Interdisciplinarity now stands as the foremost academic initiative of our time. On both personal and collective levels--as teachers, scholars, administrators, and students--we are faced daily with the need to rethink our most basic theoretical and practical assumptions in accordance with a host of considerations that require sensitivity to questions of ever-changing international, local, multicultural, thematic and technological issues. Whether we are philosophers building a bridge to cognitive sciences, art historians adapting literacy criticism, musicians composing on computers, biologists reading political theory engineers or psychologists interfacing with local K-12 programs, or students juggling all of the above while turning toward post-graduate professional goals, interdisciplinarity speaks at once to our most ambitious, deeply meaningful and pragmatic intellectual and social interests.

The Center for Interdisciplinary Studies (CIS) functions as an essential site and mechanism on the Tufts campus through and across which facilitation of interdisciplinary work occurs. The institutional structure provided by CIS encourages and initiates multidisciplinary dialogue and practicums necessary to the nurturance of new approaches to curriculum, pedagogy, research and outreach. Moreover, as ever-increasing interdisciplinary aims and innovations continue to thrive, and newly coalesce as, programs, CIS provides the unifying administration and leadership that drives the interdisciplinary impulse at Tufts.