Abstract
This article reflects on 11 years leading the University of Birmingham's Liberal Arts and Natural Sciences unit, examining how we might continue to educate undergraduates in genuine interdisciplinarity when the very concept remains contested and unstable. Drawing on Walter Benjamin's understanding of historical consciousness and the ‘weak messianic power’ of the past, I argue that interdisciplinary education succeeds not through mastery but through what I call the amateur's advantage – the willingness to stand as a curious outsider across multiple domains. As a classicist and literary scholar by training, I trace how leading programmes that bridged arts and sciences transformed my own scholarly identity, revealing interdisciplinarity not as a fixed pedagogical method but as a disposition towards knowledge itself. The suspension of our successor BASc programme in 2025 prompts reflection on what interdisciplinary education can and cannot achieve within institutions organised around disciplinary structures, and on the fragility of educational experiments that demand students and staff alike inhabit uncomfortable grey areas where established canons, questions, and methods no longer suffice.
The Messy Question
How do you teach undergraduates to be interdisciplinary?
The question sounds straightforward until you try to answer it. Then it becomes a nest of further questions, each more vexed than the last. What does it mean to ‘be’ interdisciplinary? Is it a skill, a disposition, an identity? Can you teach it at all, or must it emerge from years of disciplinary mastery? And if genuine interdisciplinarity requires deep competence across multiple domains, how can we possibly expect 18-year-olds to achieve this in 4 years?
These are the questions that haunted me throughout my decade leading the Liberal Arts and Natural Sciences (LANS) unit at Birmingham (2014–2025). They are urgent questions now because universities face mounting pressure to manage diminishing fee income and negotiate ever more complex regulatory and funding environments yet still produce employable graduates who can navigate complexity, think across boundaries, and solve ‘wicked problems’ that refuse disciplinary containment. Moreover, in these same universities there persist the taxonomic and linear, hierarchical models of knowledge that remain stubbornly organised around departments, disciplines and the vertical integration of specialist knowledge. We try to produce graduate interdisciplinary outcomes from disciplinary structures. We want breadth from an infrastructure built for depth. We want students to be comfortable in epistemic grey areas when we ourselves find them deeply uncomfortable. We want students to be comfortable in the disassembly of heuristic practices when we ourselves, in many of the contexts that make universities tick, find this deeply uncomfortable.
The LANS BSc and BA 4-year degrees at Birmingham were part of a cluster of programmes in the UK seeking to integrate arts and sciences at undergraduate level. LANS required all students to undertake core modules engaging both humanistic and scientific modes of inquiry regardless of their eventual specialisation. Students were not required to identify a traditional ‘Major’ field of study and remained free to develop and re-centre the content and balance of their academic portfolio at every stage, selecting modules from across all five of the University's colleges, and opportunities available through an integrated study abroad year. Thus emerged combinations as diverse as Film and Physics, Textiles and Geography, History and Biosciences. The structural openness by design placed LANS outside any single college, reporting directly to senior university leadership – an arrangement that proved both essential to the development of a distinctive interdisciplinary mission and, ultimately, a source of institutional vulnerability.
In reflecting on this leadership work at the invitation of the Editor-in-Chief, I found myself thinking harder about my route to this work from my disciplinary background as a classicist – which is to say, as someone already implicated in interdisciplinarity by disposition if not by design. Classics has become an odd amalgam: a catch-all for philology and history, literature and material culture, philosophy and science, all held together by the accident of temporal and geographical proximity in the ancient Mediterranean world; ‘Ancient Mediterranean Studies’ is just one of the new attempts to redefine what it is that we do. We are at least in principle trained to read inscriptions and interpret vases, to parse Greek metre and understand the significance of Roman sewers, to theorise gender in Ovid and factor in mortality rates in imperial provinces. We are jacks of many trades — a promiscuity of method that Lloyd traces, with characteristic precision, to the very ambitions of ancient curiosity itself (Lloyd 2002, 147).
This zone of discomfort is important. It represents what the medical educator Kumagai (2022, 649, 653) identifies as the transformative space where mentored uncertainty extends the learner's edge of discovery, tracing a lineage from Plato's aporia (that moment of puzzlement and productive impasse in Socratic dialogue) through Vygotsky's ‘zone of proximal development’ (Vygotsky 1978). From my perspective, in actively seeking out and occupying Classics’ breadth and troubles, virtuosity emerges. This is virtus in its root sense: courage and disciplined excellence. This virtuoso is both adventurer and specialist.
