Title:Beauty at the intersections

When Miami native Akil Cole (C’24) began his first year at Georgetown, it was Fall 2020 and classes were meeting remotely due to the pandemic. He planned to study political science and government, but a course that first semester called Environment and Society with Professors Randall Amster and Martha Weiss opened a new door.

“I’ve always wanted to be helpful to people, and I’ve always wanted to protect our planet, but I didn’t really know how to do that in a way that made sense,” recalls Cole.

The professor brought in an inspiring guest lecturer: executive director of the Community Ecology Institute, an environment and education nonprofit in Columbia, Maryland.

“They were doing what I wanted to do. The combination of that place, that guest speaker, and that organization connected the dots for me,” shares Cole. “COVID set me on a path that was a much more winding road than I would’ve expected at the beginning.”

He continued taking environmental and sustainability courses every semester. At the time there was no environmental studies major at the College of Arts & Sciences, but he learned about another option from his friend Joel-Anthoney Bossous (C’23).

“He was studying Africana studies and philosophy and I was like, ‘How are you combining those things?!’” Cole says.

Discovering the Interdisciplinary Studies major

Since the late 1970s, the university has offered a major in interdisciplinary studies, explains Professor Bernie Cook (C’90, G’91), director of the program which is housed in the College of Arts & Sciences.

“It’s an opportunity to design a major around a series of questions that the student articulates, and it’s built around a research experience,” says Cook.

Students apply for the program as sophomores and propose their majors. “They need to have an awareness of themselves and their interests, but they also need to have worked through the core curriculum enough to have been exposed to different fields of knowledge. That way they have a sense of, oh, okay, pursuing these questions through this discipline might lead me here, but there are other aspects of my questions that could be illuminated more if I looked at another discipline.”

Recent students have explored a range of fields including biology, game theory, philosophy, and political theory. As a film and media studies scholar who teaches American studies, Cook’s expertise is broad, but no one professor could possibly cover the scope of interest that students in Interdisciplinary Studies pursue. The program requires that students work with two faculty mentors to help guide their path as they design a major based on big questions. “Interdisciplinary studies is a great way to tackle really difficult problems because you’re seeing potential solutions from different perspectives, and you’re trying to find overlap or coherence or integration among them,” Cook adds. Cole realized that the interdisciplinary approach offered him the creative and challenging approach that he needed. What began for him as a big question about how to save the world evolved over time as he took more classes and spent summers working in the field of ecology. He refined his question to “How do we make sure that everyone has quality food to eat without destroying the planet?”

“I wanted to understand how to pursue these questions and activities related to agriculture, community resilience, and environmental sustainability as fully as possible, while also addressing issues like justice, inequity, and social structures,” Cole notes.

In the end he came up with his final research question: “How do environmental justice organizations use farming, gardening, and other land-based initiatives to resist oppressive systems and make their communities more resilient?” For his thesis, he developed a podcast called Peace of Earth.

“I crystallized my journey with the Interdisciplinary Studies major through a four episode mini-series that is a comparative case study of two organizations: one in Columbia, Maryland and one in Cape Town, South Africa. Both of them use farming and gardening to grow food, but also to make their communities more resilient, particularly against oppressive systems like capitalism, patriarchy, and the legacies of apartheid and civil rights issues here in the United States.”

Liberal Arts 2.0

Interdisciplinarity itself is foundational to any liberal arts education, and has been part of the fabric of Georgetown since its beginning. The university is placing a renewed emphasis on it in order to help answer increasingly complex questions in our interconnected world today—challenges like the pandemic, mass migration, and climate change. In 2023, Georgetown created the position of vice president for interdisciplinary initiatives and appointed Soyica Diggs Colbert (C’01), Idol Family Professor of Performing Arts and African American Studies, to the new role.

“All colleges and universities exist to advance the boundaries of knowledge,” says Colbert, who was named Interim Provost in November 2024. “But as a Jesuit institution, we are also encouraged—some might go as far as saying required— to do that work towards the common good. And we also know that the problems and challenges that we face in our world—problems that we’re training our students to solve, that the research that we’re currently doing at the university is helping to solve—do not fit neatly in disciplinary boundaries.”

As part of her work in the role over the past two years, she partnered with other university leaders to build and support cross-school and crosscampus collaborations, including the Emergent Ethics Network, the Tech & Society Initiative, and the Medical Humanities Initiative.

“There are lots of places we could point to at Georgetown University where interdisciplinarity has existed,” Colbert notes, adding that interest is growing, but often students and faculty run into hurdles. She helps break those down.

“A lot of my work focuses on supporting initiatives that cut across more than one school. For example, students who are enrolled in one school find it difficult to even take classes at another school. Part of my role is to create the structures that make it easier for our students and our faculty to collaborate, decreasing the friction that has existed for a while, even as people were already doing this work.”

She describes the effort succinctly: liberal arts 2.0.

“Georgetown has had a liberal arts education since our founding in 1789. The assumption is that there’s a general basis of knowledge that all of our students should attain, and they go back to their dorm rooms, to their own work, and integrate this knowledge. For example, they might realize that something they heard about in their economics class relates to something they heard about in their history class. What we’re doing now is giving students the support to make those connections in real time in classrooms. The fundamental need of having these different bodies of knowledge speak to each other has always been a part of the liberal arts mission. How we are delivering on that mission is shifting.”

