The establishment of interdisciplinary research centres and institutes has been a key structural response for universities interested in embedding interdisciplinarity within the university research system, as it enables universities to retain traditional departments while having a locus to address the grand challenges of society in an interdisciplinary approach.
Yet we know little about how well they achieve this role. Are they just a “laundry list” of affiliates and a nexus of loosely connected individuals searching for intersections rather than cohesive groups tackling well-defined problems, as suggested by Diana Rhoten (2003)?