Realized Publicness at Public and Private Research Universities

Abstract

Although research extensive universities in the United States produce similar outcomes – research, teaching, and service – they vary substantially in terms of the publicness of their environments. In this paper, we adopt the public values framework (Moulton 2009) to examine how regulative, normative/associative, and cultural cognitive components affect realized public outcomes by faculty. Using survey data from a random sample of faculty scientists in six fields of science and engineering at Carnegie Research I universities, we find that organizational and individual public values components are predictably associated with different realized individual public outcomes. For example, individual support from federal resources and affiliation with a federal lab (associative) are related to increased research outcomes, while tuition and fee levels (regulative) explain teaching outcomes, and perceived level of influence in the workplace (cultural cognitive) explains teaching and service outcomes. Overall, university-level public values have a stronger influence on individual public outcomes than individual-level public values. We conclude with a discussion of the findings.