The Renaissance of Interdisciplinary Learning: A Conversation with Carl Gombrich

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to the Boundless Podcast, where we explore the intersection
of leadership, innovation and the future of education. Today we're
joined by Carl Gombridge, Dean of the London Interdisciplinary School,
a groundbreaking institution reshaping higher education in the UK. With
a rich background that spans mathematics, philosophy, music and even

(00:24):
a stint as a professional opera singer, Karl brings a
uniquely interdisciplinary lens to the challenges and opportunities facing education today.
In this episode, we delve into the value of breadth
in education, the evolving role of universities, and how interdisciplinary
thinking can prepare us for a rapidly changing world. Let's

(00:48):
dive into this fascinating conversation with Carl Gombridge. Carl, a
huge welcome to the Boundless Podcast. It's great to.

Speaker 2 (00:55):
See you, Hi, Richard, Thanks so much for having me.

Speaker 1 (00:58):
Our topic today is going to be around the purpose
and the requirements of interdisciplinary education. So we said in
our pre conversation that given that's our topic and given
your interdisciplinary background, it'd be great to start by learning
a bit more about you, so perhaps you could take
us through your journey.

Speaker 2 (01:13):
I'm currently the dean of the London Interdisciplinary School, which
is the first university for about fifty years in the
UK to get its own degree awarding powers at its inception. Generally,
when you start in a university, though that itself isn't
very common, you have to grant the degrees of another
university until your stabilizers are taken off. But due to
our kind of seriousness and our innovative qualities, we were

(01:36):
afforded this privilege and this recognition, which we're very grateful
for by the OFS Office for Students and the independent
University Quality Insurance Body. So it's a yeah, it's a
testament to our achievements. And I'm the dean of this
wonderful project. I've grown the faculty. I very largely designed
or led the design of the curriculum with my team.
Before that, I was at UCL, what we now like

(01:57):
to call the other university in London, which has been
around a little bit longer than us. We are about
four or five years old with students u SEL as
you probably know, one hundred and eighty ninety years now,
and I led there the first Bachelor of Arts and
Sciences degree in the country, a BASc because we thought,
why are people still thinking they have to just get
a science degree or an arts degree. Is that really

(02:18):
relevant or necessary or helpful for thousands of students who'd
like to think more broadly and make more interesting connections.
And before that, I'm now nearly sixty riches, so I
won't bore your listeners. But I suppose, most colorfully, I
was an opera singer for a while in the late
nineties very early thousands, and before that I studied a lot,
did lots of degrees, and taught in various places. Let's

(02:40):
leave it at there.

Speaker 1 (02:40):
Wonderful And is that just your personality then, Carl, Do
you just think, yes, I can tackle this is doable,
or if somebody tells you something's impossible, does that get you.

Speaker 2 (02:49):
Going both of those things? I think I've learned this
as I've got older, that I am really a learner.
That's what I am. It's what I love. I love
the steepest part of the learning curve. So in a way,
the most recent thing I've learned about myself is that
I'm an education entrepreneur or entrepreneur UCL or innovated within
a great establishing institution, and latterly an entrepreneur by setting
up a whole institution in a startup kind of a way.

(03:11):
And I love that steep part of the learning curve
right at the beginning when everything's hard, but you're also
making massive progress. And that's both a great gifts and
I realized that quite late in life, but it's also
a little bit of a No handicaps is not the
right word. You have to place your own skills right,
because actually I get a bit bored of the learning
when I've reached a certain level. So I've got very
good in my life at lots and lots of things,

(03:33):
but not outstanding in anything. And what that's led me to, though,
and this is actually quite interesting, I think as a
career trajectory is I'm a decent leader because I'm good
at lots of things, and I can talk to lots
of different people of what they're doing, bring teams together.
I get what people are interested in, why they're interested
in it. I really want to help them facilitate them
do what they want to do. But I haven't specialized

(03:55):
in being that aeronautical engineer who's the person you go
to if the Boeing plane goes down on not that
medic knows all about that particular disease. I've made a
real virtue of that, and I see that a lot
in my students now who are graduating and going into
tech or into health and so on. They're becoming generalists, really,
but very high level generous and the jobs they do
with things like product manager program manager jobs which require

(04:18):
you to synthesize and collate a lot of information for
kind of leadership purposes. So that's also been part of
my thinking on education. But yeah, personally, it's because I
just love learning.

Speaker 1 (04:28):
In life, we tend to move towards things that we
want or away from things that we don't want, and
I'd love to dig into this little bit. This sounds
like a slight frustration for you that maybe generalists are
not given the recognition they need in business and academia
for the value that they bring. Is that a fair statement?
I felt like that, But is that true of you?

Speaker 2 (04:48):
Yeah? I think it's very difficult in this age and
really since Industrial Revolution for us to conceive of the
value of generalism. It wasn't, of course true for centuries
when most educated people were generalists. That's what you did.
You read a variety of books, You went out and
tinkered in the garden, whether you're a botanist or an
engineer or a cook, you learned languages, that's what you did,
and then went all through the Renaissance. That's that's why

(05:10):
we have the term Renaissance, ma'am, because exactly that was
how the best people are educated, and we lost it.
We lost it in the Industrial Revolution and then the
highly professionalizing of the world in the twentieth century. But
it's not given that the world has to be so
siloed and so segmented. And if we think we might
be going through some other kind of renaissance, which I

(05:30):
really do think we are with the Internet, which is
crashing through all sorts of boundaries again, requiring all sorts
of new skills sets to be learned and new connections
to be made, then why wouldn't we be looking back
to the Renaissance and thinking, how were they learning then
that was relevant to their age, that might be relevant
again in our age. And is that hyper specialization which
we had for two hundred years previously actually an anomaly

(05:51):
in history in some ways, or at least only a
point in history. There have been many books published over
the last decade, things like the Neogeneralist by Richard Martin,
pot The poly Math by our colleague bachasamaed Atlas, Social
History of Knowledge by Peter Burke, a wonderful two volume
history of knowledge, and these ebbs and flows by a
brilliant cultural historian, a proper academic at Cambridge. And they're

(06:13):
all saying, maybe there's another turn of the wheel. Now
we need to think more about the value of breadth
and education, and not just breadth but new connections between knowledge,
which we lose if we send people down very narrow
roots at a young age.

Speaker 1 (06:26):
And my goodness, don't we try and do that. I
guess for me the generalist, it's not somebody who just
gets bored quickly. But for me it's somebody who's threading
a path where if you're like between these different aspects
and then drawing insights from the dots that they're connecting.

