In a world grappling with intractable wicked problems – from climate breakdown to political inertia – the fragmenting, disciplinary university has proven woefully inadequate. This article synthesises the intellectual journey of a Ugandan scholar who, from his 1982 masters research in Tsavo National Park in Kenya, has persistently argued for the radical reintegration of knowledge.

Moving beyond the ‘false king’ of disciplinarity, I introduce the team sciences of interdisciplinarity, crossdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity and, most critically, extradisciplinarity as the engines of 21st-century knowledge production.

I explain my deliberate rejection of the popular but deceitful banner of ‘multidisciplinarity,’ and lay out my vision for a new ecosystem of higher education institutions: the interversity, crossversity, transversity and extraversity.

Finally, I assess the revolutionary yet ambiguous role of digital technologies and artificial intelligence, warning that without extradisciplinary governance, these tools will merely digitise ancient disciplinary silos.

The article closes with a firm conclusion: the old universities have no choice but to yield to these new versities, or be swept aside by a world that can no longer afford the luxury of fragmented thought.

Productive mind

At 77 years of age, I write not as a retired academic, but as a “tired but not tired” agent of change. My life, from my birth among the Mulawa clan of Busoga to my current work at the Centre for Critical Thinking and Alternative Analysis, has been dedicated to one proposition: that the human mind, when freed from the arbitrary cages of disciplines, is the most powerful instrument for truth and development.

The 21st century has brought us social media, the Internet and Artificial Intelligence (AI) – tools that have accelerated the speed of information exchange beyond the wildest dreams of the 20th century. However, these technologies are merely empty vessels. They will produce either emancipating knowledge or amplified nonsense depending on the knowledge culture that wields them.

This article is my roadmap for ensuring that our knowledge cultures evolve from the 20th century’s fragmented disciplinarity to the 21st century’s integrated, extradisciplinary and truly productive mind.

The 1982 Tsavo study – A testament to interdisciplinary courage

My academic career was forged not in the lecture hall, but in the semi-desert heat of Tsavo National Park (East), Kenya. In 1982, I submitted my masters thesis: Vegetation changes in Tsavo National Park (East), Kenya, which examined medium-term vegetation changes between 1971 and 1981 with reference to the role of elephants and fire regimes.

I was trained as a zoologist. Yet, to understand the genocide of elephants and the simultaneous collapse of vegetation, I knew I could not merely count animal corpses. I had to reach into the past.

Thus, I crossed an impermissible boundary. I, a zoologist in a department of zoology, adopted the technique of dendrochronology – the study of tree growth rings, which belonged to the realms of forestry and botany. By exploring the dendrochronological potential of Tsavo’s woody species, I was not just studying elephants; I was reconstructing the ecological and fire history of the savannah, engaging in what is now called dendroclimatology.

My study demonstrated a profound truth: the trinity of sciences – Natural Science, Social Science, and the Arts (Humanities) – are not separate kingdoms. They are dimensions of a single, integrated human effort to understand reality. To solve the wicked problem of desertification in Tsavo, I had to integrate the natural science of elephant behaviour, the social science of land management, and the historical analysis of climate patterns.

It is deeply saddening that nowhere in East, Central, or Sub-Saharan Africa has another scientist picked up this simple, inexpensive technique to study savannah ecology. Some have cited my work to acknowledge my observations, yet they did not use the method. This is the tragedy of rigid disciplinarity—the inability to take a tool from one tribe and use it to heal a problem in another.

Critique of disciplinary discourse

My Tsavo experience revealed the core sickness of modern higher education: disciplinary discourse. I have long argued that “at no time has the sense and nonsense of academic specialisation necessitated serious debate in the African academia as now”. The sense is obvious: specialisation allows for deep dives into narrow fields. The nonsense is that in the real world, problems are not narrow. They are web-like.

I have consistently critiqued how disciplinarity has infiltrated every aspect of our public lives:

• Higher education: African universities have become “centres of docility, silence, undemocratic practices and human rights abuses” because critical thinking has been squeezed out by academicism and scholasticism. We produce “educated fools” who can cite narrow theories but cannot synthesise a plan of action.
• Policy and Law Making: When politicians talk of integration, they have no integration agents to help them, because our parliaments are filled with disciplinary products who cannot perform as integrated units.
• Judicial processes: A judiciary that applies law without understanding the social ecology, environmental context or economic reality of a case is a machine for injustice, not equity.
• Environment and development: The greatest barrier to environmental conservation in Uganda is not a lack of natural science data; it is the failure to integrate that data with the “socioeconomic dimension of the environment” – the cultural, spiritual, and economic lives of the people living on the biocultural landscape.