I already knew by training what it felt like to stand at the threshold of unfamiliar methods, to stumble over alien vocabularies, to experience that peculiar mix of exhilaration and vertigo when you realise that a historian's ‘evidence’ means something utterly different from a scientist's ‘data’. And I came to know – because leading LANS forced me to learn – that you only truly grasp your own discipline's assumptions and infrastructure when you are required to explain them to someone from outside, someone who does not share or value your shibboleths. In that process emerges a new kind of ‘interactional expertise’ (Collins 2004).
As Callahan writes, on the difficulties in developing a course in medical ethics, there is evident pedagogical value in being ‘an educated amateur in the other’ field(s) – a physician who understands ethics, a philosopher who grasps medical culture, but even this positionality is a compromise: by what rationale is one field privileged over another? Who pulls rank, when? Which disciplines are by nature or design more carnivorous (or cannibalistic) in their DNA? Indeed, where might ‘interdisciplinarity’ sit as a field amidst wider competing practical challenges for the application and development of credentials (Callahan 2010, 421 and passim). What emerged clearly in conversations with prospective students and their families was the challenge of translating interdisciplinarity's open, integrative practice into the specific, transactional contexts of employability and career planning.
The amateur's advantage comes with real risks. Google and now Generative AI have made us all amateurs in everything, able to retrieve facts about immunology or Boolean algebra without understanding the conceptual architectures that make those facts meaningful. As I asked in a 2020 interview: ‘How do you make yourself different to just anybody on the street who can Google stuff?’ (University Times 2020). The answer, I came to believe, lies in something Walter Benjamin understood about historical consciousness – something about memory, time and the peculiar untimeliness of real understanding.
Benjamin's Weak Messianic Power
Benjamin's Theses on the Philosophy of History written in the darkness of 1940 as Europe collapsed, contain a strange claim about the past's relationship to the present, its weak messianic power: as if the past realised certain latencies, certain promises or premises, in its future. As if the past had rights that the present must honour (Benjamin 1969, 254).
What has this to do with interdisciplinary pedagogy? Everything, I think. Because Benjamin grasped that the past does not arrive to us as a smooth continuum, a steady accumulation of knowledge building towards the present. Rather, the past ‘flashes up’ in moments of recognition – what Benjamin calls Jetztzeit, ‘now-time’ – which I use in this context to characterise interdisciplinarity in action: all of a sudden a constellation of images, symbolic and allegorical, from different moments locks together and illuminates something previously invisible, delivering a kind of poised revolutionary potential and (for my purposes) wrenched from the teleological strictures of disciplines (Benjamin 1969, 261). This, I have come to believe, is how interdisciplinary understanding works. Not as the patient accumulation of (disciplinary) knowledges, until you finally achieve some synoptic vision. Rather as sudden recognitions – constellations – where a concept from but no longer of biology illuminates a problem previously conceived in music, where a historical analogy unlocks a contemporary scientific puzzle, where a poem reveals something about geological time that no amount of data analysis, for instance, could capture.
Barile, writing on Benjamin and the Italian poet Vittorio Sereni, describes this as the difference between ricordo (memory as static record) and rammemorazione (remembrance as generative ferment) (Barile 2002, 19–21); full of the dangerous, hectic vitality of Benjamin's eingedenken (Barile 2002, 23). Reflecting this through the arguments of Klein and Newell, genuine interdisciplinary work moves beyond simply juxtaposing disciplinary perspectives, respecting their norms and characteristics, and instead ‘consciously integrates separate disciplinary data, concepts, theories, and methods to produce an interdisciplinary understanding of a complex problem or intellectual question’ (Klein and Newell 1997, 393). Yet as Laursen (2024, 106–107) observes, integration ‘remains, paradoxically, both a key methodology and an elusive mystery in crossdisciplinary work’, variously explained as ‘a stepwise process for individuals’ (citing Repko and Szostak 2020) and ‘an iterative process for teams’ (citing Keestra, Uilihoorn and Zandveld 2022), yet resisting systematic codification. This all goes some way towards capturing the practicalities, but in my work with students and colleagues I have found that this framing, like so many others, fails to bring to life the emergent, emotional and often mysterious materialisation – a quality that distinguishes some of the most transfigurative leaps of interdisciplinarity – as a viscerally human experience.
