Private Research Universities Research Articles

Dedication to Community Engagement: A Higher Education Conundrum?

Universities and colleges are increasingly providing internal grants to encourage faculty and staff involvement in community-based research and service-learning projects; however, little attention has been given to the impact of institutional support of these efforts. This qualitative study employed focus group interviews with 17 faculty and staff at one mid-size private research university (high activity) to explore the impact of institutional funding on their professional roles and practice of community engaged work. Findings revealed that community-based projects energized the participants, helped them make their academic work relevant in communities, created formal and informal university-community partnerships, and elevated the University’s public image. However, a conundrum was evident in the tension between the University’s public expression of the importance of community engagement and participants’ concerns that the traditional academic reward structure could jeopardize their long-term commitment to community work. A framework is offered that may assist institutions that are pondering or have already committed to using institutional dollars to support engaged scholarship.

The Bioentrepreneurship MBA: Options for mid-tier business schools

Most successful Bioentrepreneurship MBA programmes are located in major metropolitan areas described as ‘biotechnology clusters’. The present study focuses on the demographics and characteristics of a private research university to determine the feasibility of offering such a programme and the appropriate format(s) for its delivery. Recommendations include that a school should not initiate a Bioentrepreneurship MBA until there is regional demand for graduates and sufficient university expertise in areas such as regulatory issues, technology transfer and bioenterprise ethics. A conservative approach would devote 1 year to curriculum and expertise development, during which the school could supplement its present MBA programme with elective courses aimed at current MBA students. A line extension of MBA with electives could also be offered to the emerging markets of (a) mid-level non-technology managers seeking biotechnology employment and (b) laboratory technicians wishing to develop business expertise. Thereafter, the school could launch an MBA programme aimed at its broader potential student market. Provision should be made for individuals not interested in obtaining an MBA to take selected courses and for those desiring a certificate. It is concluded that the issues unique to the subject area warrant its recognition as both a career and academic discipline.

Introduction: The Work of the People's University

The state comprehensive universities (SCUs) may represent the most neglected and least understood segment of American higher education. Despite enrolling a substantial portion of the students at four-year institutions of higher learning, the SCUs receive little attention in the popular higher education literature (e.g., the Chronicle of Higher Education), in the more formal academic journals of higher education (e.g., The Journal of Higher Education, Research in Higher Education) or in many of the book-length treatments of the history and issues surrounding higher education (e.g., Geiger, 2005; Levine, 1993; Thelin, 2004). The intent of Teacher-Scholar is to bring much needed attention to the SCUs. What is an SCU? How are SCUs alike and different from public and private research universities and liberal arts colleges? How is the work life for faculty and students different at SCUs? Why have SCUs struggled with their identities? What can SCUs do that can help them play a distinct role in American higher education? What is the distinctive mission of the SCU? These are some of the questions I want to address in this essay. I will provide some background on the SCUs, discuss a model for the mission of the SCUs, and suggest some areas for future research

The Liver and Intestinal Research Centre: Bridging Clinical Research and Community Practice

The Liver and Intestinal Research Centre: Bridging Clinical Research and Community Practice

Crow’s Feet and Crimson: Academic Dress at Harvard

The corded crow’s-feet, and the collar square, The change and chance of earthly lot must share. — Class Poem at Harvard College, 1835 1 Harvard University, the oldest and perhaps most celebrated and prestigious university in the United States, has been a fixture of the Boston area for almost four hun dred years. Founded a scant fourteen years after the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, Harvard has grown from a small colonial school to one of the world’s foremost private research universities. 2 Much has been written about Harvard’s history, but this article explores one small aspect of this vast subject: the history and practice of academic dress at this (by New World standards) ancient institution. Harvard dress as it now stands owes a good deal to academic dress in English universities and therefore to the academic dress of medieval Oxford and Cambridge.

Southern Coup: Recruiting African American Faculty Members at an Elite Private Southern Research University

Competition for highly qualified African American faculty members among elite universities in the United States remains keen. Two of the most successful research universities at recruiting African American faculty members are located in the Southeast. Employing a conceptual framework grounded in organizational culture and climate literature, in this qualitative study the authors identified sets of tangible, intangible, and non-work-related factors that influenced the decisions of 12 African American faculty members in several disciplines to accept positions at an elite private research university in the Southeast. Study participants identified other factors not included in the original conceptual framework that also played significant roles in their decisions to accept positions at this university. Understanding such factors may assist other elite research universities in developing recruiting strategies to compete more effectively for African American faculty members.

