To respond to challenges in society, sustainability, and governance, universities must first deal with the mismatch between how knowledge is actually generated and what academia recognizes and teaches.

To envision the future of academic culture, we consider the epistemic, administrative, and social dimensions of the American research university. Given the existential cultural, economic, political, social, and environmental dilemmas that confront society, constituents and stakeholders alike would be justified in contemplating the academy three or four generations hence with a degree of apprehension. Leaving aside the most dystopian prospects, we summon historical perspective and speculate about the future of academic culture to critique the contemporary research university in an effort to propose new models going forward. We also consider the institutional contexts of knowledge production and examine the imperative to recognize the plurality of academic culture. We argue that if constituents assume that the venerable genealogies that support academic cultures guarantee their perpetuation, they will fail to act with the sense of urgency that is required to meet the entangled challenges ahead.

A comprehensive organizational reconceptualization undertaken by Arizona State University (ASU) during the past two decades has been motivated in part by an explicit intent to institutionalize reflexive understandings of societal responsibility within a major public research university. In the process of operationalizing new models for the American research university, ASU embarked on an academic reorganization that institutionalized the conditions for responsible innovation. Indeed, this institutionalization proceeded contemporaneously with—and in some cases preceded—the systematic articulation of responsible innovation discourses by an international community of scholars. As a transformed and transformational institution, the case of ASU points to the need for research universities to rethink societal responsibility.

Abstract This chapter assesses the accommodation of interdisciplinarity in the American research university in terms of the reflexive relationship between knowledge production and its institutional context. Although the tacit assumption in academic culture is that institutional frameworks have already been optimally configured to facilitate knowledge production, the process remains defined by the traditional correlation between academic disciplines and departments, and, more broadly, the filiopietism and isomorphism that impede the development of new models for the set of research universities. Entrenchment in discipline-based departments mirrors an academic culture that prizes individualism over teamwork and the discovery of specialized knowledge over problem-based collaboration. An overview of theoretical approaches and relevant models in this context precedes a brief historical survey of the institutional accommodation of interdisciplinarity. The chapter issues a call for mutual intelligibility among academic disciplines, and concludes with a case study.