UK Students arriving at interdisciplinary programmes typically come equipped with memory-as-record: facts accumulated for A-levels, knowledge organised into disciplinary boxes for coursework, exam-ready information. What they need is to learn the radical instability and irreplicability of remembrance as iterative and collaborative process – the capacity to let different domains speak to each other, to listen and to allow unexpected resonances, to tolerate the discomfort of not-yet-knowing while patterns slowly emerge or collapse. This cannot be taught through content delivery. It requires a different pedagogy entirely: one that makes humane space for confusion, values questions over answers and treats knowledge as something re-made rather than transmitted. Something continuously emerging in each new present tense.
But here's the rub: making this space real requires time, it demands consistency and organizational security to develop staff who are themselves comfortable with confusion, who can model the virtuoso's courage rather than retreating to disciplinary safety. And it requires institutional structures able to support and willing to resource such risky work and delayed value. The decision in founding LANS at Birmingham was to position the unit (staff, students and resources) outside of the University's five disciplinary Colleges, and it proved as crucial to our success as it was perhaps also eventually a risk to viability at scale. Reporting directly to the Provost and Vice-Chancellor was not an administrative quirk – it was essential to the core design: LANS as an educational laboratory, able to move quickly, test new approaches, fail productively and adjust course without navigating the institutional inertia that disciplinary structures and resource models inevitably generate. This design required maintaining our responsiveness, ambition, rapid flexibility and capacity for creative experimentation. The flattened hierarchy of LANS’ relationship with the University's senior leadership helped to underwrite students’ risk in joining such a fluid, experimental space, requiring a study-abroad or other non-traditional third year, and without the security of programme benchmarks, employment metrics, and recognisable, replicable curricula.
The LANS Model: Between Arts and Sciences
Our undergraduate programmes – BA/BSc Liberal Arts and Sciences, BSc Natural Sciences; with integrated Masters equivalents – took very seriously the ‘and’ linking arts and sciences. This messy epistemological centre ground was where we aimed to centre our students, with compulsory modules in years one and two requiring engagement across and between the ‘two cultures’ (using C. P. Snow's (1959) exaggeration of the divide). It was uncomfortable, it represented for these students an area of difficulty and resistance to the normal systems, workloads and everyday equilibria, and not all saw it as an opportunity when they were in the midst of it. Yet by their final year projects, and in discussion with external examiners as part of annual quality review processes, students typically reflected positively on the benefits, the extra rocket fuel, those initial studies gave not only to their independence and ambition as researchers but to their onward journeys into life after LANS.
Our insistence on this conjunctive ‘and’ reflected the gulf between scientific and humanistic modes of enquiry uneasily institutionalised, for many often insurmountable and usually complex and intractable reasons, in contemporary academic knowledge production. It floodlit the different kinds of questions, framed in incompatible vocabularies rife with false-friend assumptions and different kinds of truth claims, that emphasise the divide where it emerges. To repurpose Snow's observation, the ‘two cultures’ these days often seem to be meaningfully in dialogue (‘and’) but too often are talking across or at each other (‘this and that’), with genuine frustration. Often, as a result of insufficiently serious attention to the structuring and supports for framing these conversations and poor understanding of the labour they entail, the ‘and’ allowed LANS to be perceived as anthology rather than synthesis.
It was not until we gained the resource to make substantive academic and professional services hires to create a dedicated, stable team, with expanded office and educational space, that we were able to look beyond the creative maelstrom of the first few cohorts’ experience and outcomes and begin to undertake systematic and radical annual evaluation, and to grapple meaningfully with what should constitute core learning. With a few cohorts of students moving through the programmes, and a stabilising operating unit, the early years of ad hoc innovation and student input became more structured co-creation. We determined to move beyond our starting point for the compulsory core modules: a mix of the ‘survey course’ model that treated interdisciplinarity as tourism across disciplines, and a set of digital creative-practice activities that were difficult to resource, monitor and support, leading to students producing much more, and working much harder, than the module's credit weighting warranted.
The LANS curriculum in what would eventually turn out to have been its final form embodied our commitment to genuine exploration and experiment among and within groups of disciplinarily different students and academics. In their first and second years all students worked from multidisciplinary group research (From Research to Policy) to understand and leverage the power of diverse teams, moving into the deeper integrative conundra that as we mapped it, underpin interdisciplinary work (Interdisciplinarity: Study and Practice). Across these two curricular years, we worked to produce students attuned to the challenges and ethical dimensions of translating research on real-world problems into toolkits for effecting authentic and tangible change. We insisted on methodological training – not just ‘learning about’ different fields but learning how they operate in principle, what counts as a good question, what failure looks like, what makes evidence persuasive, and how arguments progress from premises to conclusions.
