Forget Classics, these students are studying to save the world

Instead of focusing on one subject, graduates from a controversial London university had a unique curriculum – fix actual problems

Zuzana Fernandes did what any parent who cared about education might wish their child to do. She took A-levels in difficult, serious subjects – physics, maths and economics – and earned a place to study physics at King’s College London. No one could accuse her of failing to aim high enough or of eschewing the rigour of traditional academic disciplines.
But Fernandes, 23, decided to defer her place at King’s for a year. She would spend the time as a youth worker in her home city of London. During this period, something in her mindset shifted. ‘It felt kind of hard to go back into physics, because it didn’t feel like it had anything to do with what was going on in real life,’ is how she puts it.
Around this time, she heard about a new university. London Interdisciplinary School (LIS) did not offer the usual choice of single or joint honours degrees in arts or sciences; instead it offered polymath courses designed to equip students with skills to tackle the complex issues societies face around the world.
This would not be achieved by simply studying, say, physics alone – and certainly not by devoting three whole years to English literature or the politics, philosophy and economics (PPE) courses that so many of our Westminster leaders undertake. It offered an alternative kind of curriculum: an interdisciplinary one, spanning everything from neuroscience and anthropology to economics, data science, politics and law.
The idea behind it: that students would gain a greater breadth of knowledge, understanding and skills transferable to the real-life challenges that Fernandes suspected a physics degree would fail to help her with. ‘I thought, “This sounds exactly what I need,”’ she says.
Fast forward three years to this summer, and she is in the first cohort of LIS degree students to graduate and enter the job market – convinced she made the right choice of university.
Higher education in England is in trouble. Amid rising costs, frozen fees and fewer international students, universities face a financial crisis. Some 40 per cent were forecast to run budget deficits for 2023-24, according to the Office for Students. Staff jobs and courses are in peril – particularly in arts and humanities subjects, because overseas students who bolster coffers by paying far more for tuition tend to favour science and technology degrees.
Conservative ministers in the previous government talked of outlawing ‘rip-off degrees’ that failed to offer decent employment opportunities or financial security. Such market-oriented rhetoric naturally raised the question of what a university education is actually for.
Against this uncertain backdrop, LIS enters the arena – or the marketplace, as the academe is now encouraged to see itself. Opened in 2021, it declares its curriculum to be the first of its kind in the UK. The university is the first new academic institution in over half a century with degree-awarding powers from inception.
Critics of Britain’s higher education might argue that this alone indicates how ossified our system has become; that while our top universities may be world-renowned, we are too often churning out graduates who, by their own admission, feel ill-prepared for what awaits them beyond the campus perimeter.
This is the starting point for the privately funded LIS and its lead academic, Professor Carl Gombrich, grandson of the renowned art historian Sir Ernst Gombrich. ‘Most people when they leave university, 18 months later they’ve forgotten almost everything they learned if they’re not using it,’ he says. ‘And most of them won’t be.’
It’s a bold statement that will likely be hotly contested by anyone who, decades after graduating, can still quote Shakespeare’s sonnets or confidently explain Plato’s Republic.
It also goes to the heart of what young people attend university for. If you read history, then become an accountant, does that mean you were wasting your time, since so few accountants require in-depth knowledge of the Tudor court or Enlightenment in their average working day?
We’re sitting in an upstairs room at LIS pondering such questions. The neatly bearded Gombrich, 58, is a persuasive talker, with a sonorous voice that earlier in life he put to use in his career as a professional opera singer. He has degrees in maths, philosophy and physics, and switched from music to a job teaching physics at University College London in 2002.
It was there he started the UK’s first arts and sciences degree. His next step was not for the fainthearted. ‘It’s easier to launch a fleet of nuclear submarines in this country than set up a new university,’ he likes to joke.
His, then, is a multidisciplinary trajectory that perhaps makes this Renaissance man uniquely suited to LIS and its philosophy. And despite the challenges he highlights, LIS secured funding: from UK entrepreneurs such as the founders of Innocent, Bookatable and Funding Circle (the UK fintech unicorn), the UK government and, most recently, Emlyon, one of the oldest grande école universities in France.
