Interdisciplinary campus battles UK sector status quo

Three years after the London Interdisciplinary School (LIS) opened its doors to students, its dean, Carl Gombrich, describes its curriculum as “radical but simple”.

The institution offers only a single course – Interdisciplinary Problems and Methods, which draws on skills from such diverse fields as English literature, mathematics, neuroscience and political science to study “real-world challenges”, including sustainability and the ethics of artificial intelligence, holding that a cross-disciplinary approach is needed to prepare students to tackle multifaceted global issues.

In 2021, LIS became the first higher education institution in the UK since the University of Warwick in 1965 to be given degree-awarding powers at inception, but it did not come without its challenges. While there was “a lot of goodwill” from regulators as LIS worked to establish itself, Professor Gombrich, alongside founders Ed Fidoe and Chris Persson, discovered that current regulation was geared towards single-discipline approaches.

According to Professor Gombrich, who set up UCL’s first interdisciplinary arts and sciences degree course before joining LIS: “Interdisciplinarity as a theme doesn’t really exist as a learning outcome in education,” which makes “innovation naturally quite difficult” for any institution that wants to challenge traditional degree structures.

While the Conservative government may have tried to make it easier for new institutions to establish themselves through the Higher Education and Research Act 2017, Professor Gombrich said he “did not appreciate” the challenge that LIS would still face after three years in terms of winning recognition and status in the conservative and hierarchical UK higher education system.

“The prestige thing is huge,” he said. Potential students can be “suspicious that we can be, or are, as intellectually demanding, fulfilling and, ultimately, as useful to them as a traditional intellectual degree or a Russell Group university”.

A cost-of-living crisis in which students are focused on getting value for their investment could certainly make this hurdle harder to overcome, Professor Gombrich conceded. While renown and recognition can come with time, “the question for us internally is, do we want to wait that long? Definitely years, if not decades?”

The students LIS does attract “are not from privileged backgrounds – they’re just brave”, he said. Of its 151 students, 82 per cent attended state schools. Meanwhile, its master’s course has “taken off like a house on fire”. Having started with just nine MA students in 2022, the university counted 42 in its most recent cohort.

“They just get the need for interdisciplinarity much more,” Professor Gombrich said. “They’ve been out in the world. They’ve worked. They see that studying one thing at university was nice in many cases, but really not that helpful or important for their careers.”

And LIS has had some notable successes. With its first undergraduate cohort graduating this summer, its students have lined up some impressive positions. The first job offer received by any of the class was for Goldman Sachs’ competitive graduate scheme, with other students gaining sustainability advisory roles and software engineer positions.

Professor Gombrich made clear that the LIS approach “isn’t for every university”. But there should be the choice, he said, and LIS should form part of a healthy ecosystem of higher education providers.

“With 600,000 people a year at university at least, there has to be a big space for students who go just because they want to get a job out of uni. And there has to be a big space for students to go just because they want to study medieval poetry. Both are possible. And there’s a third space, which should be big too, for extremely bright, talented, purpose-driven students who want both.”

Ultimately, this tension goes to the heart of the purpose of higher education: as graduates increasingly complain about feeling ill-equipped to enter the workforce, are universities there to prepare young people for their first job, or to provide a quality education that will set them up for their working lives and their place in wider society? Professor Gombrich said it did not have to be “black or white”.

Problems surrounding AI and sustainability are not “going to be solved by shouting in the streets or some technical solution”, he said. “[They are] going to be solved by some very smart person who gets the concept, who gets the history, who gets the data and is able to organise or set up a business which tackles this problem. So I don’t like the dichotomy between education either as instrumentalist for work or ivory towers. It’s clearly not [that simple].”

People will need a variety of complex skills and a range of knowledge to compete in a changing jobs landscape, he continued. “The jobs of now are already hyphenated,” he said, underlining the need for an interdisciplinary approach. Citing digital health, cybersecurity and sustainable fashion as examples, he said: “Hyphenation and hybridisation is inherently interdisciplinary.” Encouraging students to engage in a multidimensional approach prepares them for the lateral thinking needed in the workplace, he said.

But those championing such change can find themselves stymied by how higher education is viewed within the UK. Pressure on sixth forms and colleges to get students into Russell Group universities means that “there are some very powerful, locked-in incentives in terms of targets and perceptions”.

What the country needed instead, Professor Gombrich continued, was a “national conversation” about the role of higher education, and whether traditional degrees are inculcating the diversity of thought required of students and wider society.

juliette.rowsell@timeshighereducation.com