Class Participation in Accounting Courses: Relationship Among Preparation, Frequency, Comfort, and Learning

Class discussion, especially case discussion, is a frequently used active learning strategy in business and accounting education. Prior research suggests that students' self-reported comfort with class discussion is positively related to students' self-reported learning. Pre- and post-course surveys concerning student perceptions and behavior about class discussion in an introductory management accounting course were gathered from sophomore business students at a large, private research university, and objective grade data were gathered from instructors of the course. Data were gathered from fourteen sections of the course taught by six instructors in two consecutive fall semesters. The analysis revealed interesting relationships among participation frequency, preparation, comfort with class discussion and objective learning measures. Consistent with Dallimore, Hertenstein & Platt (2006) results for graduate students, this study found that undergraduate student comfort participating in class discussion was positively and significantly related to familiarity with, level of preparation for, and frequency of participation in, class discussion. Further, the analysis showed that student comfort with participating in class discussion was also significantly and positively related to the perceived value of other students' comments for a student's own learning and the extent to which the course affected a student's own oral communication skill development. In addition, overall student learning was positively and significantly related to comfort with one's own participation in class discussion and beginning GPA. This finding is an important extension of literature concerning learning, as objective measures of learning were used rather than student self-reported perceptions about learning which have typically been used in prior research. The finding on the relationship between learning and comfort participating in the discussion suggests that instructors' efforts to create classroom environments that foster student comfort with class discussion - especially those efforts directed at increasing students' level of preparation, and at increasing the number of students participating and the frequency of their participation - should lead to increased student mastery of the course content.

Introduction and Comments

This issue of Perspectives on Politics presents a disparate sampling of research from across the discipline. The papers are diverse in terms of substantive focus, methodological approach, and disciplinary subfield. They offer, in various creative combinations, historical analysis, theoretical exploration, policy advice, and informed prognostication. More importantly perhaps, the authors whose work you find here range across ranks from the very junior to full professors and across institutional affiliations from small liberal arts colleges to some of our most prominent public and private research universities, all with several stops in between. In these ways I hope the work we are publishing does not simply reflect or even celebrate the diversity of our discipline. I hope instead that our continuing to publish work of this quality and provenance goes some distance toward insuring that rich diversity will remain a central feature of our future.

Internationalization as a response to globalization: Radical shifts in university environments

This case study probes recent developments in a number of academic and non-academic aspects of a private research university in response to current globalization trends. Under the name of internationalization, university administrators and external firms are emerging as powerful decision-makers shaping academic content and even academic governance. This is manifested in student recruitment and in the hiring of prestigious professors and researchers to increase university reputation and thus to appeal to more students and secure more research funds. Among disciplines central to economic and technological globalization, such as communication, business, and engineering, patterns of convergence are emerging. Rather than internationalism, internationalization is found to prevail, and internationalization is found to signify predominantly a search for student markets domestically and abroad rather than positioning the university’s knowledge at the service of others in less advantaged parts of the world.

How Do Female and Male Faculty Members Construct Job Satisfaction? The Roles of Perceived Institutional Leadership and Mentoring and their Mediating Processes

In this study we examine how a sample of 248 male and female professors at a Midwestern private research university construct their academic job satisfaction. Our findings indicate that both women and men perceive that their job satisfaction is influenced by the institutional leadership and mentoring they receive, but only as mediated by the two key academic processes of access to internal academic resources (including research-supportive workloads) and internal relational supports from a collegial and inclusive immediate work environment. Gender differences emerged in the strengths of the perceived paths leading to satisfaction: women’s job satisfaction derived more from their perceptions of the internal relational supports than the academic resources they received, whereas men’s job satisfaction resulted equally from their perceptions of internal academic resources and internal relational supports received. Implications for leadership and institutional practices are drawn from the findings.

