Abstract: Disciplines serve as the core pillar of higher education. The adjustment of discipline setup, as a crucial aspect of higher education management, represents a complex systemic engineering involving multiple stakeholders. Its optimization is both a “proactive transformation” aimed at deepening the comprehensive reform of higher education and a “necessary change” driven by external pressures and challenges. Employing the embeddedness theory, this study posits that optimization of discipline setup is influenced by political, structural, relational, technological, and cognitive factors. By analyzing the embedding process constructed through different combinations of these factors, this study first clarifies the reform logic beneath the adjustment and optimization of discipline setup, then proceeds to propose governance strategies to improve the institutional leadership mechanism, reform the structural support mechanism, optimize the relational coordination mechanism, establish a technological breakthrough mechanism, and upgrade the cognitive motivation mechanism.

Key words: higher education, discipline setup, influencing factor, embeddedness theory