Staff Writer Sebastian Coughlin emphasises the need for interdisciplinarity in education to train the innovators of tomorrow.
Today’s trend of subject specialisation is setting us up for future failure. This generation, pushed to specialise young, are not necessarily capable of formulating and merging different ideas to create impactful research. The percentage of students studying a humanities subject at AS or A Levels dropped from 56% in the 2015 academic year to 38% in 2021. This has led to top academic institutions lacking the quality of applicants in humanities and arts subjects as there is far less competition for places. Lawrence Goldman’s recent article addressing Cambridge University’s encouragement of private school pupils in applying to music, classics and languages highlights this changing prerogative.
Considerations of the ever competitive current job market have led to the disparagement of a varied selection of subjects across both the humanities and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) and instead promoted a focus on one or the other instead, thus leading to narrower knowledge bases. Interdisciplinary research, where the cutting-edge discoveries of academia are made, arises from a combination of both specialised and broad knowledge—something sorely missing at the secondary level. The school system is setting this generation up to fail.
Such delayed exposure to interdisciplinarity frustrates the initial progress of students at university, as students aren’t able to capitalise upon their newfound academic autonomy and widened horizons as they struggle to enter the dialogue between disciplines promoted at university. The push from Trinity College for more privately educated students indicates that there is a state/private school divide playing out. Yet, with the recent confirmation to alter the national curriculum in 2027 to promote critical thinking and analysis, as well as art degrees being given similar status to the humanities, this could have implications for the acceptance rates of pupils.
For an expert opinion, I talked to Dr Spike Gibbs, Lecturer in Medieval European Economic and Social History at King’s and asked him about the importance of interdisciplinary research in History. ‘Historians have always been magpies’, he says. “Researchers draw on theories and methods from other disciplines to better understand the past.” Interdisciplinarity liberates historians from the written word to reveal hidden histories: “we can examine sources such as images, objects and landscapes using approaches from archaeology and art history, thus enabling us to recover the experiences of non-literate persons.” To Dr Gibbs, analytical approaches pilfered from other disciplines like “economics, sociology and anthropology” allow historians “to move beyond description to explanation”. Thus, he sees interdisciplinarity as “fundamental to historical research” and “a source of innovation in our craft.”
This outlook isn’t unique to Dr Gibbs or King’s: in a 2025 article, Professor Christine Gerrard at the University of Oxford similarly emphasised the importance of interdisciplinarity, also noting the structural impediments of undergraduate education: “our traditional single-subject degrees impede syllabus reform and intellectual risk taking”.
There are numerous current university programmes which centre interdisciplinary research. Cambridge’s Centre for Data-Driven Discovery, Energy and Global Food Security explicitly “promote[s] an interdisciplinary approach”, combining public policy and governance with environmental science and ecology with a focus on the prevention of global food shortages in the future.
Oxford University’s Human-Centred AI Lab and newly created Lau Fellowship in Creativity and AI, will help to direct AI’s impacts on society by translating philosophical concepts and implementing them within open-source AI software. The application of ethics within AI seeks to prevent nefarious use of the technology, particularly in the context of current concerns over misinformation and security risks. Furthermore, our own institution’s interdisciplinary research, such as the Kings Global Health Institute, explores health challenges in societies around the world by combining human interactions (anthropological evidence) with biomedical science data. The mergence of both resource networks will be invaluable in combating communities affected by poor health and sanitary concerns.
The British Academy’s “Knowledge Frontiers” programme provides funding specifically for interdisciplinary projects spanning both the sciences and humanities. Further funding is set aside for forging global research interconnections between the UK and other countries such as Japan, Switzerland, South Korea and Canada.
SHAPE + STEM = Success!
The prevalence of interdisciplinary research at top universities suggests that a malleability of subject skills is valued within prestigious academic institutions, and with good reason: when STEM and SHAPE disciplines (Social Sciences, Humanities and the Arts for People and the Economy) are combined, innovations and breakthroughs follow.
The combination of scientific and anthropological research is essential in understanding the study of our species and its origins. Cambridge researchers combined approaches in their ancient DNA analysis by considering migratory factors, and found evidence that modern humans fall into two separate brackets of ancient populations which diverged 1.5 million years ago. Without the understanding of a combination of genetic testing and migration patterns, this would not have been possible.
The discovery of radiocarbon dating by Willard Libby at the University of Chicago has had huge impact upon the work of researchers from other disciplines. Atmospheric scientists use the method to measure how quickly carbon has moved through our planet’s ecosystems, thus helping quantify human contributions to climate change. Specifically the radiocarbon-14 isotope enables archeologists to estimate closer timestamps on objects too. A famous example of this being the Vatican’s own Turin Shroud analysis conducted in 1988. Led by scientists from Oxford, Zurich and Arizona it revealed that the cloth itself- that was once believed to have dated back to the first century, was in fact from between 1260-1390.
This interdisciplinary logic equally applies to revolutions of theory: Walter Friedman’s book ‘Fortune Tellers: The Story of America’s First Economic Broadcasters’ argued that the ability to predict markets via economic forecasting requires an understanding of historical crises (the Great Depression of 1929 in this instance) in order to avoid future crashes.
The creation of Human Geography (taking into account social and cultural factors, as opposed to just Physical Geography’s focus on the natural environment) exemplifies the compatibility of Humanities and Sciences approaches. Assessments of the topography of landscapes can help to explain human migrations, as can analyses of cultural mergences and interactions too. Friederich Ratzel’s emphasis on the environment impacting human cultures (otherwise known as environmental determinism) merged the study of geography with ethnography in the late 19th century. However, despite this concept revolutionising how we perceive human interactions, it was later adopted and distorted by Adolf Hitler using the idea of the ‘Lebensraum’ (what is needed for a nations development) to promote Nazi ideology. This displays the sensitivity of massive contributions to interdisciplinary research and how they can be altered to suit immoral political agendas. Yet, the use of environmental determinism in contemporary academia reflects the positive applications of ethnography in contributing to the study of cultural identity. The conservation and regeneration of biocultural diversity is essentially linked to social functioning by protecting communities’ relationships with their surrounding landscape. In the High Atlas mountains, academics conducted a study of 92 participants from the indigenous Amazig communities, analysing agriculture, pastoralism and the functions of their local economy. These assessments have led to rural development planning catering towards a more productive ecological landscape thus benefitting their level of affluence.
Whilst specialised research within STEM and SHAPE subjects will always be essential to the evolution of academia, interdisciplinarity will play a key role in fostering the skill sets and requirements to further research. However, due to the trends in subject choices, with STEM far outweighing SHAPE disciplines in the post-16 academic landscape, this blinkered approach to education risks hindering research. The push from Trinity College for more privately educated students indicates that there is a state/private school divide playing out. Yet, with the recent confirmation to alter the national curriculum in 2027 to promote critical thinking and analysis, as well as art degrees being given similar status to the humanities, this could have implications for the acceptance rates of pupils. It is incumbent upon schools and universities to ensure that the next generation of students are well rounded and capable of contributing effective interdisciplinary research in an uneven academic landscape.
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