Like the subtitle of Scott Hartley's (2017) recent book, The Fuzzy and the Techie: Why the Liberal Arts Will Rule the Digital World, the quotation in this chapter's epigraph encapsulates some of the promises that are made for a liberal arts education at the more hyperbolic end. In some quarters, the liberal arts are taken to be the key to solving all manner of apparently wicked problems, from rising sea levels to knife crime. In particular, the ‘real-world’ character of such degrees is often connected to their interdisciplinary nature: the approach is able to solve problems in the real world because it is not held back by the artificial divisions (and therefore restrictions) of the disciplines.

In this chapter, I argue that a tendency towards hyper-interdisciplinarity (Moore, 2011) contributes to this sense of the liberal arts as the solution to the future's problems. Hyper-interdisciplinarity is the belief that disciplines create problematic siloes for knowledge and must be broken down in order to facilitate access to the world as it really is. Such hyper-interdisciplinarity takes for granted the idea that disciplines are regressive because they take us away from ‘real’ knowledge, which is thought to be situated unproblematically in the ‘real’ world. Here, looking at specific, concrete problems in an interdisciplinary way is thought to give access to this real world and, in turn, to bypass the fustiness and unreality of the old-fashioned disciplines.

In this chapter, I show that, as opposed to this hyper-interdisciplinary register coming from both promotional websites and some senior managers, students, in different ways and often very subtly, launched critique. They questioned the idea that disciplines are inherently progressive or regressive, offering a less positivist and more pragmatic account of the real world and its relationship to disciplines. Certainly, as we will see, some students expressed hyper-interdisciplinary ideas, but they tended to do so less often and less simplistically.