In 1977 Rustum Roy proposed that the "science and engineering activity of a university ... [be organized] primarily around a dozen permanent mission-oriented interdisciplinary laboratories." To reach this conclusion he notes that "universities have been forced into new interdisciplinary patterns not only by the dollar sign but also by the inexorable logic that the real problems of society do not come in discipline-shaped blocks."
The daunting structural inertia of the university did not faze him:
:A human being, that is both a naked ape and a fallen angel, can manage perhaps to organize the university with both the ivory tower and service-station character.