The contemporary African university is a colonial relic built on rigid disciplines, siloed knowledge and the myth of value-free science. Yet the wicked problems of the 21st century – climate collapse, pandemics, algorithmic governance and social fragmentation – refuse to respect departmental or disciplinary boundaries.

This article argues that disciplinarity – once a necessary tool for depth – has become a collective roadblock.

Drawing on ancient African and Greek traditions of unified knowledge, we propose a radical reorientation: beyond the university toward interversity and transversity. We examine pioneering efforts at Makerere University (HURIPEC, 1997-2006) and Mbarara University of Science and Technology (MUST), critique the institutional allergy to teamwork, and offer a way forward that does not abruptly dismantle existing structures but progressively outgrows them.

Extra-disciplinary past: When knowledge was one

Before the birth of disciplines, knowledge was whole. In ancient Africa – from the ethical cosmology of Maat in Kemet to the oral epistemologies of the Akan, Basoga and Baganda – no separation existed between natural science, social norms, and spiritual values.

Similarly, for the pre-Socratic Greeks and through Plato and Aristotle, philosophia was the love of wisdom that united physics, ethics, logic, and aesthetics. This was extra-disciplinary knowledge: created without invoking disciplinary warrants.

Philosophy was not a department but the very architecture of thinking. Its recent closure at Makerere University (reportedly for political reasons) is not merely an administrative cut; it is a symbolic amputation of the faculty that once integrated all knowing. Without philosophy, knowledge loses self-reflection, its ethical spine, and its capacity to question its own foundations.

Birth of disciplinarity: A brief history

The systematic disciplinarisation of knowledge began with Aristotle’s classification of sciences (theoretical, practical, poetical), but the modern rupture occurred in 19th-century Germany and France. Auguste Comte (1798-1857) proposed a hierarchy of disciplines from mathematics to sociology, while Wilhelm von Humboldt’s university model embedded disciplinary specialisation into institutional structure.

The immediate consequence was epistemological fragmentation: chemistry no longer spoke to poetry, economics divorced from ethics.

Philosophy became the primary victim. De-philosophising knowledge meant that each discipline pretended to generate its own first principles, forgetting that those principles rest on unexamined metaphysical assumptions. The expulsion of morality and ethics from scientific knowledge produced the enduring myth that knowledge is value-free—a dangerous fiction, as climate science and AI ethics now painfully reveal.

University: Built on universal knowledge, yet trapped in silos

The term university derives from universitas – the whole. Yet the modern university is allergic to meaningful teamwork. It glorifies the individual professor as the epitome of knowledge, a living silo. Students are told: learn from this one expert. By graduation, most dimensions of a young brain are stunted: trained in narrow hypothesis-testing but unable to hold contradictory truths, blind to feedback loops across systems.

What don’t university graduates know? They know their discipline’s canon, methods, and literature. What do they not know? How their object of study entangles with political economy, ecology, indigenous knowledge, and emotional life. That separated knowledge, when applied to wicked problems, becomes a new pollutant—solutions that solve one variable while poisoning ten others.

Sense and nonsense of specialisation

Specialisation produces depth within a narrow trench. That was useful for industrial-era problem-solving. But our complex, intricately interwoven crises demand multivariate analyses—exactly what social media, the Internet, and AI now perform with ease. Disciplines respond with univariate regressions and controlled experiments that strip away context. Multidisciplinarity merely over-glorifies disciplines, letting them sit side by side without integration. It is not a solution; it is a polite fiction.

Alternative knowledge systems: From inter- to extra-

The new knowledge systems go by many names: team sciences, integrative sciences, convergence research. We distinguish:

• Interdisciplinarity: Integrates methods and concepts from multiple disciplines to address a common question.
• Crossdisciplinarity: Views one discipline from the perspective of another (e.g. physics of music).
• Transdisciplinarity: Transcends disciplines entirely, co-creating knowledge with non-academic actors (communities, practitioners).
• Extradisciplinarity: Returns to pre-disciplinary wholeness, drawing on indigenous, artistic, and embodied ways of knowing.

These systems cannot be meaningfully institutionalised in a disciplinary university because the university rewards individual publication, not team outcomes. It cannot offer a joint degree to an integrated team of scientists. Hence the need for new institutional forms.

Beyond university: Interversity, crossversity, transversity, extraversity

We propose alternative institutions that can coexist with universities and eventually overtake them:

• Interversity: Organised around problems, not disciplines. A student studies “water security” integrating hydrology, law, poetry and indigenous rainmaking knowledge.
• Crossversity: Secondments and lens-swapping as pedagogy. A physicist spends a semester in a theatre department to learn complexity through improvisation.
• Transversity: Community-embedded knowledge labs. Half the faculty are farmers, nurses or activists. Research is judged by real-world flourishing, not citation indices.
• Extraversity: Reclaims ancient and contemplative knowledge systems. Meditation, ritual, storytelling, and land-based learning are central.