Team sciences: inter-, cross-, trans- and extra-disciplinarity

Since the early 1970s, a new scholarship has been rooting itself globally, which I have termed the team sciences or integration sciences. These are the legitimate successors to the fragmenting disciplines. I define them thus:

Interdisciplinarity: The integration of knowledge and methods from different disciplines to achieve a real synthesis.

Crossdisciplinarity: Viewing one discipline from the perspective of another.

Transdisciplinarity: Creating a unity of intellectual frameworks that goes beyond the disciplines altogether.

Extradisciplinarity (or non-disciplinarity): A way of thinking, working and writing that is not limited at all by disciplinary boundaries. It is the purest form of integrated knowledge production.

Why I have ignored multidisciplinarity

It is imperative to ask: why have I ignored multidisciplinarity, which virtually all universities have jumped onto?

The answer is simple: Multidisciplinarity is a trap. It is “glorified disciplinarity”. In a multidisciplinary setting, scholars from different disciplines sit in the same room, but they do not integrate their insights. A geologist sits next to a sociologist, but the geologist does not become sociological, and the sociologist does not become geological.

They merely produce a salad, not a smoothie. Universities love multidisciplinarity because it allows them to claim they are being innovative without actually reforming their rigid departmental structures. I have called the scholars pushing this agenda “slow professors” because they are deliberately slowing down the genuine knowledge integration movement.

The call for new versities (interversity, crossversity, transversity, extraversity)

If the old disciplinary university – the ‘university’ – is the problem, then the solution is the creation of entirely new institutional forms. I have therefore proposed the establishment of what I call the versities.

Interversity: An institution structured around interdisciplinary synthesis.

Crossversity: An institution built on crossdisciplinary exchange.

Transversity: An institution designed for transdisciplinary problem-solving, where academics, practitioners and community members co-create knowledge.

Extraversity: The highest form, an institution with no departments, no disciplinary silos, and no boundaries between ‘campus’ and ‘community.’ It is the institutional embodiment of extradisciplinary discourse.

Why I prefer extraversity

In my recent writings, I have preferred extraversity because the 21st century’s wicked problems – pandemics, climate collapse, artificial intelligence governance – cannot be approached through the lens of a single discipline, nor through the bridge of two disciplines. They require a state of mind that is non-disciplinary from the start. An extraversity does not ask “What does the zoologist say?” It asks “What does the truth say?” This is the institution that the cyberage demands.

Educational technologies and the future of knowledge production

The rise of social media, the Internet, and artificial intelligence presents a double-edged sword.

On the one hand, I have integrated myself into the digital culture, acknowledging that it is the “antithesis of traditional culture.”

These technologies are the only tools powerful enough to manage the multivariate analyses that extradisciplinarity requires. A disciplinary mind can handle two variables; a computer powered by AI can handle two million. Therefore, AI is the perfect machine for the extra-disciplinary scholar.

However, my advice is one of severe caution. If we feed these technologies into our current university system, we will simply accelerate the production of nonsense. As I argued in “How Social Media Shapes Politics and Public Opinion,” these platforms are profoundly influencing political discourse, but they are doing so without ethical or intellectual governance. We will produce “Networked scholarship” that is wide but shallow, digitizing the same old biases.

The only way to use these technologies for good is to govern them with extra-disciplinary logic. We must stop using AI to search within disciplines and start using it to map between them. We must use the Internet to dissolve, not reinforce, our academic tribes.

Universities have no choice

Do the universities have any choice other than giving way to the rise of the new versities? No. They have no choice.

Their continued failure to tackle wicked problems by sticking to univariate analyses is their death warrant. When a university cannot solve a water crisis because the hydrology department won’t speak to the political science department, it has failed its social contract. As I have repeatedly stated, knowledge was historically one and integrated.

The fragmentation of knowledge into disciplines was a useful, but temporary, technological phase of human history. That phase is ending. The universities that survive the 21st century will be those that abandon their attachment to the ‘sense’ of specialization and embrace the difficult, beautiful necessity of extra-disciplinary integration.

Conclusion: Productive mind beyond the 21st century

Looking beyond the 21st century, I see a humanity that must choose between two paths: one of hyper-specialized chaos, or one of integrated wisdom. My work has consistently been the latter. From the Tsavo study in 1982 that proved a zoologist could use dendrochronology, to the founding of the Center for Critical Thinking and Alternative Analysis in 2019, I have been preparing the ground for the extraversity.

The productive mind of the future is not the one that knows everything about a little. It is the one that understands the connections between everything. It is the mind that is unafraid to be non-disciplinary. That is my hint. That is my direction. That is the revolution we must wage, with the power of the pen, the power of the internet, and the indomitable power of integrated truth.

• 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.