Change and adaptation challenge even top universities, and Stanford is no exception.

That was the message at Thursday’s Faculty Senate meeting, where focus was on an increasingly prominent set of institutions on campus that could be the key to pushing the University forward in its research and scholarship — and in raising its real-world impact.

Alongside traditional University institutions that define Stanford’s perceived strengths and carry out its core activities, the Farm also has 15 independent centers, laboratories and institutes; they do not operate within any of the traditional schools like Law, Medicine or Humanities & Sciences.

Addressing the Faculty Senate Thursday, faculty and administrators emphasized the role that these smaller, specialized organizations play in bringing Stanford’s resources to bear on formulating policy and solving real-world problems — and on spurring on advances within the traditional scholarly disciplines.

Vice Provost and Dean of Research Ann Arvin said that Stanford’s set of research organizations give the University an uncommon resource with many benefits.

“At least as far as I know, this is a fairly unusual structure, not common to our peer institutions, beginning to be perhaps imitated,” Arvin said.

“We see many of the funding agencies very interested in going in this direction and we, I think, as a result of this history, have been pretty well poised to take advantage of those opportunities,” she added.

Of Stanford’s independent research organizations, four are institutes with a specific focus on policy: the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR), the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), the Woods Institute for the Environment and the Precourt Institute for Energy.

Lynn Orr, the director of Precourt, described how, in the 1980s, interest in energy issues and policy trailed off so significantly that Stanford had no institute dedicated to its study. He said that the birth of Precourt in early 2009 represented a second chance.

“Our job now is not to waste the next twenty years the way we’ve wasted the last twenty years,” Orr said. “This is so important to the way that the world operates in the future that we need to be playing in all the parts of it. And we do have a lot to contribute.”

FSI Director Coit Blacker said that the search for solutions, even if relying on the exploration of interdisciplinary measures, rested on traditional scholarship and the University’s established strengths.

“I would start with something that Lynn Orr said: you cannot have excellence in these places unless we have robust strength within the disciplines,” Blacker said. “So it cannot be an either-or. It’s no accident that the quality of the work that goes on at FSI, which I think is quite high, is a function of the fact that we have really good faculty, really good graduate students and remarkable undergraduates, who keep us honest.”

Blacker also emphasized the key effect the institutes have on the momentum of research.

“My own view is moving forward, we have to balance…between work that must take place within the disciplines and that that can’t take place within one because the problems are so vast,” Blacker said. “That I think is the challenge that is confronting the American research university. I think we have the best chance to get it right because I think we’re very self-conscious about trying to get that right.”

Jeffrey Koseff, co-director of the Woods Institute for the Environment, noted that the energy behind interdisciplinary research often reverberates back to influence departments.

“I can think of at least three or four examples where departments have been transformed, resuscitated, revived, invigorated, by the existence of these interdisciplinary initiatives,” he said.

He described the scholarship evolutions that turned the study of petroleum engineering into energy resource engineering, increased the sustainability emphasis in civil & environmental engineering and encouraged materials science and engineering’s “huge alternative energy focus.”

William Newsome, a neurobiology professor and director of the Bio-X program’s “NeuroVentures” project, also described how the discipline of neuroscience emerged out of the kind of interdisciplinary research now emphasized at the independent institutions.

In comparison to the expansiveness of other speakers, Arvin had a more conservative outlook, stressing the independent institutions’ crucial strengths but saying that they remained firmly secondary to traditional schools and departments.

“I don’t personally think we’re at a tipping point, because I think we see the vast majority of faculty effort going on in their departments, in their disciplines,” Arvin said. “This is something that is…layered on. I believe it gives us an awful lot of flexibility, agility, to do new things.”