Does interdisciplinary research require interdisciplinary education?

This paper presents an alternative view to some of the ideas put forth in The Forestry Chronicle (Vol. 81, No. 3) by arguing for a disciplinary approach to graduate-level education. There appears to be a diverging dichotomy between the educational requirements of forest managers and forest researchers. Forest managers today are barraged by an increasingly broad set of problems, and therefore likely benefit from an interdisciplinary education at the undergraduate level. In stark contrast to this generality, modern forest researchers solve problems so intricate and complicated that often only those specialists on the frontier of an academic discipline can contribute—which is why graduate-level curricula should, for the most part, remain disciplinary. Key words: forest management, forest research, undergraduate-level curricula, graduate-level curricula, disciplinarity