Recognizing students’ need for translational vocabularies – ways to communicate interdisciplinary capabilities in specific professional contexts – we developed two key bridging structures. The Year in Civic Leadership offered an optional alternative to study abroad, embedding students professionally with third-sector, charitable and social justice organisations to undertake defined project research and development while continuing campus-based training in leadership and professional development. This returned students to the change-making tactics and capabilities from their first year but now in real-world application. Final-year Entrepreneurial modules focused on start-up skills and practice. These weren't retreats from interdisciplinarity but applications of it: students learning to translate integrative thinking into targeted action, building functionality between open inquiry and focused professional contexts.
In culmination, we had modules that were epistemologically open in structure and content, and progressed towards interdisciplinarity moving from theory, to practice, and application. We selected, with students, problems that they were energised by, that had local as well as global dimensions, that required multiple frameworks; in sum, projects where students had to translate between conceptual systems. A particular challenge but also strength was that students and module leads together were responsible for producing the academic and intellectual depth, drawing on and eventually integrating the multiple areas of knowledge and expertise in the room. The lecturers in these complex, fragile, but community-focused learning sessions were facilitators, and joined students as project co-developers and investigators rather than as voices of knowledge authority. Students typically found these modules to be outliers in their educational experience, and by turns confounding, inspiring and uncomfortable.
The Student Challenge: Double Jeopardy and Conceptual Vertigo
Our A-Level entry requirements were demanding: A(*)AA, signalling that this was not a choice for students simply fleeing from disciplinary demands or ill-equipped for disciplinary competence. My own perspective is that A-Levels remain a poor proxy for predicting academic potential, but this predominant UK educational paradigm funnels students into a university system that is ill-fitted, especially in the sciences, for taking students from zero to mastery. The scale of LANS and our ‘outsider’ place in the university's organisational model gave us no leverage to change that. By contrast, both the Melbourne Model – which controversially restructured Australia's highest-ranked institution around US-inspired liberal education objectives emphasising multiple knowledges and interdisciplinarity – and Hong Kong's unprecedented system-wide mandate for general education across its entire public higher education sector demonstrated that radical structural reform was possible. These precedents showed that breadth could be positioned as central to institutional strategy rather than as a peripheral enrichment (Davies and Devlin 2007; Godwin and Altbach 2016). Both experiments served as inspiration for LANS, yet Birmingham's UK context offered neither their radical political will nor – in an era of increasingly constrained HE funding across education and research – the structural leverage to effect such grand transformation. This created perceptional vulnerabilities in our organisational and operational framing.
Our demanding A-Level entry requirements also created a paradox in a results-oriented system: our students faced what we might call ‘double jeopardy’. They were measured against disciplinary standards in their chosen specialisations (anything up to the 50% of their degree that might be devoted to a Major, some of which, for instance Sustainability, and Gender, did not exist outside the LANS curriculum), while simultaneously being asked to operate outside of their comfort zones in ways that disciplinary students never faced. A standard physics student taking thermodynamics is graded against their peers; a LANS student might move from thermodynamics to a class on representing climate change, where they were expected to analyse Amitav Ghosh and write about narrative strategies alongside literature students, evaluated by the same assignments – cognitive labour utterly unlike anything in their physics training.
This double jeopardy exacted real costs and increased the emotional labour for academic faculty, wellbeing and professional services colleagues despite the design of our personal tutorial system (structured to provide consistent, tailored advice and guidance for LANS students throughout their academic journey). Some students thrived, producing extraordinary work that synthesised across domains in ways that disciplinary programmes rarely see. Others struggled with conceptual vertigo – the experience Gérard Vergnaud describes in his theory of conceptual fields (Vergnaud 1990). But beyond the cognitive challenge, students faced what we might call translational jeopardy: the need to communicate interdisciplinary practice in transactional contexts that demanded specificity. Prospective employers and graduate programmes wanted to know ‘what you studied,’ not ‘how you learned to think across boundaries.’ From their first encounters with LANS at Open Days – where families sought reassurance about ‘real-world implications’ and worried whether interdisciplinarity was ‘worryingly aspirational’ in the transactional context of student loans – through to final-year job applications, students needed vocabularies that could make fuzzy, integrative capabilities legible in professional terms. This was not a failure of interdisciplinarity but a feature of operating in institutional and professional worlds still organized around disciplinary logic.
