In September 2008, Lehman Brothers collapsed and took the global economy with it.
The quants who built those mortgage-backed securities had PhDs from MIT. They could model risk better than anyone on Wall Street. Still, their models failed to account for mass panic in the markets, causing the fourth-largest investment bank in America to file for bankruptcy. Interdisciplinary blindness, even among the smartest and most specialised, created intellectual blind spots that ended catastrophically.
This was far from an isolated failure. The same interdisciplinary blindness plagues AI governance, climate finance, and public health policy. When experts stay in their lanes, they over-optimise their corner of reality while missing the bigger picture entirely.
For over a century, specialisation was the winning strategy. In The Wealth of Nations, classical economist Adam Smith observed that by dividing production into specialised tasks, productivity increased dramatically. In his famous pin factory example, ten workers could produce far more pins per day if each focused on one specific task rather than making whole pins individually. He termed this the division of labour: an insight that became the engine of the industrial revolution.
Driven by industrial demands, universities began to offer career-oriented degrees like engineering and the sciences. Following the Humboldtian model of higher education, they reorganised around departments to manage increasingly complex expertise.
This approach served the industrial economy well. Factories needed mechanical engineers the same way hospitals needed surgeons. Deep expertise in a single domain was the ticket to a stable, high-paying career.
But the most pressing problems of today have no respect for disciplinary boundaries. Issues relating to AI governance cannot be solved by computer science graduates alone. It requires philosophers that can draw ethical boundaries, psychologists that understand human behaviour, political scientists to navigate regulation, and anthropologists considering cultural impacts. In an increasingly complex world, solutions to today's greatest issues live at the intersections. What we need, more than ever, are people who can think across boundaries: people who have read both Kant and Kahneman, who understand regression analysis as well as Renaissance art.
Cardinal John Henry Newman understood this 150 years ago. In The Idea of a University, he writes:
"In order to have possession of truth at all, we must have the whole truth; and no one science, no two sciences, no one family of sciences, nay, not even all secular science, is the whole truth."
Premier academic institutions like Harvard University pride themselves on the pursuit of truth. Its motto is 'Veritas', a Latin word meaning truth. While every discipline contains some level of truth, it is not absolute. It paints a partial picture of reality. Think of it like wearing a pair of 3D glasses but looking through only the red or blue lens. Each shows you an image of reality that appears muted or distorted. But together, they paint a more coherent, three-dimensional image of reality.
We should be wary of anyone who claims that their discipline is the most important of all. In reality, each discipline illuminates what the others miss. When we hyper-fixate on solving problems with only one lens, we develop tunnel vision that causes us to miss critical blind spots.
SHEIN's meteoric rise happened precisely because they were one of the cheapest options available. But behind the low prices were 75-hour workweeks, child exploitation, and criminally low wages. By treating human dignity as yet another negative externality, economics justified exploitative sweatshops. Minimise cost, maximise profits, right?
What worries me most is how universities continue to structure education around single majors, clinging to an old assumption that the world can still be understood one discipline at a time. But reality is sobering: economics without ethics becomes inhuman, science without philosophy becomes reductionist, technology without humanities creates addictive products that destroy attention spans, and finance without psychology builds models that ignore human panic.
If reality doesn't respect our departmental boundaries, neither should our education. Universities claim to prepare students for a world defined by complexity, yet the bulk of them continue to organise education into disciplinary silos, even as real-world problems routinely cut across multiple fields. A university should not exist as a collection of isolated departments, but an integrated intellectual ecosystem where disciplines inform and correct one another.
In practice, most universities train students to think within their major, but rarely alongside those trained to see the same problem from a different angle. What if philosophy and computer science majors sat in the same seminar to debate AI ethics? Or if economics and anthropology professors co-taught a course on development? Interdisciplinary education creates the conditions to weave scattered ideas into a lattice, where insights from one field strengthen and refine another.
Of course, the goal isn't to abandon specialisation entirely. We need deep expertise to push the frontiers of human knowledge. But what we also need are people who can translate between domains and integrate knowledge across boundaries.
Tim Brown calls this ideal a 'T-shaped person': someone who possesses a deep expertise in one domain, but also a broad understanding of others. By marrying depth with breadth, one can become a jack-of-all-trades, master of one. What we don't want to become are specialists who only know how to operate under narrow conditions, or generalists who know a little about everything but lack depth.
Modern institutions, however, are optimised to produce exactly these extremes. Universities reward narrow excellence over integrative thinking, raising a generation of competent specialists who can optimise parts of a system but fail to see it as a whole. The next catastrophe won't arise from lack of expertise, but from experts who fail to see beyond their own discipline. In the past, T-shaped thinkers were a luxury. Today, they are a necessity.
The three-dimensional problems of our age demand three-dimensional thinking. Like it or not, it's time we put on our 3D glasses.