Supposedly, if you remember the 60’s you weren’t there.  But some of us do hazily recall that at the end of that decade, Essex became the place to be.  New ideas and freedoms made for a feeling of excitement - a frontier spirit, where the boundaries between academic fields were consciously being broken down, and a thousand flowers briefly bloomed. 
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Geoff has the sort of personal background that naturally gives him a broad, eclectic outlook.  When he became a social historian in the seventies, he grew up in a discipline that encouraged him to range widely, including in sociology and economics.  Later, as with many social historians, the linguistic and cultural trend meant that he needed to look at other aspects: literature, anthropology and even art history.  So when he went to Essex in 1980, he was looking forward to an atmosphere in which interdisciplinarity flourished. 
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The old enthusiasms were still around in the 1980s, but even then they were in decline; and by the following decade they seemed to have burnt out, as they had in many of the 1960s universities.  The founding ideas were still being honoured, but the departmental fiefdoms had been rebuilt and the traditional boundaries had somehow reappeared.  The self-image was still one of interdisciplinarity, but its substance had softly and silently vanished away. 
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Then in 2002 everything changed for him, when he found himself put in charge of the Arts and Humanities Research Board.  At that time, though the AHRB was technically inferior to the other Research Councils (it was made into a full Council only in 2005), Geoff was treated as an equal by the heads of the Research Councils, and was part of the whole policy-making process.  This gave him a unique chance to observe and influence government thinking at close quarters and to understand the directions that further education will have to take to survive in Blair’s (or Brown’s) Britain.
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Geoff summarises the government’s view this way: breakthroughs in human knowledge come only from cooperation between experts from different disciplines.  The big idea leading to this conclusion was the success of the human genome project, which, though basically a biological challenge, relied on essential help from chemists and theoretical physicists.  Indeed, without the conceptual models of each, the project would have been unthinkable.  The government’s belief in interdisciplinarity is not due to the influence of any one person, Geoff believes, though Lord Sainsbury must take some of the credit for promoting the idea within government.  The civil service as a whole has been buying into it over the last several years, and essential support comes from the Treasury which now believes (perhaps for the first time in history?) that investment in science is good for Britain as a whole.
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But the genome precedent was very much in the hard sciences.  What about social issues?  Whatever we may think of them, there is no denying that this government is activist on social policies and here, too, they believe that policy formulation requires multidisciplinary teams.  If you want to regenerate the inner cities, for instance, you need to bring together sociologists, urban planners, economists and perhaps others (a really enlightened approach, this writer might add, would include psychologists).

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What does this mean for Goldsmiths?  Just that we must listen to the powerful political messages emanating from Whitehall and the higher education structures.  Over the next five to ten years, interdisciplinarity will be the name of the game.  The way in which research councils award grants, the way in which the RAE evaluates departments - all will be influenced to a real extent by how far this important concept is incorporated into the way people work.  Look on it as a shibboleth if you like, and Geoff firmly believes in the importance of academic disciplines, but you cannot afford to ignore it. 

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This is all very fine, but as Lenin said, what is to be done?  It might be a good start if we answer the question, what is this thing called interdisciplinarity?  Geoff reckons there are not one, but three main types.
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Firstly, you have multidisciplinarity. This is where a team of different experts meet together to solve a problem, as in the genome project, or when they have to formulate social or energy policy to meet a definite need. 
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This is a natural enough process for people working in the hard sciences, which are collective enterprises and where cooperation and collaboration are part of the mindset (as they must be for areas where knowledge is essentially cumulative).  Scientists approach issues with a problem-solving mentality and tend to be goal-oriented; this means that they work to overcome whatever communication difficulties arise when, for example, biologists have to talk to physicists.  For people coming from the humanities, all of this is a lot tougher, by the way. 
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Secondly, you have interdisciplinarity.  In Geoff’s view, this term strictly means for most people in the humanities and perhaps also the social sciences that you as an individual need to acquire, or at least understand, more than one discipline.  It is therefore harder to achieve than simply seating a group of experts around a table: the bringing together has to occur inside a person’s skull. 
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This is hard enough (and rare enough) in the hard sciences.  But it is a darn sight more difficult in the arts, humanities and social sciences.  This is because what you believe, in, say, sociology, is tied up with who you are, with your personal identity.  So taking on another discipline can involve some serious messing with your own mind.  Small wonder that successful examples are hard to name, though in Geoff’s own field of history Alan McFarlane in Cambridge and Michael Anderson in Edinburgh represent a genuine marriage of the mind, involving history with anthropology, and sociology, respectively. 
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Lastly, there is transdisciplinarity.  This involves moving beyond and outside the constraints of traditional disciplines, indeed, beyond the whole concept of a rigidly defined area of knowledge.  One example might be seen in the emergence of “visual culture” as a field of work and an approach.  Griselda Pollock, who runs the Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History at Leeds, is another. 
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The question arises, though, of whether anyone can really transcend the boundaries of the disciplines in which they were educated.  Even people raised multilingually from birth will have one language which tends to dominate the others.  In the same way, it may be that an anthropologist looking at human psychology, say, will always see it differently from a Freudian or cognitive psychologist.  Perhaps it is only the next generation, brought up in a different environment, who can absorb disciplines and blend them in their own minds, much as the English language has absorbed and blended so many different inputs over the last thousand years.
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So where does this leave Goldsmiths?  Geoff believes that the college has strong institutions which embody the idea of interdisciplinarity: prominent examples are the Centre for Cultural Studies, the Centre for Cognition, Computation and Culture and Digital Studios.  But elsewhere, the idea of interdisciplinarity, in its various forms, rests on enthusiastic individuals.  He sees departments here as having boundaries which are not as permeable as they might be.  Cross-departmental working is not made as easy as it should be.  It remains more difficult than it should be for undergraduates to take parts of their course in different departments.  The same applies to postgraduate students, where PhD training should allow for more exposure to other disciplines. 
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How to put this right?  You cannot create the desired activities artificially, top-down, Geoff thinks.  But you can create an environment where people who want to be interdisciplinary can find each other.  When enthusiasts for it emerge, you have to be ready to offer them the right facilities, and to encourage them to get on with it.
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So the take-home lesson seems to be, come up with imaginative ideas for starting something off that will implement interdisciplinarity, and which has real potential to succeed, and you will get support from the top. 
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Meanwhile, Somewhere Else Magazine is helping to get the movement off to a flying start, by providing an environment where disparate ideas and people can come together: it has created a space for those enthusiasts, on whom the success of these ideas in Goldsmiths must surely depend. 
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(Interview with Rory Allen)