Saving higher education in the age of money

Since 1965 an increasing preoccupation with has resulted in the inversion of its role in higher education, from a practical means to an end that crowds out all others. No longer do students and parents choose the best education that money can buy. Instead, they are faced with choosing which college or university will buy them more money. This comes as no real surprise, as the cost of attending a four-year college has doubled since 1985. Yet the question persists: at what real cost are we sending our students to college? Renowned educator James Engell and coauthor Anthony Dangerfield explore the answer to this question in Saving Higher Education in the Age of Money. They argue that the counterbalancing attitudes that used to temper a focus on with other equally legitimate and more fundamental goals have steadily weakened, resulting in a new consensus that elevates and the marketing of oneself and one's institution to the foremost ambitions of the intellectual world. This new minimization of higher education to the category of an investment to be repaid has damaged all disciplines not directly associated with money, particularly the humanities. Students often now are told they face a choice: between the practical sciences, business, and economic success, or the traditional liberal arts and sciences and expected poverty. In their comprehensive analysis of admission practices, institutional rankings, salaries, hiring practices, scholarships, student attitudes, tuition costs, research programs, library budgets, and class barriers, Engell and Dangerfield expose the major changes that the Age of Money has wrought in higher education while also offering a practical method of understanding and prioritizing the various elements involved in choosing the right school. Focusing on liberal arts and sciences colleges, private research universities, and flagship public institutions, the authors provide an explicit and coherent model of what an academic institution should offer, while encouraging individual institutions to retain their unique identities. Written for a general audience as well as for professionals, Saving Higher Education in the Age of Money will appeal to teachers and administrators, parents of students and prospective students, students and faculty in schools of higher education, and anyone interested in intellectual life.

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

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. …

Examining Differences in State Support for Higher Education: A Comparative Study of State Appropriations for Research I Universities

State governments and public colleges and universities have a symbiotic relationship. Public higher education institutions play an important role in creating an educated citizenry and improving state and local economies, while states bear the primary responsibility of funding postsecondary education. Still, there is widespread evidence that the state-university relationship is eroding, as seen by the drastic cuts in appropriations for higher education during the past two and a half decades. Adjusted to account for inflation, state appropriations for higher education have declined 40% since 1978, and current state investment effort per personal income dropped $32.1 billion below that of 1980 (Mortenson, 2004). There are many factors that explain the nationwide decline in state support for public colleges and universities, but the majority of the blame rests on painful economic recessions that have occurred in the last 25 years. Recessions in FY1980-83 and FY1990-94 contributed heavily to the slide in support for higher education. The cuts during FY1990-91 were especially formidable, marking the first time in 33 years that state budgets allotted less money to higher education than the previous year (Schuh, 1993). The freefall in support for higher education only intensified as state appropriations were slashed $650 per student between FY2001 and FY2004, a period marked by widespread fiscal crisis among states (Jenny & Arbak, 2004). In addition to these economic hardships, drops in state support for discretionary programs such as higher education have also been attributed to a conservative shift in the federal government's role. During the last 25 years, the federal government transferred partial or full responsibility for many programs to the state and local level. This shift in philosophy, known as new federalism, resulted in steep cuts in federal and state aid for municipal and county governments (Peterson, 1995). Not surprisingly, this shift resulted in a significant squeeze in higher education appropriations for most states. The funding pinch occurred because public universities are forced to compete more intensely for dollars with other state programs such as Medicaid, K-12 schools, social services, and corrections (Schuh, 1993). Medicaid is forecasted to put an especially intense squeeze on higher education funding in the next decade as a larger share of public funds will be required to support the aging population of Baby Boomers (Kane, Orszag, & Gunter, 2003). Due to these economic and political factors, the relationship between states and public higher education is fundamentally changing across the country. This change is especially noticeable at major public research universities that are increasingly becoming quasi-private institutions. For example, state support accounted for approximately 35% of the budget at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1988, as opposed to 21% of its budget in 2004 (University of Wisconsin-Madison Office of Budget, Planning, and Analysis, 2004). As at many other research universities, rising tuition and support have picked up the budget shortfall at the Madison campus. Fundraising especially is emerging as a high priority for colleges and universities, including UW-Madison, which is en route to completing a $1.5 billion campaign (University of Wisconsin Foundation, 2003). This shift toward an increasingly private public research university been accompanied by an increasing tension between higher education administrators and state legislators. Mark Yudof, President of the University of Texas System, bemoaned the fact that the compact that once governed states and public research universities has withered, leaving public research universities in a purgatory of insufficient resources and declining competitiveness (Yudof, 2002, p. B24). Other public research university presidents have echoed Yudof's concerns, saying that further state cuts will radically change the character of their institutions (Gose, 2002). …