Speaker 2 (06:43):
Yeah, I think I go further than that. So the
idea of expertise has got tethered to the idea of
academic that you don't have any value as anxpert unless
you've done a degree in say economics or biology of history.
But what I see in my graduates from UCL now
in the many hundreds and now starting from Lis, is
that actually the most interesting modern experts are exactly as
you say that people who connecting from different area have

(07:04):
found their own thread through their education, often through and
then to PhD level and then a uniquely expert in
the space. The value they brings a young woman often
give an example is a graduate from UCR who's a
really important figure in climate change resilience. For her PhD
at Oxford and Engineering, she looked at climate change resilience
of small island states with sea level rises, and everyone thinks, Okay,

(07:27):
what is this. They're disoriented by that statement. But her
expertise is combining knowledge from economics, engineering, politics, anthropology, geography,
all these multiple lenses on this problem to be the
world go to person for that kind of discussion. So
the World Bank loved her PhD. Insig she's doing really
big things in insurance. Now there's a whole PhD program

(07:49):
at ucl actually called the Ecological Brain about the effect
of the environment on our neuroscience and well being, and
so they have to take both architects, transport engineers, neuroscientists,
psychologists on that program. And the coincidence that two of
my graduates from the UCL program. An went straight onto
that program to do PhD. So all the most interesting
things actually are a pH level. Not all, but very

(08:11):
large majority are interdisciplinary anyway, But why don't we help
and encourage students to see that a bit earlier and
not kind of you know, put them back in their
box or clip their wings if they're interested in several
different things, because that might be where they really add
value to whatever they're going to do next in their lives.

Speaker 1 (08:28):
If we look at the wider challenges in climate change,
it's been a communication challenge more than anything else.

Speaker 2 (08:33):
And behavior change, yeah, it's not the science communications behavior change.
I had a great colleague at UCL is a friend
now a neuroscientist, and he did a lot getting neuroscience
knowledge out into the public, and he was on a
lot of kind of governmental committees with philosophers and policymakers,
and he was like, literally, there's no point to what
I do unless I'm on these committees, unless we can
be into disciplinary use that I work. Literally, no one's

(08:54):
going to care about my work, and no one's going
to hear about it's going to sit in the journal
because there's always something else to think about right, there's
always some else pushing their thing, could be soil instead
of neuroscience whatever. So he was brilliant, and he was
one of the first really big hitting academics that made
me see not just the value of the essentialness of
being more into disciplinary. He defines himself as extremely into disciplinary,
whereas for me it was much more kind of intellectual

(09:16):
love and seeing connections between things and thinking about these
big trends in education. He showed me the practical necessity
of beginning to disciplinary for science to have any impact
at all.

Speaker 1 (09:25):
And everybody wants to find the same thing in their work,
don't they. They want to connect their passion to impact to
their income, and sadly, very few people are able to
achieve all those three things. I find that actually trying
to put your hand on that talent within that can
be very difficult, especially if it's not clear. If it

(09:45):
is in between the lines, then you find that actually
no job really is a fit for you. I feel
a huge sense of frustration in the conversations I have had.
This is a men's group. I think there's a real
sense of urgency they have out their impact, but I
think their identity is tied to their impact. So until
they've created the value, they don't feel they have an identity.

(10:08):
And I find myself constantly reminding them that happiness is
the gradual attainment of a worthwhile goal.

Speaker 2 (10:15):
Well done.

Speaker 1 (10:15):
Who would want to be a twenty year old billionaire?
What a terrible thing to be.

Speaker 2 (10:19):
It's terrible. Actually, there's a lot of problems with people
who then don't have any driver after their mid twenties.

Speaker 1 (10:24):
Yeah, and on a person who had a couple of
friends at school. There were just absolute rock stars at
school with the sports, good looking, attracting the opposite sex
and so on. And both of those two friends have
taken their own lives in their thirties. And I think
that's the problem. If you start on those for listeners,
I'm put in my hand right up in the EF.

(10:45):
You start here, where can your life go? But if
you start gradually and maybe you have to build up
that confidence, and maybe you don't have a flying start
in life, then for me, my life just keeps getting
better every day.

Speaker 2 (10:59):
That's great.

Speaker 1 (10:59):
And I look at as friends and I think their
life is getting worse every day.

Speaker 2 (11:02):
That's a really good point. It's very hard to be
patient when you're young, isn't. It's just so hard. And
we see this with learners too. I say, it's not
what you got on this test today, it's a process.
It's what happened two weeks ago was going to happen
in two months. Learn to live with the process and
enjoy the Oh, this is interesting. I haven't had any
chat like this the wrong time, actually real. I used

(11:23):
to think more about these issues about men phaps when
I was a bit younger. But it's not just about men,
of course, but this learning to enjoy the struggle. I
think that's a generational thing which we really have lost
with this generation, that the instant gratification and the instant
disappointment of social media is desperate for them. They just
don't know that the struggle is the fun, the struggles

(11:44):
where you learn your self esteem. The struggle. And someone
said to me that their failures just to postponed success. Right,
that's where the value is. That's what makes life worth living.
And somehow that message we haven't conveyed to them, and
we've messed them up with all sorts of junk.

Speaker 1 (11:58):
And what about your conversations with people in their early twenties.

Speaker 2 (12:01):
It's interesting. I'm nearly sixteen hours, so it's not as
easy as it was even ten years ago. There's a
generation gap, for sure. I still find that one on
one the connection is really easy and deeply human, and
young people are looking for guidance and wisdom. And I've
had an odd life which is weirdly relatable in some way,
and I get things like music and sport and so on,

(12:23):
which young people might think I'm just the whole intellectual.
I don't get all that. I do get all that stuff,
I've done that stuff, but in groups I find it
harder to really relate in the way that I would
ten to fifteen years ago. I think there is a
generation gap, for sure. We know it economically, we know
it politically, and perhaps it's not that surprising, but maybe
because the pace of change is so fast these days,

(12:46):
even the two year olds find it hard to relate
to twenty year olds sometimes, right, And so that makes
talking across the generations really interesting, really challenging. I mean
changed all the time. I said to my sister the
other day that I think we've had peak woke, though.
I think in the eighteen to twenty two year olds
i'm seeing now, they want to say what they think
and feel, and they do not want to be told

(13:06):
what is wrong or right to think and feel. And
that's very different than five years ago with all this censorship.
But I can't say that this person might be offended,
this person will be hurt, this might be a harmful
thing to say. You still got that going on. It's
quite a battle for hearts and minds over that. By sense,
there's a big groundsul of beyond people like I want
to say I think and I want to hold this belief,

(13:26):
and no one's going to tell me it's wrong to
hold that belief. And I think that's really positive we
have for me. I'm in favor of that. We have
to work out as a society what it means to
hold a belief and how people feel about living alongside
people have very different beliefs and might not even like
their beliefs. At the end of the day. I think
that's the work, The work out how to live with
people that you don't like and don't believe the same
thing as the work is not to shut people up

(13:49):
or sensey yourself. That can't work in the long run.
Or don't think.

Speaker 1 (13:53):
About the young people's relationship with truth.

Speaker 2 (13:56):
I'm changing about what do you think that is.

Speaker 1 (14:00):
We see a lot of people listening to folks like
Joe Rogan, and we've had Ancient Apocalypse on Netflix again
with Graham Hancock. Of course he's a journalist, and Graham
Hancock says, I believe there was a there were human
beings living thirteen thousand years ago that were basically an
advanced civilization, not advanced in terms of putting rockets into space,
but advancing their understanding of archaeology and the relationship with

(14:22):
the stars. And then they passed on their knowledge around
the world by taking boats and going all around the world,
and they passed on that knowledge to indigenous groups, and
then they started building pyramids themselves that aligned with the stars.
And he says, every other archaeologist disagrees with me, and
they're fixed on their own ideas, And of course he
is entirely fixed on his own idea, and this is

(14:44):
entirely the irony of what he's saying. But he's really
got into bed with people like Joe Rogan.

