The former exposes students to two or more academic disciplines that each have bearing on a given topic, without explicitly integrating them. ‘Integrating’ is the keyword here, and it is, according to the literature, what distinguishes a multidisciplinary curriculum from an interdisciplinary one. As NUS President Professor Tan Eng Chye (Science ’85) wrote in an opinion piece published in The Straits Times on 10 September 2020, “Our young adults will graduate into a world of ‘wicked problems’ – problems that are ill-defined, mutate all the time, defy single-discipline solutions, and even challenge established bodies of knowledge.” For students to make sense of the chaos and have a decent shot at solving it, he argued, universities need to “broaden the intellectual foundations of our students’ learning” by “integrating knowledge, skills, and insights from different disciplines”. However, things cannot be bracketed so neatly anymore. It used to be that being schooled in one discipline - be it as a doctor, lawyer, accountant, scientist, or psychologist - could set us up for life. Students would select which major to pursue, and could go even deeper into their chosen area of study through a postgraduate education. Faculties and departments typically focused on specific subject domains. Universities have traditionally been modelled around specialisation. Our young adults will graduate into a world of ‘wicked problems’ - problems that are ill-defined, mutate all the time, defy single-discipline solutions, and even challenge established bodies of knowledge. This is a trend that NUS in particular is paying close attention to, and the University is already in the process of rolling out plans to support it. This is also reflected in the higher education landscape, where a trend towards ‘interdisciplinarity’ is occurring. Today’s workforce is therefore expected to embrace an interdisciplinary approach. Addressing them in a satisfactory way requires experts from different fields to work together. Climate change, ageing populations, concerns about artificial intelligence (AI) - these are all big, complex, real-world problems of the 21 st century, and each involves overlapping considerations. The pandemic may be the most urgent problem facing the world right now, but it is not the only one.
And it is a deep-seated social issue, as marginalised groups - who lack access to quality healthcare and tend to work in precarious, low-wage jobs - have borne the brunt of the fallout, exacerbating inequalities across the fault lines of race, gender, and class. It also has political repercussions, as simple acts like mask-wearing have become inexorably linked to one’s party affiliation in countries such as the United States. It is also an economic one, as global GDP has fallen and countries have slipped into recession.
COVID-19 is not a purely medical or public health issue.
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