University mission creep? Comparing EU and US faculty views of university involvement in regional economic development and commercialization

Abstract

The attitudes of university faculty towards the expansion of universities’ missions to include assisting regional economic development and technology development by knowledge commercialization are analysed. Based upon surveys of faculty in the EU and in the United States, as well as secondary data on the institutional characteristics of universities and their regional economic conditions, we find that faculty are significantly more supportive of their universities assisting regional economic development compared to knowledge commercialization that attitudes between the US and EU faculty are remarkably similar, and that individual factors, including academic discipline, are more powerful explanators of the variation in attitudes compared to institutional characteristics or regional economic conditions.