The vertigo was not accidental. It was necessary. Klein's mapping of the contested relationship between interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity (Klein 1996, 11–14) illuminates the dissonant implications of transcendence in interdisciplinary communities, a mode that Lattuca also characterises in her typology (Lattuca 2001, 83). We were asking predominantly 18-year-old first years to begin to do what many academics avoid: to embrace trouble, genuinely to inhabit multiple epistemic frameworks, to recognise how a question ‘belongs’ to chemistry versus sociology versus ethics, and to understand that some questions belong to none of these alone. This challenge has deeper epistemological roots. Boon and Van Baalen (2019) argue that interdisciplinary research faces inherent cognitive difficulties because disciplinary perspectives fundamentally shape how knowledge is constructed. Students trained in discipline A cannot easily use epistemic resources from discipline B because those resources are ‘indelibly shaped’ by B's typical methods, instruments and conceptual frameworks. Genuine interdisciplinary competence requires what they call ‘metacognitive scaffolds’ – frameworks for understanding how different disciplines construct knowledge differently.
We were asking predominantly 18-year-old first years to develop this metacognitive awareness while simultaneously learning disciplinary content and navigating multiple disciplinary cultures. Moreover, to me, as Lattuca also observes, ‘the art or science of negotiation’ between disciplines remains rooted in collaborative scholarly paradigms that do not always sit comfortably with a single-scholar dispositionality still prevalent to some extent in the Humanities (and by habit, in my own practice), nor with traditional second-level disciplinary norms and success markers (Lattuca 2001, 50).
This demanded not just intellectual capacity but emotional resilience. Students needed tolerance for ambiguity, comfort with not-knowing, and what the poet Keats called ‘negative capability’ – the ability to remain ‘in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’ (Keats [1817] 1958, 1:193). These are not typical learning outcomes in contemporary higher education, where clarity, certainty and mastery dominate pedagogical discourse. For the LANS team, the leaps of imagination as well as the gritty determination to help students to frame and shape their choices into something meaningful, even and especially when there were crises, failures and reversals, produced a distinctive and tightly woven sense of community and mutual interdependence. In modelling this behaviour for our students, we aspired to foster not only honesty but humility as cornerstones for academic rigour.
Institutional Resistance: The Politics of Grey Areas
Research-intensive universities are troubled by grey areas. Clearly and consistently structured and funded organizational units, defined disciplines, stable metrics and predictable outcomes offer strategic security in a volatile sectoral and political context (McVitty 2024). In the UK, this typically means having clarity for research assessment, grounded in established subject associations or in professional bodies that accredit competencies or fight at national level for viability and significance. Functional clarity of outcomes increasingly determines how funding councils support research and employers recognise degree qualifications. Interdisciplinary ‘arts and sciences’ programmes and academics fit none of these current categories comfortably; although given time, norms, expectations and structures can change.
Organizationally anomalous, the operational challenges to LANS were immediate and relentless. Where should staff be housed when their work spanned multiple departments? How to ensure that the appropriate administrators and academic leads in departments knew about and remembered LANS students, every semester? How to discover and negotiate between the myriad local systems and cultures of each department or programme that might be variously broken or derailed by LANS students? Who evaluates emergent knowledge when traditional review and assessment operates within disciplinary boundaries? How do you identify quality when the whole point is to violate disciplinary conventions? As Callahan notes from his bioethics experience, ‘there are to this day no clear standards about what counts as good interdisciplinary work’ (Callahan 2010, 422). This is not necessarily a bad thing. It created a team ethos of self-critical reflection and evaluation, alert in every context to what we brought to the university (resources, students, recognition, reputation and risk), and always, how we could share what we had learned to demonstrate support for the overall institutional mission.