The university sits in a tall, heritage brick building on Whitechapel Road in east London, previously home to the original Salvation Army Mission Hall, and more recently a trendy co-working space. It feels a little like a sixth form college inside. There are no lecture halls, only classrooms. LIS’s radical approach rejects long lectures.
‘None of us see the point of broadcasting for an hour,’ says Gombrich. ‘Just go on YouTube.’ In place of lectures they favour discussions or seminars. It rejects other conventional features of higher education, too. Instead of end-of-term exams, students can gain credits by producing anything from written assessments to podcasts, videos, code, reports and video essays. Traditional subjects are replaced by ‘a really radical curriculum [in which] we just look at real-world problems and methods to tackle them’.
Harry Roberts, 24, is another inaugural student who has just completed his final year.
‘The first obvious point is you don’t really get exams in the real world,’ he says. ‘The need to revise and learn like you have to for an exam isn’t particularly useful for a real-world application. The second point is that we have such vast information at our fingers with the likes of AI and Google that those long lectures aren’t really required in modern education.’
Roberts, who grew up on a farm in North Herefordshire, initially enrolled in an agriculture degree course at the University of Reading. After he fell ill with a chronic neurological heart condition, he decided to take some time out in his second year, during which he realised agriculture wasn’t for him. He was more interested in taking a broader look at food and farming, ‘rather than just becoming a farmer on the family farm’. When his father came across an article about LIS, Roberts decided, ‘It was a risk worth taking.’
Like the other LIS finalists I meet, he is bright, articulate and keen to engage with ‘real-world’ problems – a term that keeps coming up. These Gen Zers are comfortable using buzzwords. They talk fluently about ‘how to code complexity’ and the need to ‘redesign entire information systems and supply chains to become more sustainable’.
Students don’t need particular grades to get in: there are no qualification requirements for the LIS course. The university says it gets to know each candidate through an interview process. Judging by the group assembled today, it seems to have selected a committed bunch.
While students everywhere have a long history of becoming politically exercised, particularly by wars – from Vietnam to Iraq to Gaza – these students are political in a way that feels different. It’s more about actually learning how to go out and tackle problems in a practical way.
Each term in the first two years, students focus on one big problem: inequality, say, or sustainability, or technology and ethics. Within these areas they can work on different projects. Fernandes chose to return to the youth centre where she’d spent her year out, to look at how youth workers can be supported.
Another module involved running a campaign about a real issue in the community. Fernandes and others looked at setting up a ‘library of things’ in Tower Hamlets – a project that is now being adopted in the London borough. In a third module, she built a digital Chrome extension for language learning.
The idea is that along the way, the students will pick up a range of skills and, crucially, an understanding of how to apply them.
Lucy Adeniji, 22, from Halifax, West Yorkshire, should probably be prime minister one day. Gombrich thinks so too. She is eloquent and intelligent, but not showily so. She has spent the past three years exploring everything from surveillance capitalism in technology to ‘impact investing’.
For one of her ‘real-world’ projects she examined the racialised wealth gap in Tower Hamlets.
Her group’s proposed solution was tackling it through green job upskilling.
‘Lucy probably knows more about upskilling for the green economy than many people who’ve done traditional degrees in environmental economics and are now doing a master’s, and haven’t actually been in that world,’ says Gombrich.
Everyone learns some quantitative methods, such as data science, and some qualitative methods: language and communication; images and systems. But the aim is to apply these concepts in real scenarios. There’s a focus on so-called soft skills too, such as how to get a team of people to achieve a shared goal.
In fact, Gombrich suggests, this is hardly a ‘soft’ thing to learn: ‘It’s much harder than reading five novels by someone and writing an essay about them. But if by [soft] we mean not knowledge-based learning based on set texts and reproducing that knowledge, then yes there are lots of soft skills our students learn.’
To reinforce the connection with the outside world, all students are offered the option of a five-week paid internship during summer breaks, which LIS helps organise. Numail Fatima, 21, originally from Pakistan, did an internship with Zoe, the nutrition programme.
Dilan Kaygisiz, 22, from Turkey, undertook a research placement at the Environment Agency.