Speaker 2 (14:51):
Who's a perfect Tucker Carlson guests.

Speaker 1 (14:53):
Actually exactly, and they're creating the idea that the truth
is something that you have to discover you have to
dig into it, and they present conspiracy therefore as the
real truth, because that's the one that people are trying
to hide from you, so it must be the real truth.

Speaker 2 (15:10):
Carlson really worries me because he seems to be off
the deep end, and he said on Rogan, we knew
a lot more in the nineteenth century than we do now.
I just factually I think wrong. But look, it's really
hard this conversation because what scientific progress has been about
skepticism of the status quo, but not too much skepticism, right,
And so that's the boundary. How do we teach people

(15:32):
to be really skeptical about dietary claims, political claims, numbers
banned about in the media, which we should do, and
we should get them to really dig into it without saying, actually,
the world is flat because I can see outside my
window it looks flat, and all those photos I've seen
in the rest of my life are all fake and
made up by people in the CIA. I just think
there's simply no answer. That teachers have to be, on

(15:55):
the one hand, highly educated themselves and quite open and
transparent about their own failings, but also able to teach
pretty rigorous stuff, and keep questioning students about their own beliefs,
and in a sense make the students skeptical about their
own skepticism. Why are you believing this person? Look how
much money they're making out of it. Why do you

(16:15):
think this one person is more likely to write than
these hundred other people? All these types of questions. But
you can't just nail truth to the wall and say
that's it for ever more. That's as anti science as anything. Right.
It's got to be about evidence. What's the best evidence
you can give for this claim? And why is it
good evidence? And that's what students need to be learning.
And that's quite a long journey.

Speaker 1 (16:36):
There's a lot in what you just said, that sense
that people find it very difficult to understand something if
their job relies on them not understanding it. People that, yeah,
there's very few people who aren't saying something for a reason.
And someone said to me, what's your opinion Richard on
nuclear power? I said, first of all, my opinion doesn't matter,

(16:56):
And second of all, opinions don't matter. There are just
clear facts about nuclear power. I don't understand why we
even need opinions there.

Speaker 2 (17:06):
Are For me, I would even slightly qualify that there
are the best possible facts we have for the moment
in time. I am, in some sense a totally radical skeptic,
in the sense that if you look at Aristotelian science
that lasted two thousand years and no one thought it
was really wrong, and it was all wrong. So I'm
prepared to believe that everything we think about science today is,

(17:26):
if not wrong, can be couched or reframed in another way,
which makes us think, ah, that's why we thought that
in the past, because we thought gravity was the attraction
between two objects. Actually it's a seventh dimension, which does
blah blah blah. There are reframings of science that can
be so radical that, in a sense, your previous knowledge
was wrong or at best a poor approximation to reality.

(17:47):
But that doesn't mean that anything goes. It does mean
that there are some very strongly evidential based facts which
would all be best to rely on as a baseline
for getting on with our lives. Them is vaccines, by
the way, which have eradicated horrendous deaths throughout the world
the last two hundred years. I do think democracies under

(18:07):
tremendous strain. I do think all this stuff about truth
and post truth and the factions that are happening, and
you know, we don't really know what left wing and
right wing mean anymore. I think workism is weirdly some
weird combination of hyper individualism and hypergroup think, which is
odd in itself, but we need a better combination at
a society of kind of community feeling and collective well

(18:29):
being without losing the ability to challenge norms and realize
ourselves as individuals, and we somehow had lost it in
the last thirty forty years or so.

Speaker 1 (18:41):
What's your role as an educator then, Karl, in the
context of what we're saying, or are you an educator despite.

Speaker 2 (18:48):
No I really do believe that interdiciplinary education is the
best education for probably tens of thousands of students every
year coming out of school, and probably only two thousands
are getting the ben feel slightly less if you look
around the country the courses on offer, and I think
tens of thousands, possibly even low hundreds of thousands, are
missing out on the best education for them because they're

(19:09):
being told they have to study economics to work in
a bank, they have to study biology to work in
a lab. As if many are going to work in labs.
Just so many myths not a myth, as falsehoods that
generation after generation students are told about education, careers and
so on. And I feel very strongly that they need
a different offer. They need something radically different, which we

(19:30):
offer at London Into Disciplinary School, which values breadth and education,
It values connection making, It values real world interest and
real world problem solving. That's our curriculum is based on
real world problems, not old fashioned subjects. And I just
wish you can tell I'm getting bit carried away here,
which is a good sign. I just wish more students
at school knew that and knew that it was okay

(19:51):
for them to go why to explore problems that really
interest them at university, to learn a range of skill
sets from data science and natural language processing right through
to how to make it great video, and that they'll
come out of that degree with a fantastic range of
graduate job offers and they don't have to go to
University X to do sociology or English literature or maths
or something that was invented anywhere it's in fifteen, two

(20:13):
hundred and fifty years ago. Because I think they're wasting
the time and their money and doing those things. I
believe passionately we need more interdiscipline or education in this
country of different sorts, and I'm very happy we're offering
that at Las, But I think students are still not
hearing enough about the realities of higher education for them.

Speaker 1 (20:30):
Who's pushing that myth that you just described.

Speaker 2 (20:33):
Yeah, who is pushing it? I think. I don't think
it's malicious at all. I think it's ignorance. So there's
a very good organization called the Institute for Student Employers,
basically a small research I think tank's been going a
long time run by superb chapel Stephen Isherwood, which produces beautiful,
evidenced data based reports every year on students and their employment.

(20:58):
And one thing they do every year is look at
graduate employers from people taking students from all universites, ask
graduates and ask them all sorts of questions, And one
question they ask is do you care what degree the
student has when they join your company? And at the
moment is eighty six percent of all graduate employers say
they don't care what degree students have. And that's been

(21:19):
between eighty five and ninety percent for about five years,
that simple fact should be known by every single headmaster
in the country, every single careers advisor, every single head
of sixth form. So when a student comes and says
I want to work in about after the economics, the
first thing you should say that's not true is the evidence.
Yet I keep having to tell people about this organization

(21:41):
about their research, and there are so many sort of
similar related facts and reports. But as a very good
company called the Burning Glass Technologies, who do big data
studies of job boards and job trends, they produced a
big report about four or five years ago on hybrid
jobs about how so many jobs in the knowledge service
and tech economies require two sets of skills from across

(22:03):
the sciences and arts. Great value for me. I've never
heard a teacher ahead careers advisor ever mentioned that they
knew that sort of thing to me, And so I
don't know what goes on in this space is perhaps
I'm not close enough, Perhaps I should make more effort.
But for some reason, the message about these young people's
higher education it might lead to isn't getting through in

(22:24):
my view. Otherwise, I just don't believe we'd have quite
so many people doing forensic science and psychology, we might,
but we wouldn't have the tens or hundreds of thousand
that we do. We'd have some thinking held on. There's
other things I can do which I'd be more interested
in doing, so I don't think it's malicious. I think
it's legacy thinking, anecdotal. The parents, of course, graduated at

(22:45):
a different time. They have their views which are often
completely unevidenced. But it's a massive education which we need
to roll out for everyone.

