a realistic chance that it will ultimately yield nothing. Or a project does yield something interesting, but then the funding runs out and it stops again.’

That uncertainty is too big a risk for many academics. ‘You might be able to put such a project somewhere on your CV, but the moment you write a research proposal, you can’t say: this is the publication that substantiates it,’ Bekius says. Interdisciplinary research can yield a lot, but the chance of failure is also higher, partly due to the increased complexity.

‘Giving a guest lecture at another faculty is already difficult because there is an administrative labyrinth behind everything.’

To stimulate this type of research, researchers must therefore be given more room to experiment and fail. Van Woezik: ‘It is important that interdisciplinary academics receive support from their supervisors. That a conversation takes place about what such a researcher’s year looks like and what a supervisor can and cannot expect. And that there is a clearer career path: how can such a researcher grow in their career, regardless of whether a publication ultimately comes out of it.’

Cross-faculty education

In addition to research, the RYA states there is also a great need for interdisciplinary and cross-faculty education. ‘Interviewees said: it is so important that the university provides students with the skills to work on contemporary complex problems. They simply need those different perspectives for that. At the same time, we discovered that there are major problems precisely when setting up interdisciplinary education.’

Developing a master’s program together or setting up a curriculum with colleagues from other faculties – or even with colleagues from another program within the same faculty – turns out to be very complicated. Van Woezik: ‘Giving a guest lecture is already difficult because there is an administrative labyrinth behind everything. There are different timetables, different rates are used, and it is very difficult to find out who to contact with which question. Many people therefore don’t even want to start and say, ‘I’ll just drop by sometime.’ But that stands in the way of sustainable cooperation.’

Bekius adds: ‘Even supervising a student’s master’s thesis at another program, because their topic aligns beautifully with your own research, is often formally impossible to organize. You end up doing that for free or during your own research time.’

Five interdisciplinary themes

The RYA members think it is fine in itself that the university’s new strategy primarily focuses on five interdisciplinary research themes, Bekius says. ‘But if you only seek connections within those themes, you miss out on a lot. Many research topics and researchers do not fit into those themes.’

‘Excelling in thematic areas is possible, but then you are profiling yourself rather than stimulating interdisciplinary cooperation.’

Steering by themes can also restrict creativity and innovative opportunities for collaboration, Van Woezik adds. ‘If you have already determined the problem beforehand, you partly wipe away the entire premise of interdisciplinary cooperation. Because that happens precisely out of academic curiosity, meaning bottom-up. Excelling in thematic areas can be a perfectly legitimate choice, but then you are profiling yourself rather than stimulating interdisciplinary cooperation.’

Bekius: ‘Above all, leave room for other cooperation and connections, and organize things for that as well. Realize that cross-faculty interdisciplinary cooperation is complex at our monodisciplinary university. It requires structural adjustments at various layers of the system to truly bring about change. That is also the message we are trying to convey now during the implementation of the new strategy.