Other students have had internships at Innocent Drinks, which has a partnership with LIS, as do management consultants McKinsey and professional services firm KPMG. Those ‘real-world’ links again…
If the strong emphasis on the functional application of learning suggests the LIS approach is a utilitarian one, Gombrich rejects this critique: ‘I don’t think so. I think this really develops people’s minds.’ He insists that LIS’s is an intellectual programme. ‘I think most students would agree they had to stretch themselves intellectually in several areas in ways that, if you just do something that’s curated and programmed for you, you probably wouldn’t have to do.’
These words seem to imply a criticism of what goes on in other universities – the ones where students take courses that will allegedly be of limited use in the outside world, the contents of which they will soon have forgotten anyway. Wouldn’t many academics, especially in the arts and humanities, argue that the point of higher education is critical thinking, and – whisper it – the now-unfashionable pursuit of knowledge for knowledge’s sake?
Gombrich has heard these arguments before. ‘But critical thinking has to go with real-world application. Particularly in the age of AI. You have to be deeply critical about what you’re being presented [with].’ What we need is better critical thinkers engaging with ‘real-world statistics and political manifestos,’ he argues. ‘As for education for education’s sake, who could deny that’s a lovely thing, and if you want to sequester yourself away for three years to do medieval French history, go for your life. Fine. But there’s no way that should be the norm.’
At a time when almost 36 per cent of 18-year-olds in England are entering full-time higher education, at an annual cost of more than £9,000 for fees alone (the same fees that are paid by LIS students), the debate is admittedly worth having.
LIS’s offering has precedents too, in the old polytechnic institutions, and the new universities of the 1960s, with their liberal arts courses combining humanities and sciences. But according to Gombrich’s diagnosis, our education system is not set up to encourage this kind of learning, and these programmes were ultimately hampered by Britain’s narrow A-level programme. ‘Students weren’t exposed to different sorts of knowledge and so didn’t see the value in that,’ he says. British academia itself was meanwhile too siloed to lend itself to an interdisciplinary approach, he suggests.
Times have changed and now there’s even more of an imperative to rethink the way we learn, he argues, citing the internet and globalisation as major reasons: ‘These are forcing people to think in more connected, broad ways. But it’s very hard to change a system once you’ve got self-affirming feedback loops, which just perpetuate the current system.’
We have one of the narrowest education systems for 16- to 18-year-olds in the world, he stresses. ‘And I just don’t see why British exceptionalism applies here. Either we think [UK pupils] are too dumb to do any wider subjects, or we think there’s something uniquely important about just doing history, classics and English at A-level – when a Spanish, Italian, Chinese, Indian or American kid will be doing five, six or seven subjects typically across all the sciences, all the humanities and the social sciences.’
Clearly there’s a lot at stake: all those complex real-world problems to solve, from climate change and migration to AI and ethics. ‘You cannot do it from a single disciplinary perspective,’ says Gombrich firmly.
His students are equally clear-eyed about the challenges their generation will face.
Climate change and sustainable development are cited; also social media companies’ almost unfettered access to our human experience and data; inequality in wealth, education, housing, food; echo chambers and a dearth of empathy across different groups.
The students’ awareness of the problems out there to be fixed is matched by knowledge of their own limits, and all are realistic: none believe they’re about to go out there right now and save the world.
‘Rather than thinking, “I want to do amazing things in my career and have incredible impact,” it’s more about lots of people in a network trying to make their own little bits of impact,’ says Adeniji. ‘The route you’re going to have the most impact in, at this point in our lives anyway, is pick something you’re interested in and then be an amazing person to work with.’
Most of them have jobs lined up already. Adeniji is going to the green jobs firm Greenworkx. Kaygisiz will join the project controls team at professional services firm Jacobs Solutions. Another student, who doesn’t want to be named, is joining the police through a graduate programme. 
Fernandes is going to work as a software engineer for the travel firm Tui. Fatima joined the investment bank Goldman Sachs this summer. Roberts will return to the family farm for the harvest while he figures out what he wants to do.
So far, the university remains small, with only 114 undergraduates in total; 82 per cent are state-educated. Gombrich talks frankly about the struggle to attract more students: ‘So few are brave enough to take this leap. I honestly think there are tens of thousands of students who would be happier on this programme.’
Perhaps as universities look at how to survive into the future, thinking like his will spread. ‘If you want to do a very narrow thing for four years, that’s great,’ he says. ‘But there’s way too little of this sort of education.’