Speaker 1 (22:55):
Was some of this a pushback if we go back
to the early noughties really and trying to get everybody
to Universe and you had thousands of young people studying media.
What was a former polytechnic university?

Speaker 2 (23:07):
Nothing wrong with media. By the way, the media should
be the absolute blue ribbon degree at Oxford University because
it's the most important subject that were and it combines
hardcore data science, computer science, politics, esthetics, psychology. It's just
an amazing degree potentially. But it hasn't. And that's interesting
in itself, right. Why has the UK, in its elite

(23:27):
universities not managed to create a degree called something like
Media and Leadership or Media in Future of Politics or
just media and ppe which people still think of as
broad was invented exactly one hundred years ago. This year
are the first graduates in PPE and people still go politics,
philosophy and economics. Wow, that is so dated. Yes, right

(23:52):
to pick on so called mickey mouse degrees at places
that aren't very good. But why don't we have more
contemporary degrees which actually reflect what students are interested in
and need to know for the modern world. It's a
big problem that universities had. They're stuck in research programs
which are ancient, and the whole incentive structure for academics
is based on ancient ideas of publication, in particular journals.

(24:15):
It's like the kind of Catholic Church of the Middle
Ages in many ways.

Speaker 1 (24:20):
We could certainly argue that the actual content doesn't matter
so much, and you've got the data to back that up,
but certainly the quality of those three to four years
plus is huge, whatever that subject matter was. Do people
realize the difference between moving from school's sixth forms fe

(24:40):
into hi and that your objectives as a student are
probably different to what they were the year before.

Speaker 2 (24:47):
I think very few do. As you say, maybe intermediing
with the question, I think schools have got completely stuck
in the past, the sort of the road learning aspect
exam want to win too much about that because I
don't actually have a very a positive suggestion. I think
that school children need structure to learn. I do think
they do need some kind of facts and fact based stuff,

(25:09):
otherwise we get into all this truth problem that we
mentioned before. In the technical disciplines, they need to know
algebra even if they become coders or whatever. They need
to know basic mathematics, how to new things across an
equals silence on I do think even things like maths
are incredibly stuck. But there's a way we should be
teaching through data science and coding now rather than pencil
and paper, or at least a combination of both. That's

(25:32):
just one of many erarors that are stuck. But I
think basically know you're right, schools have doubled down, scared
by the Internet, scared by phones, now terrified by AI.
And why are still doing handwritten exams when in the
rest of your life will you ever write two or
three hours with a pencil and paper. So the education

(25:52):
just know this. Educations know that you should only study
and what you're actually going to learn use in life
and yet we can't. But I think when they get
to university then it's too much of a shock. Actually,
the adaptation is very difficult, definitely in the first year
to realize that this is now their choice and to
think why am I studying? What am I studying? And

(26:13):
is there another way out of this? Or am I
now committed to this course even though it does seem
pretty irrelevant. I am only studying six hours a week
for nine grands So I think that adjustment is quite violent,
to be honest with you, and I think it doesn't
It's very difficult for many students to make that adjustment.

Speaker 1 (26:30):
We have some liberty here in the UK. I would
put China down as one of the countries where it
still matters to get a first class education at a
top university, and it is an incredibly competitive country and
probably one quite focused on jobs and status to some extent.
In the UK we're gifted a little bit like the

(26:51):
US and Canada maybe where your education actually doesn't necessarily
impact your future in the same ways and can have
the opportunities to create things, design things, come up with
companies and so on. And a lack of a first
class education from top university won't really hinder you in
that in the way it will do in other countries,
So we have opportunities here. But I guess we're trying

(27:13):
to have an education system doesn't beat individualism out of people,
doesn't beat creativity out of people, but doesn't let them
off the hook either in terms of the rigors of
study and understanding and comprehension too. How have you wrestled
with that, Lis, Yeah, I.

Speaker 2 (27:30):
Think rigor is an important word for us. It's one
of our values, actually, and it's often a criticism aimed
at into disciplinarity, which makes it doubly important for us.
Rigor is essential in any good education, and part of
the rigor is actually your study process as well, realizing
that you have to work very hard to understand and
I think that it hurts sometimes. You need to learn
to enjoy the struggle lovers or never learn, And I

(27:51):
take your wins and your lovely breathing out moments, really
enjoy them because you've achieved something, because you've struggled through it.
But we are certainly very rigorous as all our students
do data science a whole year of it, a third
of the curriculum, and then they have to use it
in individual projects throughout the program. But of course my
art teacher would say to me, rightly, if she's taught
me a lot, there's a rigor in making a great

(28:11):
video too and editing it beautifully. Right, we're not messing
about her with creativity. The greatest artist was rigorous, as
any of the greatest scientists, and we will assess that
work accordingly. Right, it has to show the rigorous process.
So rigord for me is independent of an academic discipline.
I think that's important thing to say. People say, oh,
how can it be rigorous if it's not three years
of economics or three years of medieval history, And that's

(28:34):
a completely mistake. Really, it's orthogonal. Rigorous orthogonal to whether
you're doing one discipline or not. There are many ways
to be rigorous, and part of our rigor is insisting
that all students do a mixture quantitative and qualitative methods
when tacking the research, and that they make rigorous connections
between them. They're able to say why the qualitative study
was important in this case because the data didn't reveal

(28:55):
maybe the real feelings of the focus group or whatever
might be, and vice versa. Riggor is essential and it
should be insisted upon as well by teachers. But it's
not discipline specific. And I appreciate you. Do you sound skeptical, Richard?
Do you believe me?

Speaker 1 (29:12):
It resonates with me. So my very good friend and
I both good pianists, and we could hear a song
and I would play it and most of the chords
would be in most of the right places. It would
be a bit of a Picasso song. You look at it,
go yeah, that's a face, isn't it. Whereas she has
put the rigor in and she can play properly. And
the difference is profound. And we've probably both spent the

(29:34):
same amount of time on the piano, but only one
of us has disciplined themselves with the rigor to practice
properly and listen properly. And that is very evident.

Speaker 2 (29:44):
So you recognize the rigor in her and you value it.
I do.

Speaker 1 (29:48):
Yeah, good, I'm not saying that necessarily better ways to
spend your time than four hours. And that's a slightly
different conversation. You have done it. You can see the difference.

Speaker 2 (29:57):
You can't be rigorous about everything in life, otherwise it
life would be know I like cooking from time to time,
but it's very impressionistic and I don't use recipes, and
I'm usually closer to being something edible than not. But
I don't want to be rigorous about my cooking. I
do want to be rigorous about how I design education
and somewhat drafted on, which is my new thing, as
rigorous as I can be. At my age.

Speaker 1 (30:16):
You can play the piano without rigor and enjoy it
immensely compared to the pain of having to learn every night.
And I think about comedy. I love making jokes, but
the idea that my job would be to sit in
a fluorescent lit room with no sunlights at nine am
on a Monday morning with a coffee have to be funny.

