Steven Brint

Over the last three decades, interdisciplinary cluster hiring programs have become popular on research university campuses as an approach to fostering interdisciplinary collaboration. These programs have not yet been rigorously evaluated across multiple institutions and multiple thematic fields. The paper reports the results of a survey of 199 cluster hires across 20 research universities, supplemented by interviews with 18 administrators and cluster leads at nine universities. Against the expectation of advocates, the survey responses indicate that cluster hire groups are often loosely organized and members do not typically spend much time collaborating with others in their group. Both the existence of common research agendas and the participation of individuals capable of translating across disciplinary languages are associated with higher levels of satisfaction with the collaborative environment of clusters, net of covariates, as are adequate lab spaces. Even if they do not typically lead to high levels of collaboration, clusters can, in the best case scenarios, help universities to align with emerging research areas in ways that departments may have difficulty doing.

Conventional sociological accounts of the rise and fall of academic fields have been challenged by accounts based on the idea of market‐responsive change. In this article, we focus on the period 1980–2000, the period during which, according to its proponents, the market model of change became dominant in academe. We find changes in the student market to be strongly associated with increased institutionalization of academic fields. We also find the preferences of donors to be associated with increased institutionalization of academic fields. By contrast, we find relatively little support for labor market signals or changes in federal funding priorities as important influences on the institutionalization of academic fields. We find that higher‐status institutions are more market responsive than lower‐status institutions.

This research identifies 22 fields that declined in absolute numbers and/or prevalence over a 35-year period. Most were basic fields in the arts and sciences. Steep declines were evident only in a few fields, notably European languages and literatures. Larger, higher status, and historically liberal arts oriented institutions were less likely to drop declining fields.