When the AAUP issued its report on academic freedom last September, Taking Back the Classroom, lots of conservative critics weighed in with rebuttals (see here). But one group was strangely silent, and they are a large and vocal one most of the time.

I mean the folks who praise interdisciplinarity, who cast it as the better way, the opening of disciplines to innovative thinking and inquiry. And why should they have been distressed? Because the AAUP document defends disciplinary boundaries so urgently, treating disciplinarity as the best safeguard against critics of the professoriate. Indeed, it asserts over and over the role of disciplinarity in establishing truth and maintaining professional teaching standards:

• “It is not indoctrination for professors to expect students to comprehend ideas and apply knowledge that is accepted as true within a relevant discipline.”

• “Dewey believed that it was an abuse of ‘freedom in the classroom’ for an instructor to ‘promulgate as truth ideas or opinions which have not been tested,’ that is, which have not been accepted as true within a discipline.’”

• “There may be facts, theories, and models, particularly in the sciences, that are so intrinsically intertwined with the current state of a discipline that it would be unprofessional to slight or ignore them.”

• “…balance is not a principle that can be invoked in the abstract but is instead a standard whose content must be determined within a specific field of relevant disciplinary knowledge.”

I take all these statements as true up to a point, but from what interdisciplinarians have argued at length, every one of them clashes with root interdisciplinary premises. People in “studies” programs (cultural, ethnic, American, women’s) think otherwise on principle, and they’ve been mouthing the epistemological improvements of interdisciplinarity for decades. As the Web site of the American Studies program at Wesleyan puts it, “The complexity of culture and of its historical development is such that its analysis requires the intellectual tools of more than one discipline and the interdisciplinary theoretical perspectives emerging in American Studies and other interdisciplinary fields.”

What does it mean when the central faculty organization falls back upon traditional disciplinary principles to defend itself, principles that a fair portion of the professoriate have denounced as hidebound and conservative, and nobody seems to notice the doublespeak?