Unsurprisingly, therefore, the ‘double jeopardy’ that students faced had its staff equivalent. Disciplines are, as theorists of knowledge have shown, technologies of power – ways of organising knowledge that determine what questions can be asked, what methods count as legitimate, who has authority to speak; Klein's study on boundaries is particularly important in this context (Klein 1996). Interdisciplinarity, fostered in a dedicated unit, gains visibility; if successful, risking a critical mass that seems to prosper, parasitic on but uncommitted to disciplinary labour; potentially, representing a threat to the macro organism. Its success implicitly underscores the contingency of disciplinary boundaries and benchmarks, and that the way we in the West have carved up knowledge reflects historical accidents and political, financial and institutional conveniences rather than any inherent structure of reality. These same structural tensions that constrained LANS at the undergraduate level manifest throughout academic careers, as Lyall reflects on in this anniversary issue. Her analysis of how UK research policy and institutional governance systematically disadvantage interdisciplinary scholars despite celebrating interdisciplinarity rhetorically – what she characterizes as being expected to ‘dance backwards in high heels’ while disciplinary colleagues perform conventional steps – makes clear the effort and risks.
The administrative labour of negotiating with multiple departments, explaining ourselves to sceptical colleagues, making the case for our existence and value, every year, was not only academically stimulating and often exhilarating, it was also exhausting. This labour extended to internal programme design as well. Each student's degree required the curation of a unique thematic portfolio – a permanent revolution in miniature. Yet we also needed to satisfy programme learning outcomes, external quality benchmarks and the reasonable expectations of students paying substantial fees. Maintaining the balance between radical experimentation and responsible stewardship required constant recalibration of ambition within our resource constraints. Maintaining this equilibrium was essential to making the work sustainable, both for the team and for students navigating an already demanding educational experience. Yet the significance of individual qualities in key post holders underscored the vulnerability of this kind of unit to personal change locally, and to strategic operating contexts.
Our goal in pursuing a strong and coherent team and a predominantly horizontal management structure was a strategic attempt to de-centralise my own role in particular, especially the risk of my coming to represent a ‘guarantor’ for LANS. As Dean, it was also my moral and professional responsibility to work with our predominantly early-career team to develop compelling promotion portfolios, and to find opportunities to amplify their achievements, enabling them to shine as interdisciplinary educators and innovators. Their successes have been a remarkable testament to the shared culture of aspirations and high expectations that we developed. Two clear examples of success emergent from this strategic distribution of agency and responsibility were a Year in Medical Humanities (for MBChB intercalating students), and a Year in Civic Leadership (opened to students across the University). These were conceived from within the team as producing diverse ways to enable a wide range of students to experience structural insights into different communities and domains of knowledge and practice. With the particular support of the Deputy Dean, our mentoring and review processes for academic staff saw distinctive upticks in promotion and recognition for colleagues joining LANS from other units.
The unresolved tensions underpinning many of our decisions remained productive, but also suggest why institutionally, the adjacencies of multidisciplinarity eventually emerged as the sheltered harbour, and that is where our latest programme, the BA Liberal Arts, currently sits. Multidisciplinarity brings different disciplines together to address a problem, but each discipline maintains its integrity, applies its methods and speaks its language. True interdisciplinarity is dangerous: it suggests that disciplines – and this means careers, resources, hierarchies – themselves might need radical transformation. With integration, bringing disciplines into contact is not additive (discipline A + discipline B) but generative of something new that belongs fully to neither, and that should in turn deliver new kinds of multidisciplinary neighbourhoods.
What Next
In September 2025, the BASc Arts and Sciences – designed to replace our BA/BSc Liberal Arts and Sciences programmes – was suspended for recruitment. The suspension makes especially timely this reflection on what interdisciplinary education can and cannot achieve within current institutional structures.
What failed? Our arguments for the value of a distinctively separate organizational operating model for connecting arts and sciences organically and philosophically at undergraduate level were unsuccessful in making the case for institutional exceptionality as ‘Liberal Arts’ became an increasingly mainstream model in the UK. The broader political context for universities certainly militates against radically experimental models set to spend years building undergraduate capacities whose value will not be obvious, or easily quantifiable, until much later; perhaps decades. Interdisciplinarity is slow work. This environment certainly contextualises the conclusion of the LANS experiment. Despite excellent recruitment, strong performance against many metrics, graduate attributes and outcomes closely aligned with the University's ambitions, a coherent community of practice, and a university-wide appreciation of what LANS students brought to traditional subject studies, we nonetheless remained a structural anomaly in an organization developing new priorities, ambitions, and KPIs increasingly oriented towards consolidation and research intensification – priorities in tension with those which guided LANS’ foundation. The original design feature became a bug. Put simply: the very independence that enabled our pedagogical innovation also meant we lacked the embedded constituencies and resource flows that protect headline disciplines during periods of institutional realignment.
