The Missing Half of the Strategic Plan
September 12, 2026
Read Time - 4 minutes
“Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome.”
~Charlie Munger
After twenty years of universities writing interdisciplinary work into strategic plans, standing up centers and institutes, and hiring faculty in clusters to staff them, four researchers wanted to know if interdisciplinary work had reached the classroom.
That is harder to check than it sounds, because classrooms, as they put it, get treated as “black boxes.” We reorganize around them constantly but rarely look inside. So Youjin Hong and her colleagues went and looked. They ran natural language processing over 478,233 syllabi from US four-year colleges and graduate schools between 2004 and 2019, checking the vocabulary, the topics, and the verbs in the learning outcomes.*
They found “remarkable stability in the disciplinary boundaries of course content.” For the most part, a 2019 syllabus covered what a 2004 syllabus covered. And engineering was the only real exception.
Interdisciplinarity in university research, they write, is “institutionally decoupled from universities’ everyday teaching practices.”
Sixteen years with almost no evidence in the classroom. Ouch.
Why it didn’t work
Hong and her colleagues did not test why this happened, but they did offer a short list of suspects: slow faculty turnover, weak institutional support for interdisciplinary teaching, and teaching counting for less than research.
Ask what obstacles block interdisciplinary work on campus and two answers often come back.
The first is the tenure process. Joint work is harder to evaluate, harder to claim as your own, and easy for a committee to discount. One study found tenure norms had “remained largely unchanged,” with a department chair describing interdisciplinary work at tenure time as “a kiss of death.”
The second is budget. Penn’s own budget office lists “interdisciplinary teaching and research hindered,” and “competition, rather than collaboration, among academic units” among the risks of a responsibility center model. When revenue follows enrollment into the unit that owns the course, it gives deans and chairs a reason not to collaborate. Anyone who has operated in an RCM budget model has seen this up close.
Campuses did invest significantly to encourage interdisciplinary work. Cluster hiring was the most visible version of it, and Quinn Bloom, Michaela Curran and Steven Brint surveyed 199 faculty hired through cluster initiatives at 20 research universities. 62% collaborated with others in their cluster less than ten percent of the time. 23% never collaborated at all.
The hires happened, but at most of those campuses the tenure criteria and the budget model did not change, so people did what the structure incentivized them to do.
A goal that does not change an incentive is really just a preference, not a plan.
Three campuses that did it differently
Some campuses did change the incentive.
Arizona State dissolved its biology, plant biology, and microbiology departments into a School of Life Sciences in 2003. Wisconsin’s cluster hiring initiative covered the full starting salary of a new faculty line for six years, then handed 30 percent of it back to the departments. At Duke, an interdisciplinary institute can hold a tenure appointment, not just host one.
Each of them made structural changes to ensure the goal was achievable.
Which brings us to strategic plans being written on campuses right now.
For many, AI is a strategic priority but the same questions that went unanswered for interdisciplinary work are unanswered again.
An assistant professor spends a year rebuilding her course around AI. The first semester goes badly and her evaluations drop. What does her third-year review say about that year?
A philosophy professor and a computer scientist want to co-teach AI ethics. How is workload determined?
A faculty member spends her summer becoming AI literate. Is she paid for it, or is it a hobby the institution benefits from?
How does the annual review address AI adoption? Are there campus awards or merit incentives?
If the plan does not answer those, it is not a plan yet.
Try This Before Friday
Pick one goal on your plan. Just one.
Write down the single incentive that would have to change for it to actually happen, and the name of the person who can change it.
If you can name both, you have a plan. If you can only name the goal, you have a preference, and at least now you know what to go ask for.
Bottom Line
Hong and her colleagues had a word for what happened to interdisciplinary work. Decoupled.
Higher ed is very good at dreaming. We've never had a shortage of vision. And we are also better at accountability than we get credit for. Many plans name an owner and a deadline for every goal. That tells you whether a task got finished, but it doesn’t say how we work differently or what behaviors must change for the plan to be a success. That’s the deeper discussion that strategic plans imply but don’t typically address.
We ration that conversation, because it is specific and uncomfortable. Who pays. What counts. What comes off someone’s plate to make room.
That conversation is the coupling. Have it before the plan goes into effect and you are leading change. Have it after, and you are explaining why the plan didn’t happen.
It is also the hardest conversation to run well, because everyone in the room has a different stake in the answer.
If you're interested in strategies for that conversation, join me on September 17. Getting to Yes: Building Consensus Through Controversy and Change is sixty minutes on reading the room, surfacing the real objections before they go underground, and getting to a decision people will actually act on. I would love to see you there.
That’s it for today. Thanks for reading.
I’ll see you next Saturday.
*Engineering courses dropped from 60% own-field content in 2004 to 46% in 2019. Arts and humanities moved about seven points. Hong and colleagues note their sample skews toward private universities, social science courses, and southern institutions.
Put this to work on your campus.
🏛️ For Institutions: Strategic Planning and Leadership Development
Strategic plans often assume an execution capacity nobody built. They land on chairs, directors, deans, and the senior staff running every unit on campus, and few of them have been trained for the skills that move work forward: leading people and leading change. I work with campuses in three ways: coaching leadership teams into alignment, facilitating strategic planning from mission and values through execution, and running onboarding and cohort programs that develop leaders at every level. Campuses that do this equip the people they've asked to lead. Learn more.
💡 For Individual Leaders: Executive Coaching
You can be great at what you do and still be under-equipped for the role you're in. Very few campus leaders receive the development the role actually requires, so they learn it in real time, in front of the people they lead. Trial by fire is not a leadership development strategy. I work 1:1 with chairs, deans, and senior leaders who are sharpening how they lead, getting ready for the next role, or looking for one person outside the institution to work through complex issues with. They end up with a team that works in alignment. Decisions that don't all run through them. A leadership bench that's ready. A culture people want to stay in. A few spots open each quarter. Learn more.