The Sorcerer's Apprentice and the Future of Knowledge

Across the late twentieth and early twenty-first century interdisciplinarity was offered as a remedy for what ails both academia and society. But we now live in different times: knowledge production has become too dangerous for it to continue along the laissez faire path it has trod. This implies that the concept of relevance, the stock and trade of interdisciplinarity, has become problematic. Rather than relevance, the conversation about knowledge needs to be concerned with the governance of knowledge. This essay begins with an account of the value and efficacy of interdisciplinary approaches to knowledge. In its second half, the essay explores the possibility of a new social consensus on values – the necessary condition for the creation of a governance structure for knowledge. I end with thoughts on the role that universities might play within a reconstituted epistemic order.