Speaker 2 (30:37):
It's funny you say that, because I was thinking maybe
for I pop my clogs. I wouldn't mind a little
girt stand up. Having been on the stage, I love
it occasionally. I was just thinking, do you really can
be just fantasizing in the extension with the sun streaming
and it'd be nice to have that night when everyone
laughs at your jokes? Do you really want to be
on call for a few nights every week, even for
a few months exactly as you say to have to

(30:59):
produce and perform, I'm not sure I do, to be honest.

Speaker 1 (31:03):
For me, making one person laugh is enough. For others,
it's clearly not. They want to hear ten thousand people
appreciate them, and it's worth the pain and it's worth
the misery.

Speaker 2 (31:12):
Yeah, I do think I've said this already on the podcast,
but I do think it's worth trying to instill in
young people a love of rigor and the love of
the challenge. And you see it most and probably most
in maths and data science because even though for me
actually the arts are extremely difficult, I'm not a natural
artist at all, the barrier to entry to the arts,

(31:33):
even for an incompetent like me, is much much lower
than the barrier to coding or mathematics. And so you
see that intense frustration with people who say I can't
do maths, and they get angry with the world because
they've been confronted by their own inadequacy. And if there's
some way you can teach them to if not, love
that moment, sit with it and realize what's going on,

(31:53):
Realize why there is this feeling intense frustration that maths
is implacable. Man, it's a stern stress, hard master, but
just to be able to engage with that anywhere successfully
thirty three forty percent is an amazing achievement and you
should pack yourself on the back for everything you've done
in that. This is a very live issue on my
program because this is the thing which most students get

(32:16):
most antsy about at master's level as well as undergrad
and we're like, you do, okay, you're getting fifty forty
five percent your tests. I know you put in a
lot of time, but you're actually learning in that process.
And when that's all settled down your brain, you've had
a break after Chris, you'll look back and saying, Wow,
I've come from zero to here through all that struggle,
and there's nothing better in life than that feeling. Really Yeah,

(32:38):
learning to love rigor love the process, I think is
an enormously important metal learning skill, and I'm not sure
anyone's really doing enough, or maybe one or two people,
but most people aren't doing enough on that.

Speaker 1 (32:49):
I've had two recent employees working with me. One of
them had a university education, the other one didn't, and
it was very clear the one that had the university
education would constantly stop an sss what they were doing
and why and the purpose behind it, and the other
one would just carry on and do the work. Interesting
And it's phenomenal to have somebody to stop. And so
who are we going to impact in what way by

(33:11):
doing this? Because until I know that, there's no point
writing it.

Speaker 2 (33:14):
And you don't think that was I don't know how
much you can share, but you don't think that was
just a matter of sort of basic brain power intelligence,
whatever you you think. It was actually a cultural experience
and some training that made the difference.

Speaker 1 (33:25):
I felt. So I felt that they'd had the training
to say, you don't just do something, you've got to
understand the purpose behind what you're doing. Good.

Speaker 2 (33:32):
Oh good, I'm glad to hear they've got that good education. Yeah. Yeah,
going back to this employer's report, which I lean on
so much, where they're very good. Employers still want graduates.
It's just that they don't care whatch agree with they've done.
So you're absolutely right there is something going on. Something
is transferred in that period and people go at university,
which is our value to them as in their lives.

(33:53):
And then I could like to say about that. I
like to talk about the life of the mind. Their
mind has changed in a positive way. They did developed
in a positive way, and it's a value to employers.
That's why it hasn't gone away and numbers aren't going
down that much. It's just that it's just inflation's gone
up and the fees haven't gone up. And that's why
universities are really struggling.

Speaker 1 (34:11):
If people didn't see the value of the degree, this
thing would be on its knees already, wouldn't.

Speaker 2 (34:15):
Yeah, it's a few months, which is since I look
at the absolute stats with not going down massively significantly,
definitely under ten percent drop. I think of our home students.
You could probably find it right now on Google, but
I'd be surprised if it was at more than four
percent drop. And a lot of that demographics. There are
little peaks and troughs in baby production at different points
in the past. It's not that people aren't going to
university that universities are really struggling. It's that costs are

(34:37):
very high and the fee doesn't cover it, and we
don't get enough international students. It's a poor model. It
doesn't work. So there's the cost aspect and the fees
of we charge aspect, but there's also the value to
the student aspect, and that is a curious beast. So
it's become a great right of passage for our society,
slightly divorced from the education you get. And again I

(34:58):
understand that, and young people, we don't have other rights
to passage. We don't have initiations, we don't have religious
rights of passage. So it's as much about that experience
and working yourself out as a person getting drunk, meeting
whatever gender're attracted to. All that stuff, and the learning
has become pretty incidental. You need to get the certificate
to get the job. But it's I was so thirsty

(35:20):
to go to university. When I went to learn what
I had to learn, we had no internet, so I
write down my questions on the pad and taken in
the office hour of the two to one hour a week,
and I tried to get to those questions in that time.
It was intense, man, but I loved it and I
was there just to learn. But that's really not the
case with a lot of students these days. It's a
funny mixed bag. So that's another way that I think

(35:42):
us is in trouble is that the kind of culture
and the ethos of the place is very mixed up.
Now there's the attendance problem because students ask for the
lectures to be recorded. Why wouldn't you? But then why
should the lecture turn up to lecture when literally twenty
five percent of the class turn up sometimes less than that.
Very demoralizing for the teacher, Also repeating stuff twice if
they've recorded it, why do it again? All sorts of

(36:03):
weird anomalies and weird non market driven things and weird
market driven things that don't work, market failures really all
over the place make it a very odd sector. But
the numbers aren't falling off, and that to me is
very surprising. Anyway, I'm just jumping on my perplexity AI
to ask how have the numbers of UK undergraduate enrollments?

(36:26):
See this is the skill and I was asking the
right question varied in the last ten years. So asking
the right question of the AI, then checking the sources
that is where we need to get. With a lot
of education. I think general upward trend over the past
decade with fluctuations influenced by policy changes and external factors.

(36:48):
So latest twenty two to twenty three, total undergraduate numbers
reach two point zero five million, with slight declines and
use susans offset by increases in domestic and non usages.
There's no crisis of numbers, surprisingly, right you think there would.

Speaker 1 (37:01):
Be, especially when you think about the UK and T
levels and apprenticeships and so on offering alternatives. And I'm
sure we're not the only ones in the world offering
those other roots. But there was a sort of dichotomy,
wasn't there with what you said there that what we
could glean from your message is that the value of
the university education is the classmates and the contact and

(37:23):
discussions and the curriculum and most importantly the lecturer or
the teacher.

