The Evolution of Interdisciplinary Knowledge Governance: A Historical Case Study of the Chicago Committee on Social Thought

The governance of interdisciplinary knowledge has become a pressing concern in contemporary higher education, raising questions about how intellectual boundaries are navigated and sustained over time. What institutional dynamics enable the coexistence of interdisciplinarity and disciplinary specialization? Under what conditions can interdisciplinary platforms adapt to shifting academic norms while maintaining coherence? This paper addresses these theoretical questions through a historical and empirical case study of the Committee on Social Thought (CST) at the University of Chicago, a doctoral program established in 1943 to transcend disciplinary boundaries and foster intellectual collaboration. Initially conceived as a refuge for scholars marginalized within their home disciplines—such as F.A. Hayek in economics and Edward Shils in sociology—CST facilitated innovative exchanges across economics, philosophy, history, anthropology, and mathematics. However, by the late 20th century, the program underwent a significant transformation, favoring text-based interpretive studies in comparative literature, philosophy, and the history of political thought. This shift prompts critical inquiries into the essential factors driving CST’s evolution. How did postwar trends in American academia, such as the quantification and professionalization of social sciences, influence its trajectory? What role did governance structures and intellectual traditions play in consolidating its focus on textual analysis? To explore these questions, we employ a mixed-methods approach integrating historical archival research with computational and interpretive methodologies. Drawing from extensive archival materials—including faculty records, course syllabi, and dissertation abstracts—we reconstruct CST’s intellectual and organizational history, paying attention to its shifts in disciplinary focus and institutional strategies. Complementing this historical inquiry, we utilize BERTopic, a dynamic topic modeling framework based on BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers), a natural language processing model that excels at understanding semantic relationships within text. By identifying and clustering topics across decades, BERTopic quantitatively maps thematic shifts in the corpus of 264 dissertations produced by CST students between 1948 and 2023. Interpretive analysis plays a crucial role in contextualizing these computational results. For instance, while topic modeling reveals declining engagement with economic history and increasing focus on classical texts, archival records provide nuanced insights into faculty hiring decisions, funding structures, and the intellectual influence of figures like Hayek and Leo Strauss. Together, these methods enable a richer understanding of CST’s evolution, bridging large-scale trends with granular institutional dynamics. Our findings suggest CST’s trajectory illustrates the tension between interdisciplinarity and disciplinary professionalization. Externally, the quantification of social sciences marginalized traditional humanistic inquiry, positioning CST as a haven for such approaches. Internally, figures like Strauss facilitated the intergenerational reproduction of textual analysis as CST’s core methodology. These dynamics underscore how interdisciplinary programs must balance competing pressures for academic legitimacy and intellectual coherence. This paper contributes to debates on knowledge governance by situating CST’s evolution within broader shifts in academic and political landscapes. It demonstrates how computational tools and archival research combine to trace the long-term trajectories of interdisciplinary platforms. By offering insights into the conditions under which such programs adapt—or falter—this study informs ongoing discussions on the politics and policies of knowledge governance in higher education.