FORUM TIMELINES

EDITOR Jonathan Grudin [e-mail]

try department and ask some of the faculty what
they’re working on. Almost certainly you’ll find
people who talk both about understanding the
fundamental mechanisms behind some sort of
chemical process and about developing some kind
of therapeutic based on that process.)
Similarly, there are plenty of other units on
campus that are multidisciplinary, spanning both
social science and technology: public policy; busi-
ness; science, technology and society (STS) pro-
grams; and emerging programs on sustainability,
to name just a few. The iSchools may be among
the most interdisciplinary—we often include
not just social scientists and engineers, but also
people from the humanities, from library and
information science, with business degrees, and
possibly even lawyers. We can and should develop
effective approaches to nurturing interdisciplin-
ary work, but we cannot claim this as a factor
that uniquely identifies us.
As for rules and policies: As WKK note, a
thicket of these is never a good thing. Overly com-
plicated or rigid regulations nearly always stifle
innovation and are, in my view, best avoided in
any field, regardless of whether it is well estab-
lished or emerging.
Thus, WKK’s three criteria seem to me to be
important characteristics of a good interdisci-
plinary program, and thus a good iSchool. These
characteristics are an important part of our iden-
tity. But they by no means distinguish us; we still
need a defining framework of some sort.
The simplest definition, of course, is that we
study information in all its forms, and more
particularly, the connection between people,
information, and technology, and that we create
solutions to information problems. WKK, however,
reject this definition and make the surprising
claim that information as a concept should not be
part of our identity statement. In fact, they argue
that information should not even be viewed as
something separate from people and technology.
They provide two types of support for this claim.
The first is sociological. WKK argue that in gen-
eral people have a hard time understanding what
information is, and that this makes it difficult
to explain what we are about. Additionally, they
claim that when those people are our academic
colleagues, we risk being off-putting by claiming
information as our own, since “there is no such
thing as an informationless field of study.”
Their second argument is epistemological.
Information, they claim, is “just” an abstraction.
As they put it: “It is the thing that moves within
and between people and technology, making them
interesting.” For them this is a problem, since they
believe that “most other academic disciplines—at
least those claiming to be part of the sciences—
have concrete objects of study in the world.”
The sociological arguments are simply not valid
in my experience. While it is true that neither
academics nor non-academics have much experi-
ence with information as a field of study, and thus
are prone to ask what an iSchool is, I have found
that a fairly simple explanation suffices once you
get past the initial joke—“You’re the dean of infor-
mation?? Wow, you must know everything.” My
pitch goes something like this:

January + February 2010