While I think Harvard has done a good job of creating interdisciplinary fields and giving students the freedom to create their own majors, I still find today’s XKCD amusing and appropriate in today’s world of higher education:
For the most part, I see a lot of benefit to interdisciplinary studies: those who are pre-med, for instance, usually take Life Sciences 1a, which combines biology and inorganic chemistry to explain how DNA and cells work. Physical Sciences 1, at least when I took it back in the spring of 2008, was an integrated chemistry and physics course that tackled real problems like climate change and the search for alternative energy sources. I always like it when Engineering schools are tied into a larger university body, rather than isolated. I believe the same of undergraduate business schools. While specializing makes economic sense (no one can do everything well, better to focus on something more narrow), college students should have the opportunity to expand outside of their field and see what the world has to offer. Scientists should know history; historians should understand evolution.
Outside of the sciences, Social Studies allows students to dabble in government, history, economics, sociology, and more (it is heavier on theory than concentrating in Government is). Penn has its own version of Social Studies, called PPE – philosophy, politics, and economics. Many other schools, I’m sure, offer similar programs. I do believe that every political science or government major should have to take at least basic economics, simply for the sake of being to understand different policies. I also believe that social psychology would go a long way in any social science education (psychology is unfortunately often overlooked both by social scientists who delve into politics and pure scientists who prefer neurobiology). I made quite a few course recommendations to politicians in my article here.
What about the humanities, like English? If one takes an English class, is he doomed to live in a box on the streets of New York? Hardly. A class on rhetoric, as some law clerks at my internship explained, can do wonders for those who are interested in law and politics – the nuances of words and the interpretation of phrases create many battles in our society (see: strict vs loose constructionists). And who wouldn’t benefit from the beauty of the arts? It is, after all, one of the things that make us truly human.