Synthesis And Creativity At The London Interdisciplinary School
Founded in 2017 and opening its doors to its first undergraduate cohort of 65 students in 2021, LIS marked a significant milestone as the first UK institution since the 1960s to gain full degree-awarding powers from inception. The school's ambition, according to co-founder Carl Gombrich, was born from a crucial insight: traditional universities, structured rigidly around single disciplines, inadequately prepare students to tackle interconnected, real-world challenges. Gombrich, who has degrees in physics, mathematics, and philosophy, and experience as a professional classical musician, brings to LIS a unique form of creativity through his 'polymathy' that arises from mastery of multiple domains of knowledge.
The LIS was designed to 'tackle three barriers in higher education,' as described in a 2024 article by Gombrich and Peterson. These include barriers between different subjects and between the classroom and the world, as well as obstacles to innovation in learning and teaching,
Gombrich's career began as a Teaching Fellow in physics at University College London (UCL). UCL senior management, especially Provost, Professor Sir Malcolm Grant and Vice-Provost, Prof Michael Worton, felt that their institution's majority discipline-bound education frequently failed students by inadequately preparing them to solve global challenges such as climate change, inequality, or rapid technological advancement. Gombrich - who by that point had some experience managing multidisciplinary programmes - was appointed to lead the design and implementation of the UK's first interdisciplinary Bachelor of Arts and Sciences (BASc) degree at UCL in 2012. The UCL BASc program is designed around modules that provide interdisciplinary approaches to knowledge, quantitative methods and mathematical thinking. This approach fosters qualitative thinking and specialization through a set of 'pathway modules' that focus on broad themes such as cultures, health and environment, sciences and engineering, and societies.
Encouraged by the success of the UCL program, Ed Fidoe, a former McKinsey consultant, and tech entrepreneurs Chris Persson and Andrew Mullinger cofounded the LIS in 2017, and selected Gombrich to lead the building the LIS faculty and curriculum. Gombrich and his team faced challenging regulatory frameworks for higher that discourage innovation. He notes, 'it's easier to launch a fleet of nuclear submarines in this country than set up a new university.'
The LIS curriculum directly confronts these limitations by structuring education around "Interdisciplinary Problems and Methods." Rather than traditional courses, students undertake "problem modules" centered in 'problem areas' such as inequality, climate change or technology and ethics. These modules incorporate 'disciplinary perspectives on the problem' to develop multiple perspective-taking and require students to learn 'meta-skills' such as stakeholder mapping or framing. Their learning journey for the duration of the degree is fully supported by methodological training, including data science, mathematical modelling, visual methods, ethnography and narrative storytelling. Indeed, the teaching of a wide range of methods is an essential part of the program and allows students to undertake their own, independent research projects at the end of every year.
The LIS uses a form of flipped learning, termed "prep culture," in which students prepare independently for interactive classes. There is a wide range of assessments and practical outputs that includes consultancy reports (for external partners), video essays, and data visualizations. The institution also enables practical engagement with external organizations through paid internships after students' first and second years, a practice rare in UK undergraduate curricula.
The LIS approach is a recipe for creativity, which aligns with prominent UK policy reports, such as the "All Our Futures" report led by Sir Ken Robinson. This study urges that 'we must change the concept of creativity from being something that is 'added on' to education, skills, training and management, and make sure it becomes intrinsic to all of these.' The LIS also trains students in combining analytical and creative thinking which the aforementioned Future of Jobs Report identifies as 'the most important skills for workers in 2023.' The entire learning journey for students is couched towards 'synthesis' - an essential term in interdisciplinary working, and synthesis is often mentioned in discussions of creativity.
Margaret Boden, an expert in cognitive science, defines creativity as simply 'the ability to come up with ideas that are new, surprising, and valuable,' and posits that creativity can have three types – combinational, exploratory, and transformational. The first two forms of creativity involve finding novel ways to join familiar ideas or extending a previously existing and culturally accepted style of thinking. The last form of transformational creativity requires one to add new rules, or to drop or vary old ones, and is difficult to teach. Gombrich describes this type of creativity as a type of 'magic' that applies across all subjects, including mathematics and science, and takes some inspiration for ideas on creativity from philosopher Arthur Koestler. 'Koestler 's fundamental idea is that any creative act is by association, not mere association of two or more apparently incompatible frames of thought, employing a spatial metaphor,' explains Gombrich.
LIS students develop creative capacity as they 'sample' multiple perspectives, and Gombrich tells students that 'at this period of your life, you should sample as much as possible of the intellectual and practical world.' The program samples contexts that include 'different sorts of businesses, small startups, social enterprises, government internships,' says Gombrich, 'so they're definitely going to have that much broader experience in these three years of their life than most undergraduates.' The result is that students are trained to 'make fields speak to each other' and 'to condense and transform the variety of knowledge relevant to a problem into something that can be understood, used or acted upon,' according to the 2024 article on LIS.
To reach these goals, the LIS founding faculty members were selected for interdisciplinary expertise and an ability to teach in a coaching mode with small student groups. The hiring process required prospective faculty to make presentations on interdisciplinary topics, demonstrate their teaching, and join in a day of collaborative activities. LIS coaching uses techniques that blend an academic 'cognitive apprenticeship' with methods more associated with pastoral work or in professional and sports contexts. The faculty provide students with a 'team of polymaths' with degrees from top prestigious universities and experience spanning multiple academic domains, such as quantitative anthropology, systems thinking, machine learning and English literature, and even UX design and theoretical physics.
LIS graduates are beginning to validate the power of this educational approach. Some of the graduates are eagerly snapped up by consulting and financial firms such as Goldman Sachs and KPMG. Others have entered careers in tech, politics or the arts, and one recent graduate has been accepted to a PhD program at the University of Cambridge. No doubt these individuals, like all students graduating in today's world, will be asked to adapt to the rapid pace of change in society and technology. Hopefully the diverse range of ideas they encounter within LIS will enable them to both adapt to and create this future.
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