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Following the 2005 closure of the John M. Olin Foundation, law and economics centers at elite universities faced a critical sustainability challenge: how to maintain operations without philanthropic support. Existing academic capitalism literature predicts uniform market adaptation, yet provides limited institutional-level analysis of how organizations actually navigate post-philanthropic funding pressures. This study employs comparative case analysis of three surviving Olin institutions at Harvard, Yale, and Stanford to examine organizational strategies for balancing market engagement with research agendas. Through historical analysis, organizational examination, and text analysis of working papers (2020–2024), we identify three distinct organizational mechanisms: Harvard’s corporate advisory board model creates direct accountability to market actors, producing research on corporate responsibility and ESG challenges; Yale’s traditional academic infrastructure preserves faculty control over research agendas for principles-centered public law analysis; Stanford’s cross-institutional Law-Business School collaboration enables market engagement through legitimized professional education structures. These divergent pathways challenge deterministic interpretations of academic capitalism, demonstrating that elite institutions can strategically position themselves along a spectrum from market orientation to academic independence. The findings contribute institutional-level evidence to academic capitalism theory and reveal how philanthropic capital creates lasting organizational infrastructures that shape research priorities decades beyond direct funding. (194 words) ● Academic capitalism fuels interdisciplinarity in higher education, shown in John M. Olin institutions linking law, economics, and governance. ● Harvard and Stanford pursue market-driven work on corporate governance and climate change; Yale stays more theoretical and autonomous. ● Academic capitalism and interdisciplinarity reinforce each other as universities align with market demand via vocational training and integrated frameworks. ● Market-aligned interdisciplinarity can boost innovation, but may threaten integrity; balance is needed for sustainability.
Lu et al. (Fri,) studied this question.