ABSTRACT
Scholars have responded to various crises besetting higher education by emphasizing the value of the humanities disciplines, their key role in society, and, in general, education. At the same time, in their scholarly work, scholars continued to affirm fragmentation and the plurality of knowledge production known as posthumanities and postdiscipline, multiculturalism and cultural studies. Interdiscipline changes strategy and proposes a new universal role for the humanities and literary studies: to bring together disparate and divergent scholarship and teaching under a new common goal of fighting climate change and inequality. Coming together, faculty and universities would counter the threat of totalitarian and neoliberal ideologies that seek to sideline science, truth, and facts and to impose religion- or business-based models of education. The creation of successful interdisciplinarity would take time and require a change in attitude such that all knowledge production would foreground the convergence and integration of scholarship and teaching. Literary scholars would help undertake institutional reform by organizing this convergence, starting with peer review, and then by establishing interdisciplinarity as a specialization, new common epistemology, and otherwise facilitating integration of knowledge production.
