Playing the Board Game: An Empirical Analysis of University Trustee and Corporate Board Interlocks

Abstract

The past decade has been marked by an increasingly entrepreneurial and commercial approach to the management and finance of postsecondary institutions (Kirp, 2003; Marginson, 1997; Pusser & Doane, 2001; Pusser, Gansnede, Gallaway & Pope, 2005; Slaughter & Leslie, 1997; Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004). The widely noted pressure for universities to rely on emerging corporate models of organization and to raise substantial amounts of income from private sources highlights a number of concerns relating to the missions and social responsibilities of these institutions (Bok, 2003; Ehrenberg, 2000; Press & Washburn, 2000; Pusser, 2002, forthcoming). The retreat of collective support and state block funding for public higher education has been well documented (Breneman, 2003; Callan, 2001). As unrestricted monies for higher education constrict, institutions have altered their resource-seeking patterns to compete for new, more competitively allocated funds Pusser & Wolcott, in press. To respond to new opportunities, research universities in the United States have also shifted away from basic research toward more applied science and technology--efforts that are considerably more competitive and that can yield more immediate financial returns to the institution (Geiger, 2004; Kirp, 2003; Slaughter & Leslie, 1997). Combined with intense internal pressure to shift to new funding sources, universities in the United States--large and small-are increasingly being viewed--and promoted--as engines of state and regional economic development (Geiger, 2004; Kirp, 2003; Pusser & Doane, 2001). Eager to gain comparative advantage, college administrators and state political leaders increasingly tout linkages between private sector entities and postsecondary institutions within their regions. Such alliances more often than not involve varying degrees of corporate access to faculties, students, laboratories, and the intellectual capital of the university-resources substantially underwritten by the public at-large (Bok, 2003). While the political-economic contexts shaping universities' revenue-seeking behaviors are well known, the process by which environmental demands are translated into institutional policies is much less well understood. The role of university trustees--the stewards of these institutions-in the negotiation of these new demands and opportunities has been little examined (Nicholson-Crotty & Meier, 2003; Ordorika, 2003; Pusser, 2003, 2006). As a key site for deliberation and the enactment of a wide range of institutional policies, governing boards provide a key source of data on the ways in which broader market forces may influence institutional behavior (Pusser & Turner, 2004). This study focuses on trustee interlocks, the pattern of multiple board memberships held by individual trustees at the nation's top public and private research universities. We argue that in keeping with a number of contemporary theories of organization, the trustees of university governing boards are significant sources of information and legitimacy for institutional policymaking. Consequently, the number and types of boards with which university trustees are affiliated provides a key window into sources of information, networks of legitimacy and authority, and normative understandings of effective institutional organization and behavior. The data collected here represent the linkages between trustees of 20 of the United States's most productive research universities and the broader corporate universe. We detail these linkages by empirically examining the number and nature of simultaneous memberships on the boards of trustees of these institutions and the boards of directors of some of the nation's largest corporations as well as the nation's most powerful research corporations. Research on Corporate Boards There is not a great deal of theoretical literature on postsecondary boards of trustees. …