This paper examines innovations in strategic faculty hiring emphasizing interdisciplinarity at two major public research universities in the USA. The research investigated how and why the Pennsylvania State University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison chose to pursue interdisciplinary faculty recruitment, how it was structured, and how it was intended to cause changes in academic work at each university. The paper analyzes how the interdisciplinary aims of those innovations intersected with competitive pressures, resource acquisition strategies, and organizational problems. Implications are discussed in the last section. (Contains 14 notes.)