America's sprawling system of colleges and universities has been built on the ruins of war. After the American Revolution the cash-strapped central government sold land grants to raise revenue and build colleges and schools in newly conquered lands. During the Civil War, the federal government built on this earlier precedent when it passed the 1862 Morrill Land-Grant College Act, which created the nation's system of publicly supported land-grant colleges. And during Reconstruction, the Freedmen's Bureau, operating under the auspices of the War Department, aided former slaves in creating thousands of schools to help protect their hard-fought freedoms. Not only do “wars make states,” as sociologist Charles Tilly claimed, but wars have also shaped the politics of knowledge in the modern university in powerful and lasting ways.

Interdisciplinary research requires scholars to learn by doing, and thus interdisciplinary work will be constantly undergoing development. This paper reviews how a large truly integrated interdisciplinary research team capable of handling complex interdependent social and environmental issues was created, developed and managed. The Canadian Coasts Under Stress bicoastal research project (CUS) constitutes a case study, aimed at providing a detailed analysis of a successful relatively ‘mature’ template for interdisciplinary team research that can be transferred to other teams and other research problems. CUS was created to address coastal social-ecological stress, and it uncovered linkages (‘pathways’) between the main drivers of social-ecological health in both human and environmental communities. In so doing, the team produced a comprehensive new way to understand restructuring and its impact on social-ecological health. In organizational terms, the team was divided into two coastal sub-teams (east and west) and five main research components that were reflected in the team logo as the arms of a seastar. To achieve integration of all components and subcomponents, a methodology for research construction and integration was employed that operated in tandem with the methodologies employed in the various subcomponents. Team members shared their vision of what they wished to achieve and meetings were facilitated in a variety of ways such that cross-fertilization and discussion were ongoing, and team members always knew exactly where their work fitted into the greater whole. In the process, significant student training occurred, and the challenge of equitable publication processes were met such that the output of the team achieved both disciplinary rigour and interdisciplinary understanding.