To the man with a hammer, every problem is a nail

Encouraging students in university to reach beyond the traditional disciplinary boxes is a significant problem – our education system makes practically no effort to look across the traditional disciplinary boundaries. Some US universities have experience with common first year programmes that focus on problems  in an interdisciplinary space in which students can explore different disciplinary modes of investigation in an integrative way. Simply copying their programmes would, I think, properly meet the needs of our undergraduates. How then  might we design first year courses which encourage students to work on questions rather than in disciplines, with a distinctively Irish flavour? One pet course I have had in mind would use the Great Famine as theme.

Traditionally, the Great Famine (1845-47 ) is the preserve of historians in our many flavours, but it offers points of engagement for a great many disciplines:

History – Causes, course and Consquences, obviously. the basic framework

Literature – the literature of famine, death and exile, both in Ireland and overseas.  The Famine was a major event  shaping the soul of the nation, and yet we divorce it’s history from the literature of suffering, and of survivor guilt

Modern Languages –  The  years saw a general depression across Europe, and emigration, seperation and scattering are appear as themes in the literature of every European language. We are, as a nation, poor at languages; understanding the common European experience of  emigration across different languages would raise interesting questions.

Music and song – Apart from the obvious role of music as a partner to literature in expressing emotion, ethno-musicology has a lot ot say about emigration while in more practical terms, popular ballads carried news and political satire. Some Irish historians have been aware of this rich vein, but by and large, we do our thing in History and they do their thing in Music, without enough sharing.

Archaeology – apart from the industrial archaeology of the workshouse, there is also the practical fieldwork possible i the many abandoned “famine villages” around the country.

Art and Art History – A logical partner to the other creative disciplines in exploring the common experience of the famine.

Food Science, Nutrition, Plant Science –  It’s not called the Potato Famine for nothing; you can’t really deal with the events of 1845-47 without addressing the pathology of the potato blight.

Medicine - Epidemiology and some other -ologies:  Most people who died in the Famine did not die from hunger, but from diseases. Any serious effort to study the Famine demands input from the medical sciences.  As with the blight, how can you interpret the political history or the art and literature of hunger and emigration if you don’t deal with the central event?

Marine Engineering: Building replica’s of Famine era ships which carried emigrants away form Ireland enjoyed a burst of activity in the past 15 years. if no dicsussion of the Poor law system is complete with looking at the history of the workhouse buildings, then surely the naval architecture of the emigrant ships also warrants study.

And the list can go on – the point is that there is almost no discipline in the university which cannot find something to say from its perspective which bears either directly on the events of 1845-47 ; or on the implications of famine in a general way, ranging down to contemporary problems of famine and the real rise in food prices which we will see over the coming winter.  The problem is that our disciplines, in order to enable disciplinary professionalism, have become prisons, silos which cannot speak to one another – and this is how we teach our students. To the man with a hammer, every problem is a nail.

The Great Famine is an easy starting point, because it so obviously involves both the Arts & Humanities and the Sciences. It is a problem which transcends Snow’s ”Two Cultures’  For “The Decade of Anniversaries” in which we mark the centenary of the events from 1912 to 1922, it is easy to see how all the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences can bear on the problems of politics and society, but not so easy to bring in the hard sciences. It is possible though – there are significant developments in military technology which carry over into the history of the War of Independence – airpower in counter-insurgency, and the very hard physics of Improvised Explosive Devices.  The Titanic, marking the final triumph of Victorian engineering, brings in questions of  engineering, the science behind it and the social organisation that it created.

Every problem will not provide an equal entry point for every discipline, and in terms of teaching, and not every discipline will produce academics who are happy to respond flexibly to a course which moves around a central question on a path shaped by student inquiry so it would be necessary to work with a coalition of the willing – and willing here means not only willing to work collaboratively but also willing to accept that one’s home discipline does not, in fact, possess the one and only true path to understanding!

The point here is that there are a range of problems which could be dropped in front of students, which are interesting, reach into a wide range of disciplines, and have a distinctively Irish and international dimension which could serve as starting points for a Liberal Arts programme that would improve the ability of our graduates to deal with complex multi-dimensional problems with automatically reaching for the nearest hammer.