The great interdisciplinarity illusion – and what to do about it

Across the UK, universities promise to prepare students for a complex world. They increasingly champion interdisciplinarity as the way to deliver it. We see this in the increase in new programmes and – across the Russell Group – in almost every institutional strategy framework. As well they should. The world is full of complex problems – from climate change to mental health crises to the impact of AI. For the sake of our future, graduates of interdisciplinary programmes must have the skill set to address the great challenges they will inherit. But what’s celebrated in strategy documents rarely matches what’s taught in classrooms.

When interdisciplinarity becomes multidisciplinarity

All too often, modules that claim to be interdisciplinary are only multidisciplinary. Multidisciplinarity slices a complex problem into discipline-shaped fragments. Each discipline answers only on its own terms – politics politically, economics economically – leaving the larger problem behind. Once reduced to fragments, a problem stops being complex. Students are often assessed on these fragments, such as being asked to bring two disciplines into conversation or, more superficially, to write in a non-disciplinary style.

Multidisciplinarity is a good starting point. However, “bringing together” is not the same as the rigorous work of integration. Simply listing perspectives side by side or acknowledging multiple disciplines breaks down the problem without putting it back together. Integration demands more: not just reassembling the pieces, but transforming them into a new response that addresses the problem as a whole. Interdisciplinarity is not an add-on. It requires sustained, analytical, reflective, creative work that starts early in the process. Universities have embraced the multidisciplinary step and mistaken it for the whole. Without integration, students are not learning to think across complexity. The outcome is an education that looks modern but leaves them unprepared for the future.

When interdisciplinarity becomes flexibility

How did we get to this point? Governments, funders and global bodies started stressing interdisciplinarity as the most effective way to tackle complex problems. Higher education providers quickly adopted this language, keen to show alignment with these agendas. They turned “interdisciplinarity” into an academic buzzword – shorthand for being relevant and globally competitive.

In practice, many higher education providers embraced a version that could be contained within their existing siloed structures. Rather than rethinking how disciplines connect, they mapped it onto what their systems already allowed. Because interdisciplinarity sounds like “breadth” or “choice”, education leaders took it to mean options in curriculum design – module choices and pathways. This has since been marketed as “flexibility” or “personalisation” – words intended to appeal to prospective students.

This hollow version appeals to university leaders because it demands little of budgets and timetables. It is particularly attractive in disciplines where student recruitment is struggling, and new programmes offer faculty-wide flexibility. But while breadth and flexibility have value, on their own, they do not teach students how to grapple with complexity, and we must not deceive ourselves into thinking this is what interdisciplinarity looks like.

The problem runs deeper than flexibility alone. Programmes built on choice seldom provide a genuinely interdisciplinary core curriculum, replacing it with “cross-cutting themes or “global challenges” modules that are only multidisciplinary. This leaves genuine complexity – the kind that transforms learning – untouched, and reduces students to admiring complex problems without the ability to act on them.

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What universities must do now

This has to change. Here is a three-step plan: 

First, education leaders must familiarise themselves with the ideas and arguments of interdisciplinary studies. This is a well-established field of scholarship that defines what interdisciplinarity is and how integration works. There, they will learn about ways of integrating and types of integration. This should put an end to the convenient excuse that interdisciplinarity “means different things in different disciplines”. That sounds tolerant, but in practice, it reduces interdisciplinarity to a free-for-all – meaning it can be whatever anyone claims, turning it into everything and nothing all at once. This is precisely the logic that sustains the hollow version of interdisciplinarity.

Second, universities need to support those committed to teaching interdisciplinarity. Too often, they remain isolated within their institutions – a small minority whose work is left at risk of being lost altogether. Universities must protect this expertise and invest in building institution-wide communities of teachers so that knowledge is shared and genuine practice embedded.

Third, university leaders must tackle silos head-on. This begins with leadership: institutions should appoint senior figures with responsibility for interdisciplinary education, empowered to drive change across departments and colleges. Universities must also fund and reward collaboration, and redesign curricula and assessment structures so that integration is recognised rather than ignored. Reform cannot happen without rethinking how resources are used. At present, money rarely follows students; without stronger incentives, interdisciplinary education relies too heavily on goodwill. If universities cannot properly deliver interdisciplinary education, they should admit it. 

In the UK, students’ rights are protected by the Competition and Markets Authority. Students who are promised interdisciplinary modules and programmes have rights as consumers to study and practise interdisciplinarity, and the right to be educated enough to know when they are not receiving it.

Simon Scott is associate professor and programme lead of arts and sciences at the University of Birmingham.