Speaker 2 (37:29):
We're certainly not incentivizing students to turn up enough, and
that's bad for their learning because then they end up
cramming and they don't get they don't get the stuff actually,
which you say, and you're right, is the real value.
And there's great research actually coming out of the US
about what people look back at union and say was
real value for them. It's often one tutor that they
felt really got them and they had a special connection

(37:49):
with aigan as a teacher or a tutor, a mentor,
and if they don't make the effort to do that,
and the union doesn't make the effort to do that
with people, that's not an experience which many students are
going to be able to look back on in our culture.
And then of course we set them assessments, which are
basically all crammed at one point. Usually we don't do
this at las, but that's led to other stresses for us.
But most you needs it'd be one or two essays
a term, or an exam at the end of the year,

(38:11):
or some problem sheets an exam at the end of
the year, and that's the incentive, right that the whole
thing is set up to do well in those things.
However you can gain the system to do that. This
isn't blaming students. Everyone would do that. It's about how
you incentivize students. That's what you're going to do. So
if you can record all the lectures, look at the
assessment brief right at the start of the term, you
know what's coming, you know the books to read, Go

(38:32):
and have fun for six seven weeks, and then in
two or three weeks just go hunker down, do your
absolute best and get your two to one. And that
is absolutely sort of box standard pattern of most students,
I think, and it's because the systems set up really
badly to incentivize that type of behavior.

Speaker 1 (38:47):
Now, how do you find that your relationships or conversation
with employers are different now than they were?

Speaker 2 (38:53):
Let's say at UCL, I've been in this space of
providing a broader education or more into discipline education for
a while, so my conversations are a bit particular employees.
We love the graduates from these programs. They're like, my gosh,
they can code and they can write, and they can
scare a conversations about economics and so on. It was
interesting the first job offer we got from our first

(39:13):
graduate in cohort to the first student who got a
job offer was guess where it was from Goldman Sachs.
So people like, oh, crazy university or whacky what's this thing?
And no one's ever going to take that seriously. The
gold Plated Company, second probably only to McKinsey, that all
graduates want to work for, is the first person to
give our student London into disciplinary school, unknown university a

(39:37):
job offer. That shows a bunch of things. It shows
that we are giving just the right sort of education
for those gold plated corporate jobs if you want them.
It also shows that the goldplate corporates are way savvy
and know that another degree from University Russell Group, University
X's pointless really for them. There are plenty of other
options for them. It also shows that no matter how

(39:57):
edgy and creative you want to be, students will choose
things which are sometimes quite normal. And that's fine, but
we like to graduate people doing as you're indicating, more
innovative things, either in profit making world tech world. What's
great is we just graduate someone in September, they've got
an AI startup and they're just employing one of our
next generation on an internship four months later. Isn't that cool?

(40:20):
So that's the sort of thing we like, and social
entrepreneurships and all that. But it's very interesting that Goldman
Sachs literally gave well, that was the first job offered
to the first of our graduat and cohort that we got.

Speaker 1 (40:31):
And it's a private university. Yeah, and so what sort
of liberties does that give you? Then?

Speaker 2 (40:37):
Not as many as we like, because we're highly regulated,
which in a way is good. It's great that UKHG
keeps its quality brand. But man, the regulation is tough.
You can't really be a very different shaped university because
regulation says that's not a university. So with three years,
one hundred and twenty credits a year, you get a
bachelor's at the end. Actually, one really interesting point is
that if students leave us for a job which we've

(41:00):
broken really found for them, that's a black mark against us.
It looks like a dropout. I was like, that's just
so dumb. There must be a metric whereby we can
use this as a positive, like we've got this person
from some working class background whatever, had no opportunity, came
to us, did well in the first year, we got
my good internship. Like wow, this is a dream job.

(41:22):
I'm leaving. We're like yeah, win. But no, we have
to keep them as a captive audience. Otherwise they're dropouts.
That's the sort of thing that makes you tear your
hair out about regulation and thinking in the sector. But
so you ask about Liberty's the private funding doesn't really
affect what we can do in terms of the curriculum.

(41:42):
We were supported in being very innovative by the government
and by the regulatory body for the universities, because there's
a lot of good people out there who know that
we need something different, and there's a lot of good
will actually in the sector to see us succeed because
we're so different, and people appreciate that and think it's
valid and glad to see it. So we were a
do very radical in the curriculum, but that was more
from supportive colleagues in the regulatory space and our own

(42:05):
ambition than being private. I wouldn't say the private money
actually changes much about what we can do in education.

Speaker 1 (42:13):
So there were a number of people that really understood
your vision potentially already felt.

Speaker 2 (42:18):
That because everyone, like we're saying, everyone who works in
the real world knows that it has nothing to do
with academic subject or at least academic touch only a
small part of whatever you're doing. So everyone realizes that
projects are into disciplinary, whether it's finding out about health
inequalities during COVID or what the government's going to do
about drone technology. Everything is into disciplinary outside of university,

(42:40):
and so people want to see it, and then they're
very intrigued by our problem based learning and how we
navigate this tension between rigor breadth and depth. Funnily enough,
I had a DM from a very eminent professor of
sociology this morning and he said to me, a friend,
he said to me this, read this to you. Have

(43:01):
you ever thought about marketing LAS explicit explicitly as quote
academic knowledge for non academic careers. Of course, most people
with academic degrees don't go into academia. But why not
make this a selling point of LIS which might serve
to open up a public conversation about the value of
academic knowledge. And in a way he's right, because you know,

(43:25):
our economy is a knowledge economy, and knowledge outside of
very good practical knowledge like fixing bikes and doing gardening
and cooking, which is essential and not dissing that, but
the knowledge of our professions and our GDP actually largely
is now service knowledge based, technic tech based, kind of
research based. Yeah, it's work focused in quotes, but that

(43:47):
work is knowledge work. And what is good knowledge? It
should come from academia. It should come from research, and
students should be taught how to recognize good academic knowledge
and then use that, as my friend was saying, use
that in their work.

Speaker 1 (44:03):
At eighteen, you're still very much a child. We know
that the brain is still developing, we're still growing in
a lot of cases physically. There's a sense there that
the timing is also quite important. So it feels to
me that it's important that point in your life as
well that you learn these critical skills that you're describing.

Speaker 2 (44:23):
Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. And I talk a
lot about the timing of the particular education that I
am interested in in young young people experiencing because a
lot of our happier students are slightly older, a slightly
older students, some of whom have started at other universities.
Actually a few of them have worked like, Okay, the
world is tricky, it's messy. It's not going to be

(44:43):
a textbook into the workplace type scenario. Oh this is interesting.
Elie is teaching me about all these different perspectives on
a problem about systems, thinking about qualitative and quantitative. They
get it more easily, and that's less of a gearshift
for them. Developmentally, It's almost like it's already happening for them.
I think for developmentally, for the eighteen ninety year olds particularly,
our education into education is challenging. It's certainly possible. I've

(45:06):
seen it hundreds of times, but you've got to be
aware that's coming your way as an eighteen nine year old.
It's going to hit you a bit like a tidal
wave and upset a lot of your assumptions and ways
of being and working before. So I think this into
education is a good map to the real world. And
that's ultimately we want education to do is help equip
people to have fulfilling personal and work lives. And this

(45:29):
is the best map for it because it maps better
on the world than discipline or education. But it's definitely
a shift for the mind to have to make when
you're young.

Speaker 1 (45:37):
By that, yeah, and I think those skills that a
critical analysis, the ability to focus, to spend a prolonged
amount of time on one task. It feels a bit
like pulling off the Latin band aid. Does our friends
in America say that every year that you leave it
training your brain, you know it's going to be harder
and harder. It feels.

