Everywhere you go in Boston-Cambridge, universities and research centers are saying the same thing: we need to do more interdisciplinary research. It’s at the heart of the recently announced proposal for Harvard’s new Allston campus. It’s part of MIT’s drive to do more energy research.

And BU has joined in with its new plan to revamp itself. It even has a catchy slogan: One BU. (Probably something the fundraisers can use.) The report covers a wide range of BU activities and is rather short on detailed recommendations. One of the stated aims is to:

…cultivate cooperative work across departments, Colleges and Schools, and administrative boundaries in order to eliminate disconnected pockets of activity and bureaucratic barriers to broad interdisciplinary study and research by students and faculty;

What’s perhaps more interesting are the publicly posted comments from members of the BU community. I would have thought the university would want to keep these internal, but there they are for everyone to read. Lots of expressed skepticism for how to unify such a large and diverse university.