‘We are trying to create a higher education structure that broadly resembles the American system at its zenith’
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The National Education Policy proposes to change India’s siloed higher education system by establishing large multidisciplinary educational institutions. The emphasis will be on having a more cross-disciplinary education, a pedagogical shift towards “communication, discussion, debate, research, and opportunities for cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary thinking”, and interdisciplinary research.
How do we transform the existing system of universities, colleges, and the research ecosystem in India to achieve these objectives? The answer: a progression from a multidisciplinary campus or university space to a cross-disciplinary collaborative teaching and research practice, interdisciplinary thought and also research based on integrated disciplinary frameworks.
Multidisciplinarity is the existence of multiple disciplines in a single project or programme without seeking interaction. Disciplines exist parallel to each other, with each applying their own disciplinary methods and perspectives and maintaining boundaries. Cross-disciplinary approach expects collaboration between different disciplines without emphasising knowledge integration. It works towards creating connections and fostering dialogue between disciplines. An example would be an educationist and an economist writing this article. An interdisciplinary approach on the other hand, integrates insights, methods, and concepts from different disciplines to address complex real-world problems. It goes beyond collaboration, leading to the synthesis of knowledge across disciplinary boundaries.
The multidisciplinary campus
Phasing out single stream institutes of higher education (IHE) to establish a multidisciplinary campus can work in two ways. First, by adding departments to expand the existing core disciplinary focus — for example, the Indian Institutes of Technology are adding or strengthening their humanities and social sciences, offering integrated masters programmes in economics and allied disciplines. Second, creating university clusters by connecting existing institutions — for example, a commerce college can collaborate with an arts and science college to create a cluster university. This requires administrative streamlining and not just academic collaboration. Clustering single stream institutions might be a cost effective and time efficient way of creating large multidisciplinary institutions in the short term. However, according to the 2020-21 All India Survey of Higher Education (AISHE), a significant proportion of institutions are undergraduate colleges, 35% of these are single stream, and many of these are only B.Ed colleges, making it difficult to find appropriate disciplinary variety nearby that is suitable for clustering.
In addition to repurposing existing IHEs, new multidisciplinary universities will have to be established to reach the goal of having “at least one in or near every district” by 2030. It would be wise to establish a single multidisciplinary campus in a district rather than have one institution with multiple campuses across districts to maximise educational and research efficiency. Research shows that while public universities have a higher educational efficiency, they have lower research efficiency because they need to manage multiple campuses.
Cross-disciplinary learning and practice
The university of the future cannot be just a collection of multiple departments. It needs a disciplinary faculty that is open to collaboration and diverse points of views, and experienced in working across disciplines. To achieve this in the long run, students (i.e., faculty of the future) and current faculty need exposure to different disciplines. This cross-disciplinary approach to learning starts with students taking courses across departments outside their core discipline. The next step is to encourage and facilitate cross-disciplinary research and projects to solve complex problems.
At this stage, faculty and students are expected to bring in their disciplinary knowledge, collaborating and fostering dialogue between the disciplines. This can lead to the creation of cross-disciplinary courses — for example, a course titled ‘Economic changes and class structures as seen in Indian cinema, in collaboration with the economics, sociology, and film studies faculty’.
Incentivising such cross disciplinary courses, projects or centres needs additional funding to sustain it over multiple years. The National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) programme in the United States is a good example of substantial investment in having teachers and researchers of the future with a “breadth of skills, strengths, and understanding to work in an interdisciplinary environment while being well grounded with depth of knowledge in a major field”.
On inter-disciplinary thought
Cross-disciplinary learning and practice expects collaboration between disciplines. On the other hand, interdisciplinary thinking and research requires drawing deeper connections between disciplines and the creation of integrated frameworks. Can cross-disciplinary research and practice really reach this ideal? In the experience of the writers of this article of the Integrated Graduate Research Traineeship (IGERT), this was achieved in some cross-disciplinary combinations such as biotechnology, medicine, chemistry and biology. However, for disciplines such as engineering and architecture, participating students reported challenges in finding publication venues for integrated research, securing and advancing in academic employment, as they did not fit in any particular discipline. Thus, to avoid interdisciplinarity from sliding into traditional practice, there is a need to overhaul funding and the publication ecosystem as well as faculty hiring/promoting practices.
The cost implications of all these changes will be enormous and staggered over several years. This will require reprioritising public spending. The governance and regulatory changes to achieve this also need to be carefully thought out. The fact is that we are trying to create a higher education structure that broadly resembles the American system at its zenith, which has organically grown over a century, in one of the most unregulated and competitive environments.
Devayani Tirthali is an educational researcher and research design consultant. Parag Waknis is a faculty of economics at the Dr. B.R. Ambedkar University Delhi
Published – April 12, 2025 12:08 am IST
