Graduates for the real world

Acting and caring in and for the world is now emphatically holistic and interdisciplinary.

Worldly problems are inherently interdisciplinary, so our graduates need to be interdisciplinary too. Just as we talk about 'whole-of-government' or 'multiple bottomlines', so too our graduates need to be whole of faculty and multi-disciplinary.
Even if some 'old' universities continue to focus on producing new generations of narrow disciplinary theorists, new universities like VU should focus on producing worldly actors. Curriculum should focus on a real-world problem - water, energy, urban development, terrorism, pandemics, public health, Indigenous community development - and bring to bear on it as many disciplinary perspectives as possible. Students will learn to work and think across different vocabularies, paradigms, methodologies, values and conceptual frameworks.