Vol.:(0123456789) Research in Higher Education https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-020-09603-x 1 3 What Catalyzes Research Universities to Commit to Interdisciplinary Research? Sondra N. Barringer 1  · Erin Leahey 2  · Karina Salazar 3 Received: 30 May 2019 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020 Abstract For decades, science policy has been promoting interdisciplinary research (IDR), but uni- versities have not responded uniformly. To explain this variation, we integrate insights from the organizational literature, especially research on microfoundations, and highlight the role of both administrators and faculty. We collect and, with the help of machine learn- ing, code vast amounts of textual data from 156 universities nationwide to measure uni- versities’ structural commitment to IDR as well as key explanatory variables, including top-down administrative support for, and bottom-up faculty engagement with, IDR. We integrate these measures with extant data from the Survey of Earned Doctorates, Higher Education R&D Expenditures Survey, NIH, NSF, and IPEDS to analyze how internal uni- versity dynamics infuence the degree to which a university commits to IDR. Our results reveal that the level of structural commitment to IDR difers at universities with and with- out medical schools, as do the precursors to this commitment. At universities with med- ical schools, we fnd that bottom-up engagement is positively associated with structural commitment to IDR, and that status moderates the relationship between top-down admin- istrative support and structural commitment to IDR. For universities with low levels of supportive administrative discourse status signifcantly impacted their structural commit- ment to IDR. At universities without medical schools, top-down support and bottom-up engagement are interrelated and mutually reinforcing such that universities with high levels of both administrative support and interdisciplinary research grants have higher levels of structural commitment to IDR. We discuss the implications of these fndings for university administrators, policy makers, and researchers. Keywords Research universities · Interdisciplinarity · Organizational commitments · Machine learning · Microfoundations Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s1116 2-020-09603-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Sondra N. Barringer sbarringer@smu.edu Extended author information available on the last page of the article