Yet our hundreds of graduates remain a distinctively heterogeneous community, and describe how the ability to translate between domains, to recognise when a problem requires multiple frameworks, to tolerate ambiguity – how these capacities make them valuable in new and evolving ways that their examiners and employers had not anticipated.
Aura and Authenticity: What Cannot be Reproduced
Returning to where I began, Benjamin's essay on mechanical reproduction helps to clarify what is at stake in specialist versus interdisciplinary knowledge. Every work of art, he argues, possesses ‘aura’ – a unique presence in time and space, its authenticity grounded in tradition and embedded in specific contexts. Mechanical reproduction destroys this aura by detaching the work from tradition, substituting ‘a plurality of copies for a unique existence’ (Benjamin 1969, 221). Photography liberates art from ritual, from the requirement that you travel to the site or monument of environment to experience it. But something is lost: that sense of irreplaceable particularity, the object's authority derived from its singular history. It is also, it seems to me, analogous to the tension between my opening idea of virtuosity understood deeply as a particularly humane practice and the normative expectations of replicable expertise that scaffold economies of knowledge.
Disciplinary authority has its own virtuosity in this sense. The specialist possesses aura – deep embedded knowledge in a field's traditions, fluency with its canonical texts and mastery of its craft. This cannot be mechanically reproduced through quick internet searches or casual sampling. As Benjamin notes, ‘the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition’ (1969, 221). Google gives us endless copies but no aura, no sense of how knowledge is made, uniquely, through years of situated practice. A similar diminution occurs when the mere assemblage of multiple disciplinary perspectives (multidisciplinarity) is assumed to produce genuinely integrated interdisciplinary insight. It might (not). True interdisciplinary integration, like disciplinary mastery, demands virtus – the courage to work in zones of discomfort, and the disciplined excellence that comes only through sustained practice across epistemological boundaries.
Yet Benjamin also recognised that in the shattering of tradition that this withering of aura produces, new possibilities emerge (1969, 221). Freed from the ritual dependence of aura and authenticity, art can serve different purposes – can become, in his phrase, ‘designed for reproducibility’ rather than for cult value (1969, 224). Similarly, interdisciplinary work sacrifices something of specialist aura – that deep craft knowledge, the subtle recognitions available only after decades within a tradition – but gains something else: the capacity to see patterns across domains, to notice when one field's methods might illuminate another's problems, to translate between conceptual systems and find something genuinely original and even transcendent in the process. As Benjamin's essay concludes, there are intense moral and ethical risks in this process of sh(r)edding the aura, and despite the different political contexts in which he wrote, that danger persists.
What LANS sought to cultivate was space for a double consciousness: students learning to work within disciplinary traditions (building craft knowledge and virtuosity; the practice of and within traditions; Benjamin's ‘aura’) while simultaneously standing outside and de-mystifying them (comparing methods, translating concepts, questioning shibboleths; virtus). The specialist achieves depth through immersion; the interdisciplinarian achieves breadth through strategic distance. Neither is superior; they are different epistemic stances, each valuable for different but also shared purposes.
Community of Practice: Living the Paradigm
None of this would have worked as it did without the extraordinary community we built – connecting LANS staff and students alike with the comprehensive breadth of our university's research and disciplinary expertise. This was not just rhetoric about interdisciplinarity; it was a daily practice articulated in an ethos document, seeking to employ kind curiosity, humane rigour, intellectual bravery and appetite for calculated risk.
The LANS staff team – academics and professional services colleagues together – modelled the disposition we hoped that students would develop. We asked impossible questions of each other, admitted ignorance, challenged assumptions persistently. It was invigorating (and terrifying) to lead from a position of disciplinary ignorance so that meetings, whether academic or organizational, might develop into genuine conversations where no one pretended to have all the answers, where chemists asked historians about evidence and historians asked chemists about replicability, where everyone accepted that confusion was productive rather than shameful.
This created in microcosm what Lave and Wenger (1991) call a ‘community of practice’ – a concept that Wenger (1998) develops into a comprehensive account of learning as social participation, characterized by mutual engagement, joint enterprise and shared repertoire – not just people doing similar work, but a group actively constructing shared meaning, developing collective identity, negotiating what counts as legitimate knowledge. Genuine collegiality. Our community was bound by a shared ethos that we reviewed and refreshed annually, rather than by shared methods: the conviction that complex problems require multiple perspectives, that intellectual courage means venturing beyond your expertise, that not knowing where you are going is crucial to the journey.