Noteworthy examples include new degrees across schools, such as the interdisciplinary undergraduate degree program delivered jointly by the School of Foreign Service and the McDonough School of Business. The Dikran Izmirlian Program in Business & Global Affairs, which graduated its first cohort in 2023, offers an experiential and research-based program to prepare students to address the complex interactions that occur when business and international affairs mix, all with a grounding in ethics.

Additional programs include a new joint degree between the College of Arts & Sciences and Georgetown McDonough focusing on proficiency in multiple languages, and a new master’s degree in sustainability offered through The Earth Commons and Georgetown McDonough, developing business leaders with a scientific understanding for how sustainability functions.

Supporting interdisciplinary work among faculty is the William and Karen Sonneborn Chair for Interdisciplinary Collaboration—more of a loveseat, says Colbert, because it’s made for multiple collaborators—which currently supports a global team looking at predicting migration patterns, and another on studying the Indian Ocean, which includes faculty from the Qatar campus.

“All of this is an effort to respond to questions that our students and faculty want to answer,” says Colbert.

At the intersection of society and technology

An interdisciplinary initiative percolating at Georgetown since 2019, Tech & Society offers itself as a way to connect work already underway across campuses “to explore emerging questions and realities” relating to the “increasingly ambiguous terrain of information technology.” The effort encompasses multiple centers and programs touching on different aspects of technology and society, including ethics, privacy, national security, law, policy, governance, and data.

In addition to organizing conferences, spearheading research, and supporting education such as the popular new Technology, Ethics, and Society minor, the organization offers a variety of programs, including the Fritz Family Fellowship. Offered for students at all levels, the collaborative research projects are codesigned and mentored by faculty from at least two different areas of expertise. The goal is to develop a network of public-interest tech leaders grounded in the social and ethical impact of technology.

Fritz Fellow Jason Yi (C’26) has been interested in STEM subjects throughout his life. The computer science major learned how to code in middle school and studied mechanical engineering at his STEM-focused high school in Virginia. But he also started doing more work in the humanities and social sciences, branching out to become part of Model U.N. and studying educational equity. These interests drove his decision to come to Georgetown, knowing that he wanted to study technology but as it connects to social impact and government.

“When I came to Georgetown, I wanted to merge these two areas, but I had no formal way of doing that,” says Yi. “The Tech & Society Initiative made it really easy, with all the departments and research centers under them. Students can create a way to get involved in this space no matter if you want to work more on the qualitative research or the technical side.”

During his first year at Georgetown, he worked at the Beeck Center for Social Impact and Innovation, which he credits for contributing deeply to his interdisciplinary mindset. The center fosters partnerships between students and practitioners working on projects that advance good governance, using data, design, technology, and policy as instruments for equitable societal change.

“The amount of research I was able to do while looking at different tech initiatives the government is putting on gave me a general awareness of what is going on in the field,” Yi notes, crediting his mentors for the trust they offered him as he pursued his research. During that time he learned about an issue in government—the problem of making web forms mobile-friendly—and developed it into a winning hack-a-thon project to digitize paperwork in one click.

He had the opportunity to demo the project at BenCon, the digital benefits conference sponsored by the Beeck Center. “I ended up getting a lot of great feedback, because I was able to demonstrate how technology is really able to improve a lot of aspects about government.”

Yi cites a favorite interdisciplinary course called Intro to Tech Ethics and Society featuring guest speakers who ranged from philosophers to computer scientists, offering different perspectives on ethical issues related to technology “and really explicitly put these topics in conversation with each other.”

In the fall of his first year he took an Ignatius Seminar theology course called Human Flourishing: East and West with Professor Erin Cline—an experience that also informs his interdisciplinary approach. “We learned about different religions from Eastern and Western cultures, and learned how to analyze and extract value from different perspectives.”

Naturally, interdisciplinarity is also happening outside of the classroom, Yi notes, in conversations between friends.

“Every once in a while we’ll just talk about some issue going on in the world today, or my pre-med friends will talk to me about their research. My other roommate will talk to me about his China research. Another close friend is interested in labor relations. And I’ll talk to them about my computer science research. There’s a lot of really smart people around me, with different perspectives, and I learn so much from them every single day.

“There’s a strong formal network of interdisciplinary work here at Georgetown, but also a very strong informal network as well of people being interested in the topic, talking to other people in the field, making connections in that area,” Yi adds. “Even in just the three years I’ve been here, the interdisciplinary community at Georgetown has gotten stronger.”

Indeed the last four new majors developed at the university are each shared by two schools.

Interim President Bob Groves, who previously served as provost for 12 years, underscores the increasing importance of interdisciplinarity at Georgetown, and the need to construct spaces to foster it. He notes that students today seek more experience-based learning, which aligns well with an interdisciplinary approach because it integrates education with research and is problem-oriented. Above all, interdisciplinarity aligns with Georgetown’s values.

“Georgetown’s mission involves forming people for others, especially those among disadvantaged groups in the world,” says Groves. “The unsolved world problems—climate change, epidemics, harmful effects of globalization—are disproportionately faced by disadvantaged groups. What domains of human knowledge will solve these problems? No one field has the ownership to do so.”

Aspects of interdisciplinarity can be challenging, he adds, as experts from different fields learn over time to speak the same language, and work in a model of shared leadership rather than a more efficient but less fruitful top-down hierarchy. It’s good for faculty, for students, and for the world.

“Interdisciplinary work can be risky, but it generates possibilities.”