Does a Dual Degree Make a Difference in Social Work

The purpose of this mixed method study was to examine the professional integration of religion and spirituality by two groups of MSW level graduates from a large midwestern private research university with a joint degree program. The Dual Degree group consisted of all graduates with a second master's degree in religion/divinity. The second MSW-only group was a random sample matched by gender and year of graduation with the Dual Degree group. Survey questionnaires were mailed to 124 graduates with a response rate of 65%, or 81 graduates. Forty-five respondents were Dual Degree graduates while 36 had only the MSW. Obtaining advanced university or seminary education in religion is correlated with different perspectives on social work practice. Dual Degree graduates are more likely to ask about client religious views and to have a richer context for practice in this domain.

Literature Review

Fabio Sala (2003), “Leadership in education: effective UK college principals,” Nonprofit Management and Leadership, 14, 2, pp. 171–89. D. J. Rowley and H. Sherman (2003), “The special challenges of academic leadership, ”Management Decision, 41, 10, pp. 1058–63. A. Binsardi and F. Ekwulugo (2003), “International marketing of British education: research on the students' perception and the UK market penetration,” Marketing Intelligence & Planning, 21, 5, pp. 318–27. Mario Martinez and Richard C. Richardson (2003), “A view of the market through studies of policy and governance,” American Behavioral Scientist, 46, 7, pp. 883–901. R. G. Ehrenberg and C. L. Smith (2003), “The sources and uses of annual giving at selective private research universities and liberal arts colleges,”Economics of Education Review, 22, pp. 223–35

The Relationship of Self-Efficacy, Identity Style, and Stage of Change with Academic Self-Regulation

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between academic self-regulation, self-efficacy, and two student self-belief systems, identity style and stage of change, for 210 college students enrolled at a private research university. High scores on the informational identity, contemplation stage, and action stage subscales and low scores on the diffuse/avoidant identity subscale were correlated with high self-regulation scores. The degree that the students have invested effort in establishing their identity as students (informational identity style) and their willingness to improve their study skills (action stage of change) significantly increased the proportion of variance explained in students' self-regulation scores. Implications for learning strategies instruction are discussed.

America and the World: Issues in the Teaching of U.S. Foreign Policy

in world affairs and the axis around which so much of global politics revolves, there can be few subjects as politically central or intellectually challenging as U.S. foreign policy. In this review essay, I examine some of the ways that U. S. foreign policy is (and might be) conceptualized in political science courses both in the United States and elsewhere; I consider several approaches to teaching-mostly at the undergraduate level-and explore the theoretical, historical, and normative assumptions that structure courses. My observations are based on an analysis of 29 syllabi in the subfieldmost of them supplied by the staff of Perspectives on Politicsthat come from private and public research universities as well as liberal arts colleges. Most of the syllabi are recent, but some

Sources and Uses of Annual Giving at Private Research Universities

AbstractThis chapter discusses why private research universities differ in the sources and uses of their annual giving.

Resource Allocation in Private Research Universities (review)

Resource Allocation in Private Research Universities (review)

Studying Ourselves: The Academic Labor Market

This paper addresses three academic labor market issues; the declining salaries of faculty employed at public colleges and universities relative to their private institution counterparts, the growing dispersion of average faculty salaries across academic institutions within both the public and private sectors, and the impacts of the growing importance and costs of science on the academic labor market and universities. The decline in the salaries of faculty in public institutions relative to their private sector counterparts is attributed primarily to private institutions' tuition levels rising by more in real terms than public institutions' tuition levels. The growing dispersion in average faculty salaries across institutions within each sector is attributed primarily to the growing disperion of endowmentper student levels across private institutions and the growing dispersion of state appropriations per student across public institutions. Finally, controlling for other factors, those universities whose real research expenditures per faculty from institutional funds are growing the most experience the greatest increase in their student/faculty ratio, other variables held constant.