Speaker 2 (45:57):
Yeah. I once had a lovely conversation. Actually, the mother
of a colleague of mind was by then an elderly
woman from a working class mining Welsh family, and she
went to UNI Think in her twenties I think it
was Open Uni. I might be remembering some of this,
but what I do remember, I was like, because I'm
from a very educated family, so for me, I don't
which is why she probably took me a long time
to get back into education. I was subtle avoiding it,

(46:18):
but I've never experienced that big shift in my mentality.
I grew up with it. So I talked to this
woman about it, and I was very moving what she
was saying. And she did sociology I think at the
Open University. And I said, what did that do for you?
I was being a bit critical, kneeling like, oh, I
do that, and she said, Carl, that's when everything changed.
I was like, wow, okay, she said, that's when I
saw the world for the first time. Scales fell off

(46:40):
my eyes. I felt empowered. I felt I could talk
to people. I felt I could hear different views, you know.
And so that's a powerful message which I actually believe
in very strongly, and try to convey that message to people,
particularly people from backgrounds I might not have had that experience,
with whom I've had many conversations now. Of course, over
the years, that's not my lived experience because I grew
up with class academics talking like that, but I believe

(47:04):
in it. I believe in education full stop, and higher
education should be part of that experience for people.

Speaker 1 (47:12):
It's something I think about a lot about myself, and
I didn't like the school experience, so I tried to
opt out of the academic rigor as fast as possible
while staying in the system.

Speaker 2 (47:22):
Did you went to UNI though, right?

Speaker 1 (47:25):
Yes, I got mag I got all ten of them.
And then I went to a college, which for me
was a lot more fun and I got to wear jeans,
and I did a B Tech in Drama Performing Arts
and I topped it up with an A level in
music Technology, so it was the equivalent of four A levels.
And then I went on to do an HND at
Bournemouth College, where I was surrounded by university students who

(47:47):
had almost all taken a year out and seemed light
years ahead of me. For that year out that they'd taken.
They seemed like men when I was a child. So
I struggled with that, dropped out of the course, still
collecting an HNC in the process, so it wasn't all bad. Sorry.
A high National certificate for anybody who cares and then
I went to d Montford in Leicester because de Montford
offered the university experience that one sees in the movies,

(48:12):
which is where the campus and the dorms and the
university and the city center are all right in the
same place, so you can have a terrific time and.

Speaker 2 (48:20):
Had you got to wear a mortar board at your graduation.

Speaker 1 (48:23):
I didn't go to my graduation, did I?

Speaker 2 (48:25):
Actually? Yeah? But so hold on. So those meeting those
university students made you feel you wanted to go to university?
Was it? And then you pivoted and went.

Speaker 1 (48:32):
My Yeah, My parents were happy to pay for the
university time and to supplement on my income during it,
So I was it was. It would have been silly
not to have gone when a parent is offering that.
So I went to de montfor and I did split
on us forming arts half the time and music technology
half the time. And there were some more deeper subjects
around physics and so on and acoustics that we covered
in music technology. And I'll speak respectfully about Demanfred University here,

(48:55):
but it wasn't a challenging course for me. It took
me very little effort from me to get the two
to one with the greatest of respect. So I didn't
go to my graduation one because I didn't feel.

Speaker 2 (49:05):
Looking back rich to that, do you wish you put
in more effort or is it just that the things
they laid out and you didn't really incentivize you to
stretch yourself.

Speaker 1 (49:12):
I felt that it was an easy course and that
it was beneath my academic ability, and I got a
job at the BBC having left university and felt I'd
rather go and do a shift at the BBC than
clickt my awards, and I guess I didn't feel a
huge amount of pride for that degree. I then decided
to go back to the Open University and I started
a psychology degree and I did two years of that

(49:35):
and I got very high marks in that. So the
first time in my life I realized that I was
actually quite clever, and up until then I'd never found out.
I'd never had the opportunity to find out. And yes, Carl,
the answer is, I do regret it. But I'm at
this point forty two where I think, could I actually
have done it? Could I have gone through hard three
years of work like that?

Speaker 2 (49:56):
But you have done it. You've got a BSc In
psychology now or not quite?

Speaker 1 (49:58):
No, No, I dropped out after two years because I couldn't.
I couldn't see that I'm being very offensive here to
these institutents. I couldn't see the point of it. So
I did two out of the five and then just
moved on to other things I couldn't. I didn't enjoy
specializing like that.

Speaker 2 (50:12):
There was somebody you learned a lot, but you didn't
want to push on to get the actual piece of paper.

Speaker 1 (50:16):
I couldn't see the point.

Speaker 2 (50:17):
Yeah, that's a bit like what I was saying about
my learning. I have actually completed three degrees, but things
like the Mandarin it's got very good, but at one
point you think, who cares if you get any further
and to do something else. I can relate to that,
for sure.

Speaker 1 (50:31):
I guess the question I have is, how would I
be different now if I had forced myself to do
three difficult years. What was your answer I wish I had?
I think, Yeah, I think I would find life a
lot easier because I wouldn't steer away from having to
do deep focus areas.

Speaker 2 (50:51):
Oh, you feel that you don't think you take on
deep rigorous challenges. You no psychology. You did do psychology,
you must have been pretty tough at times.

Speaker 1 (51:02):
It was only the first couple of years part time
we didn't probably didn't get to the hard stuff. Maybe
a masters might have been. But I feel like in
my life now I have to compensate for not doing
that by skirting around some of these challenges.

Speaker 2 (51:14):
Really we should buddy up and do a moot, Richard,
I want to go back and do a really tough
statistics mook in a while. I've been very busy with
this project. Obviously, starting Universe is crazy, so I haven't
had as much time for learning as I like. And
also my sport is a big thing now for me.
But I've missed a really begin intellectual challenge and a
couple of things around statistics I'd really like to understand.
But yeah, it helps to have a partner in crime. Yeah,

(51:36):
I hear you on this. So you haven't really Yeah,
you haven't experienced that really intense intellectual struggle and then achievement.
And you think you would have got that more at
the right unicorse.

Speaker 1 (51:49):
I think so. But I was also hugely lacking in
confidence at eighteen, and I went to de Montford as
a boy and I came out as a confident man.
And I'm ever going to be grateful for that university
for what it did, and I think it's a great uni.
I think there was a lot of really modern practices
in there that I thought were fantastic facilities, buildings, attitude,

(52:10):
full credit for what they are. But I'm curious, yeah
about That's why I talked about that particular time in
life and that moment that you have that opportunity at
that age.

Speaker 2 (52:22):
It's interesting this. Yeah, why wasn't it picked up earlier
that you were university material? Did you know why?

Speaker 1 (52:29):
I don't think anybody took a huge degree of interest.

Speaker 2 (52:32):
Really, I was your parents in all this may very relaxed.

Speaker 1 (52:37):
Just whatever you still are.

Speaker 2 (52:38):
Whatever you want to do, and the school is a
sort of box standing comprehensive.

Speaker 1 (52:43):
Yeah, that's right. Yeah, we didn't have a good private
school for boys nearby.

