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It seems to me that the task of students later as employees and the task of learning institutions are the same and can be thought of as interdisciplinarity. On the student side, interdisciplinarity means the garnering and sythesis of complex information from a variety of sources (from different disciplines, from different types of informants, from a variety of texts), the presentation of complex information in different modes (verbally, visually, in writing) and in different settings (as reports, to groups large and small, to different audiences), and the acquisition of the skills necessary for controlling complex information from different settings--through courses, internships, and public service. On the learning organization side, interdisciplinary means the ability to respond to demographic, disciplinary, economic, and political dynamism. Thus, it seems that students provide learning institutions with a way to learn. If an institution organizes learning so that students can be interdisciplinary, learning the skills to control complex information by providing the necessary structures--access to appropriate coursework, audiences, tasks, and other organizations such as businesses and non-profits--then the learning institution is providing itself with the opportunity to rethink learning in an extra-disciplinary way. Such a commitment would change the presently-exisiting relationships between students and knowledge, students and teachers, and students and evaluation. Students would have to become more autonomous and self-directing in their relationship to knowledge; they would have to become knowledge-producers instead of merely consumers. Professors would have to act more as facilitators of learning and less as ownerships of knowledge. And, evaulation would have to be more appropriate. Since the possibility of the loss of the power to grade has been taken up in prior posts, I want to focus on this for a minute. Grading by professors is only one means of evaulation and not the most appropriate one, if the goal is to evaulate the interdisciplinarity of students. One might imagine separating, for example, the evaulation process from the immediate learning process and locating the process of evaulation in a different time and place from the classroom. This could be done by having students submit to a common test at the end of each year in which they would produce a portfolio, project, or presentation. If what businesses need is students who can synthesize information and present it in meaningful ways to disparate audiences, then testing general skills, such as reading, writing, speaking, and analysis, makes more sense than examining mastery of specific content. Moreover, there is no necessary antagonism between mastery of content and control of more general, more transferable skills. A learning organization benefits from the reorganization of these traditional relationships by becoming more clearly responsive to its environment--its community, citizenry, legislature, and the businesses which depend upon students who themselves are ready to learn new skills and knowledge. It seems to me that students, both as learners and future workers, need to be seen as the means through which traditional bureaucratic forms can be transformed in the direction of flexibility and responsiveness. If in the future as employees students will be required to perform in ways I have described as interdisciplinary, then educational institutions are at the moment simply not demanding enough of them and need to find the means to develop in students interdiciplinary skills and in doing so will have to reshape their own hierarchies. Kim Gillespie <[log in to unmask]> Program in Modern Thought and Literature