In late 2013, Canada's national newspaper reported that the implementation of Ontario's "differentiation policy framework" was the province's "boldest step yet to compel universities and colleges to make hard choices about how they spend their resources...a draft policy designed to stretch limited provincial dollars by narrowing some schools' missions" (Bradshaw 2013, para. two). As part of this controversial reform agenda, the province's Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities required each of its 44 post-secondary educational (PSE) institutions to submit a Strategic Mandate Agreement in response to a set of priority objectives outlined under this rubric of "differentiation" aimed at avoiding duplication and waste of public resources (Government of Ontario 2013; Brock University 2013). Within the authors' own university's agreement, the central organizing principle was chosen as "transdisciplinarity." Under "Areas of Institutional Strength" the university pledged to focus its resources "on transdisciplinary community-based research with five new transdisciplinary hubs (Brock University and Ontario Ministry of Training, College and Universities 2014, 7). In response to these developments, this article presents a secondary analysis from a large, qualitative dataset collected during a two-year critical ethnography (Mitchell and Moore 2015). The study focused on transdisciplinarity as an organizing principle for educational reform and for researching sustainability science partnerships. The purpose was to investigate how this 21st century paradigm was being understood and deployed by key stakeholders.