Speaker 2 (52:47):
I went to Boxtann, a comprehensive. I like to joke
that it had the most negative value add an entire country,
because all the students were kids of Nobel Prize winners
at Oxygen University and all the rest of it. And
they only got two kids into Oxford each years, we
have a massive fall off in progression rates from you know,

(53:08):
Fosco Bruce in the school, from the parents of the kids.

Speaker 1 (53:11):
Yeah. Look, and I applaud my parents. I think you know,
they both they met at Manchester University. My father's got
a master's now, so we're not an uneducated family by
an extent. In fact, my mother was in the newspaper
for her a music. Oh level, it would have been
because she got one hundred percent and it came out
as zero because they've never had to put a hundred
through the system before.

Speaker 2 (53:35):
She's got a certificate saying zero percent on it.

Speaker 1 (53:37):
Yeah, she got zero in her music. Yeah, because it
couldn't handle a hundred. I didn't think anybody would actually
get a hundred. So I'm proud of that. And then
the family. But yeah, curious about the different routes and
the different options for sure, and the impact they have
in creating a mind that will serve you for the
rest of your life.

Speaker 2 (53:56):
Yeah, it's interesting. I don't know all obviously it seems
you're done all right, Well your mind's doing fine.

Speaker 1 (54:01):
But that Yeah, so my parents congratulate themselves because I
look at it worked, We did the right thing. We
let him do whatever he wanted, and now look at him.
He's at COP twenty seven and the UN's asking his
opinion and people pay thousands of powers to hear him talk.
We did that, We will success.

Speaker 2 (54:15):
They're right, aren't they. I don't know, it's it's actually
used to.

Speaker 1 (54:18):
I don't know what the other options were, but oh yeah,
there's other aspects here in plays and the tenacity and
determination and all these sorts of things that play out.

Speaker 2 (54:27):
Yeah. Yeah, I mostly want to be a footballer, but
I think I was too injury prone. I've been very
lucky in the last the last fifteen years. I mean
actually when I was your age, it was just before
I really found my thing. Literally, who knows in five
years you might suddenly become in the world's indoor figure
s gaming champion. I literally don't know, because at forty
two I was still pretty like I haven't really achieved,

(54:48):
a massive underachiever. What am I going to do in life?
And it was that job in twenty ten from UCL.
It's just me, right time, right place, did the right job,
big success. So I think we just only keep our
options open and keep recycling these thoughts like what is
it we really want to do, Are we doing it?
Are we putting enough effort to get there? Are their
fears getting in the way? Are those fears really justified

(55:10):
or can we Can we live with those fears and
get through them in some way?

Speaker 1 (55:15):
And forty two is a funny age because twenty two
year olds think you're very old and sixty two year
olds think you're very young.

Speaker 2 (55:20):
Yes, well, put, I think you're very young because it
was before I really found what I want to do
in life was yeah, I guess a twenty two you
look over the hill. It's true, sorry mate.

Speaker 1 (55:33):
And in your professional work, what can l likes do
in the broader spectrum online or internationally or beyond degrees?

Speaker 2 (55:41):
Just a nuance and that I think we'll have more
freedom now that we've officially got what are called new
DAPs as of January, so we've passed with flying colors
due to our brilliant registrar all that. So once that happens,
we might be able to very radical things like do
away with the classification system, which is one hundred and
something years old now I think one hundred and five
years old. Something crazy. Two one two two. First, what

(56:03):
what French students come to us and go, what's that?
We want to replace it with something better, but there
probably are better ways than one hundred and five whatever
is I forgot the exactly definite, over one hundred year
old system. So the nuance is that having gone through
this very rigorous process and got our own degree with
new greer prowers, it's not full with another few years
for that, but we are completely kind of allowed to

(56:23):
do more of our own things. Now. We might do
more radical stuff. I don't know what yet, so watch
this space. But we'd like to use the opportunity to
keep rethinking what is the best experience with students, what's
the best thing they can learn, how should they be
learning them? And as I've talked about kind of assessments
and how they incentivize or don't people just a minute,
I think sessment will be a big thing we'll look at. Yeah,

(56:45):
there's tons of things we're thinking about in terms of
developing because we have a partnership with a French business
school called Emlyon that has a really nice new campus
and a fantastic make space, so we'd like to get
our students going there, and we've had some of these
students with us already like more of that. We are
launching an LIS MBA, a brand new take on the NBA,

(57:07):
completely different to existing MBAs which are very tired as well,
and much more about networking and credentializing and actually learning
anything useful. But that's exciting. That's due to come out
in Gen for twenty twenty six. And we've got other
master's ideas as well, so lots and lots of internal
development degree offers as well as internationalizing a bit.

Speaker 1 (57:30):
As we draw our conversation, wonderful conversation to a close,
if people are listening who are maybe at that stage
of thinking about universities and higher education, what the sort
of messages coming from LIS that would be worth them
hearing at this point.

Speaker 2 (57:45):
I suppose if you're a parent, do think of us.
Parents often really like us, and I can't believe we're
not completely overrun with students that want to come to us.
These are often parents who are very senior in banks,
consultancy firms, government and so on. So do come and
visit us at an open day. We love to have
our open days. They are quite small, quite intimate, typically
about thirty people, so we have a lot of conversations

(58:06):
with you. Also, parents are welcome to join the degree
if they want. We do have one student this year
is about your age, Richards starting again. Great student, really
nice to have him. Obviously different take, but most of
ours students obviously are between sort of eighteen nineteen and
twenty six twenty seven. If you're a younger person listening
to this and you can believe an old guy, please

(58:29):
don't believe the myths about what you're told you have
to study at university. Maybe look at some of our graduates,
what they're doing, Look at what some of the UCL
the ASC graduates are doing. Try to find people who
can talk about this. Reach out because you don't want
to narrow your options. And if you're someone who's interesting,
lots of things that should be celebrated, and there should
be a higher education degree for you where you can
progress in lots of different things at the same time,

(58:50):
don't clip your wings early. Lean into the fact that
you are someone with a range of interest and competent
and keen to learn in the range of things. And
of course las IS should be on your radars one
of those places, but also also UCL also some liberal
arts and sciences degrees at Sussex maybe at Bristol Birmingham
have a great one. You're going to get a good

(59:12):
job if you graduate from a good university. There's way
too much anxiety about that. You are going to get
a good job, particularly if you find what you're passionate about,
because then you'll make a good job. I think with
a degree from you'll find some company or some body
engage in a similar project. So don't worry about that.
That will take care of itself. As long as you
find the right degree, and you learn well and you

(59:33):
study hard, you will get a good job at the
end of it. We haven't talked at all about Ai'm afraid,
but I've got a hop off.

Speaker 1 (59:39):
Perhaps we'll have a part two.

Speaker 2 (59:40):
All right, Yeah, let's do AI separately. That'll be good.

Speaker 1 (59:43):
Thank you for joining us for this episode of the
Boundless podcast. Carl Goonbridge's insights remind us of the profound
value of interdisciplinary education in equipping individuals for a complex
and interconnected world. If this conversation sparked new ideas or
challenged your perspectives, we'd love to hear your thoughts. Make
sure to subscribe, leave a review, and stay tuned for

(01:00:06):
more discussions that push the boundaries of leadership, education, and innovation.
Until next time, keep exploring the boundless possibilities around you.

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