Higher Education Interdisciplinarity:Symmetry across policy levels

Across policy levels, calls for interdisciplinarity in higher education and research increase (Schijf et.al., 2022). At the European level, interdisciplinarity is promoted through, among other projects, the “European Universities Initiative” calling on institutions to form cross-national and cross-institutional partnerships to develop and offer “interdisciplinary modules” and “innovative interdisciplinary pedagogies” (Council of the European Union, 2022b). The European University Strategy states that “Synergies are needed in areas such as transnational cooperation and the institutional transformation of universities, support for fundamental academic values and scientific freedom, developing academic careers, innovative and interdisciplinary learning, teaching and research” (European Commission, 2022a, p. 15), and interdisciplinarity in teaching and research is closely connected to European efforts to mobilize universities to participate in the digital and green transition (European Commission, 2022).<br/>Reacting to international trends, many higher education institutions promote interdisciplinarity in teaching and research. For example, Denmark’s oldest university, the University of Copenhagen, whose programs are mainly organized according to traditional disciplinary categories, initiated a number of interdisciplinary projects (Lindvig et.al., 2017). Similarly, Aalborg University in Denmark has embarked on an ambitious curricular change project requiring all programs to offer their students the chance to experience interdisciplinary collaboration (Aalborg University, 2021). <br/>At the same time, theoretical explorations of interdisciplinarity and interdisciplinary collaboration suggest that interdisciplinarity involves multiple conceptual and practical challenges (Lamont et.al., 2016, Szostak et.al., 2016) indicating that interdisciplinary higher education may not be as smoothly implemented as policy documents seem to anticipate. Consequently, the first part of the paper conducts a policy analysis of the role of interdisciplinarity in European higher education strategies. What seems to be the rationale behind the heightened emphasis on interdisciplinarity, in other words: which problems is interdisciplinarity supposed to address. The second part of the paper consists of a case study of Aalborg University’s comprehensive interdisciplinarity project, investigating how it relates to European policies on interdisciplinarity in higher education.<br/>