As administrators begin to worry, belatedly, whether their wards are broadly educated, an increasingly popular buzz word in academia is “interdisciplinarity.” When I first heard it, I had little to go on other than a yardstick of verbiage I use as a rule—that the longer and more convoluted a term for a pedagogical innovation, the worse of an idea it tends to be.

That said, the notion seemed to promise a remedy to the myopic tendencies that too often overcome academics—the world where a lucky college professor is one whose monograph on iron smelting in prehistoric north-western Tanzania might be read by 5,000 fellow scholars, and not 500. (Such a book actually exists, by the way.)

Anyways, if I was ambivalent before, I now see clearly that the prospects that “interdisciplinary studies” would somehow approximate “liberal education” are rather dim.

An illuminating example of the concept’s flaws is “Bodily Proof,” this weekend’s conference by Harvard’s Humanities Center, which was created for the specific purpose of bringing together many scholars of different fields.

Suffice it to say that the keynote speech—the epic coming together between the Art & Architecture, English, History of Science, Anthropology, and other departments—is entitled “Proving Sex: Gender and Genitalia, Beards and Blood from the Classical World to the Nineteenth Century.”

And that’s about as broad-minded as the conference gets, amidst other papers such as “Undersea Experience: Civil War Submarines and Bodily Engagement” and “She Bore Her Breast: Sojourner Truth & the Black Body as Proof Text.”

Anyways, the whole affair is so full of bad puns (“embodied politics”) and spun phrases of the academy (a panel is titled “Culturing the Cure: Bodily Alterna(rra)tives”) that it’s hard to tell when the conference organizers have come up with a name simply because they think it sounds cool, or because it aptly describes the topic at hand.

And, of course, it shows “interdisciplinarity” for what it usually is: not really an effort to broaden students’ academic vision, but to further curtail it around a choice few “critical theories.”