Students recognised this even as they struggled with it. They saw staff communicating and collaborating across remarkable divides, they watched us stumble through unfamiliar territory together, model productive disagreement, demonstrate that expertise means knowing what you do not know. The hidden curriculum – what students absorb from institutional culture rather than explicit teaching – was as important as the formal curriculum. Sustaining this community was often exhausting, especially as we struggled through and emerged from the COVID pandemic; it demanded constant vigilance. My role as Dean involved a peculiar equilibrium: passionate excitement about our voyage of discovery, balanced against the harsh realities of annual budgets, recruitment targets, staff change, student expectations and volatile sectoral tides. I was required to inspire and lead by example, shelter the team and students where possible from corrosive external forces, yet remain honest about the challenges we faced and the flexes that we could not make. Modern universities, however, need certainties that we could not entirely provide, and our interdisciplinary unit fit poorly with many of the modalities through which dominant global rankings and reputational metrics propagate particular kinds of HE narrative.
This tension – between the messy reality of genuine education and the structural accountability and norms that sustain it – became part of what we taught in our extracurricular work with students. Students learned in conversation with academics in structured but informal pedagogic encounters (at film screenings, on museum visits, at sporting events, in the intermission at the theatre, on overnight trips) that intellectual work happens within institutional structures that often constrain it, that the constraint can be inspiring, and that idealism requires pragmatism to survive. These were not necessarily comfortable lessons, but they were honest ones, and they prepared students for the compromises they will face in whatever careers they pursue.
Our community's shared aspirations mattered enormously: the conviction that education should make positive changes in the world, that interdisciplinarity can serve justice by breaking down silos that perpetuate inequality, that curiosity is an ethical stance. We were not just training clever people; we sought to cultivate thoughtful citizens who could navigate complexity with both rigour and humanity. Whether we succeeded remains to be seen. But the attempt was worth making, and the community we built – and the decade in which it flourished – demonstrated what can be possible, and the structural affordances with which particular risks become less palatable.
Conclusion: Living in the Grey Areas
Interdisciplinary education, at its best, teaches students to inhabit that space between disciplines where established methods just do not quite work, where you must improvise, where every moment holds the possibility of unexpected recognition. It is uncomfortable space. The future is not guaranteed. You might fail, might never achieve the synthesis you seek, might end up neither proper scientist nor proper humanist but some awkward hybrid in an increasingly pressurised employment market.
But that hybrid status – the virtuoso's capacity for productive contamination, that is where new knowledge and innovation, and productive failure, emerge. Not from mastery but from the creative friction of not-quite-knowing. This is, as McCarty observes in articulating ISR's own intellectual project, what curiosity has always demanded: the freedom to 'look anywhere, ask anything' — and the courage to accept that this has always meant risk and resistance (McCarty 2016, 2). Students and staff who learned to inhabit grey areas virtuously carry that capacity forward, applying it wherever they land. They understand that the past has claims on the future, that remembrance generates possibility, and that real understanding arrives not as smooth accumulation but as constellation – sudden patterns flashing up in the darkness, there for an instant, demanding recognition before they fade.
This is what interdisciplinary education at its best achieves: not an empty promise of universal knowledge but a certain kind of attention, a willingness to notice and listen to resonances. It is often modest work, this cultivation of possibilities. But in grey areas between established certainties, modesty might be the only honest, virtuous stance we have. A different version of this article might have drilled into the data. What I offer here is practitioner wisdom rather than empirical analysis: the experiential knowledge gained from 11 years of immersed leadership, insights that – like Benjamin's moments of illumination – resist capture in spreadsheets and league tables.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
This article draws on conversations with hundreds of colleagues and students over 11 years. I include in this group the Editor-in-Chief, whose comments have been especially acute and humane. The generous feedback from the peer reviewers has also helped to sharpen my aims and focus. To the LANS team – academics and professional services staff alike – who built and sustained a genuine community of practice: your intellectual courage, generosity and willingness to venture into grey areas made everything possible. To the students who took the risk of this brand of interdisciplinary education, who tolerated confusion (many will recall my rallying cry of ‘organised chaos’!), asked impossible questions and showed us what can happen in the space to think across boundaries: you are the best argument for why this work matters. And to those colleagues across Birmingham and beyond who doubted, questioned and challenged: your scepticism sharpened our thinking, even when it made our work harder. The LANS experiment in that particular form may have ended, but what we learned together endures.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.