African pioneering efforts and their challenges

Makerere University made an attempt to introduce inter-disciplinarity through the Human Rights and Peace Centre (HURIPEC) between 1997 and 2006 with funding from the Ford Foundation and initial involvement of the University of Florida and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). The Project was called “Interdisciplinary Teaching of Human Rights, Peace and Ethics Project (ITHPEP).

However, no academic programmes were ever conducted. Instead, the project concentrated on workshops for university administrators and faculty aimed at selling the idea of interdisciplinarity. HURIPEC produced several documents outlining the outcomes of these workshops. That was the major – and final – outcome of the project.

Thereafter, both the University Senate and University Council gave in-principle endorsement to interdisciplinary discourse but fatally undercut it by declaring interdisciplinarity optional and irrelevant to promotions and career advancement.

Disciplinarity remained the sole currency of academic survival, thanks to what is popularly known as the “Akiiki Mujaju Academic Policy”, which underlined the superiority if the disciplines in the university. ITHPEP unceremoniously or silently ended in 2006, thereby emerging as a potential pollutant of the rigidly disciplinary institution.

Since 2006, what progress? A thorough review of Makerere’s public records, Senate reports, and interviews with senior academics (2023-2025) indicates:

• No interdisciplinary academic programmes have been established.
• No reinstatement of a university-wide interdisciplinary mandate.
• No change to promotion criteria – single-authored disciplinary publications remain gold standard.
• No interdisciplinary degree programme that survives beyond donor funding cycles.

The HURIPEC experiment was a consciousness-raising effort that failed to alter institutional DNA. As desired by the Akiiki Mujaju Academic Policy Disciplinarity still reigns supreme, twenty years later.  What a missed opportunity to be the first! Makerere University remains a 20th century university in the 21st century -century of new and different knowledge systems.

Mbarara University of Science and Technology (MUST) institutionalised community-based education, research and service (ComBER) and interdisciplinary problem-based learning. Yet the challenges are identical: promotion criteria remain disciplinary, funding is siloed and students report confusion when no single department “owns” them.

MUST’s experience proves that interdisciplinarity cannot thrive inside a strictly disciplinary university environment without structural revolution.

Elsewhere in Africa, the University of Mauritius has transdisciplinary sustainability centres; University of Cape Town’s Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching experiments with cross-faculty teams; Ashesi University (Ghana) uses a core interdisciplinary curriculum. None has yet birthed a full interversity.

Journals promoting alternative knowledge systems

A small but growing ecosystem exists:

• Issues in Interdisciplinary Studies (Association for Interdisciplinary Studies)
• Transdisciplinary Journal of Engineering & Science (ATDES)
• Integrative and Comparative Biology
• The Journal of Problem-Based Learning in Higher Education
• African Journal of Inter/Multidisciplinary Studies (University of Eswatini)

But no dedicated Interversity or Transversity journal yet exists – a gap Africa could fill.

Why Africa must not wait

The 20th-century disciplinary university may have served industrial Europe. Africa cannot afford a 50-year lag. With the youngest population on earth, leapfrogging digital technologies, and existential threats from climate change to debt crises, Africa needs future-ready graduates who can integrate, synthesise, and act with moral clarity.

The new educational technologies – the Internet, AI, social media, big data – already disrespect disciplines. They are multivariate, pattern-recognising, and integrative. If universities refuse to adapt, they will become museums while learning happens elsewhere.

Way forward: Without abrupt disruption

We advise a pragmatic transition:

Pilot interversity hubs within existing universities – autonomous centres with team-based promotion, problem-based curricula, and community co-design.

Reform promotion criteria to reward co-authored, cross-disciplinary outputs and real-world impact.

Create joint and team degrees – a legal and administrative innovation that allows a cohort to graduate together.

National commissions on knowledge systems to map pathways from disciplinarity to transversity.

Establish an African Interversity Network to share curricula, faculty exchanges, and accreditation standards.

The goal is not to burn the university but to outgrow it, as a butterfly outgrows the chrysalis.

• A Tell Media report / By Prof Oweyegha-Afunaduula. The writer is a retired Ugandan scholar and elder who has witnessed and analysed Uganda’s political evolution from colonialism through independence to the present day. He is a founder of Centre for Critical Thinking and Alternative Analysis (CCTAA), Uganda.