Brian Pusser

University Rankings in Critical Perspective

This article addresses global postsecondary ranking systems by using critical-theoretical perspectives on power. This research suggests rankings are at once a useful lens for studying power in higher education and an important instrument for the exercise of power in service of dominant norms in global higher education. This article addresses global postsecondary ranking systems by using critical-theoretical perspectives on power. This research suggests rankings are at once a useful lens for studying power in higher education and an important instrument for the exercise of power in service of dominant norms in global higher education.

A Case of Bureaucratic Accretion: Context and Consequences.

It is not the business of the botanist to eradicate the weeds. Enough for him if he can tell us just how fast they grow. C. Northcote Parkinson The dramatic expansion of the higher education enterprise in the United States over the past half-century is a well-documented phenomenon [7, 17]. It has also been observed that administrative structures have grown with this expansion [25, 27]. However, whether the administration of higher education organizations has grown in proportion with the increased demands on the enterprise is unclear. Although popular perceptions of administrative growth in public research universities have reflected widespread concern over the nature of that growth [20, 26, 34], there has been little empirical research that directly documents administrative growth, its context, and its consequences [25]. To shed light on this issue, we examine a twenty-five-year period of sustained financial and systemic growth in the University of California through an analysis of budget data and relevant archival documents.(1) Using classical Weberian concepts of bureaucratization as well as more recent literature on adaptation and economies of scale, we analyze the data from a number of perspectives. Primary among them is the proposition that adaptation to environmental complexity has demanded an increase and differentiation of university functions and hence the need for a more complex administrative component. We also consider some unexplored functions of complexity, primarily that under a broad university mission the process of adaptation to complexity may have served as de facto university policy-making. In addition to applying these concepts to the case of the University of California, we examine challenges that have emerged in the transition from an era of rising resources to a subsequent period of retrenchment. The Case, the Concepts, and the Methods The University of California The University of California provides an ideal case study opportunity for examination of administrative growth. Founded in 1868, the University of California was created as a public land-grant university and is administered under the authority of an independent board of regents. At present, the university consists of nine campuses: Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, Riverside, San Diego, San Francisco, Santa Barbara, and Santa Cruz. Eight campuses provide undergraduate, graduate, and professional education; a ninth, San Francisco, focuses on the health sciences. Throughout the state the university has established teaching hospitals and clinics, as well as over one hundred fifty university institutes, centers, and research laboratories, including contract laboratories for the Department of Energy.(2) National Science Foundation data reflect that five University of California campuses (Berkeley, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, and Davis) ranked in the top twenty-two universities nationally in 1992 for R&D expenditures.(3) Annually, the university awards over twenty-seven thousand bachelors degrees, and over eleven thousand advanced degrees. Since its founding the university has awarded over a million degrees. Current enrollment is over one hundred fifty thousand students. In the twenty-five-year period under examination for this study, a defining characteristic of the University of California (hereafter also referred to as UC) has been growth. The nine campuses, systemwide administration, and auxiliary enterprises taken together had total fund expenditures just over

The State, the Market and the Institutional Estate: Revisiting Contemporary Authority Relations in Higher Education

3,700,000,000 (1993 HEPI) in 1966-67.(4) For 1991-92 these UC entities accounted for expenditures of just over

Place Matters: the distribution of access to a state flagship university

9,800,000,000.(5) This is an increase of 164 percent in constant dollars(6) [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED]. Student FTEs rose from 79,293 for 1966-67 to 156,371 for 1991-92, an increase of just over 97 percent.(7) The number of employees also shows marked growth. The permanently budgeted system staff in 1966-67 of 33,305 can be compared to the permanently budgeted system staff in 1991-92 of 68,024. …

Forces in Tension: The State, Civil Society and Market in the Future of the University

Over the past two decades, in nearly every arena of postsecondary education, traditional lines of authority, historical understandings of appropriate oversight and norms of political accountability have been rapidly changing (Burke, 2005; Hines, 2000). Essential understandings of such key elements in the postsecondary context as institutional autonomy, shared governance and organizational control are rapidly being transformed by challenges from a variety of stakeholders (Wellman, 2006; Marginson, 2006). A considerable body of emerging scholarship suggests that the balance of authority relations in higher education has changed dramatically over the past three decades, in line with shifts taking place in the larger national and international political economy of higher education (Heller, 2004; Pusser, 2003). These changes are increasingly apparent in the contested relationship between public postsecondary institutions and such key sources of authority and legitimacy as legislatures, governing boards and state agencies (Dunn, 2003; Longanecker, 2006). Contemporary literature on postsecondary organization and governance is replete with references to the rapid pace of change, increasing stakeholder demands and the pressures brought to bear by shifting political, financial and institutional relationships (Engell & Dangerfield, 2005). What emerges is an essential research question: “How should we understand contemporary authority relations in higher education?” Over the past decade considerable research in higher education has been devoted to documenting the changes taking place in the political economy of postsecondary organizations (Breneman et al., 2006; Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004). However, to date, relatively little scholarship has been devoted to revisiting the prevalent models of postsecondary authority relations, or to revising our understandings of those relations in light of contemporary cases of contest over postsecondary governance. This research addresses that gap in the literature through an analysis of a case of protracted contest over postsecondary authority relations, the institutional and political negotiations over the restructuring of Virginia’s public postsecondary system over the period 1996–2006. The case of Virginia’s restructuring is considered through the lens of one of the most influential models of authority relations in

The Political Uses of the University

This article examines the degree to which admission cohorts at a selective public flagship university in the United States reflect the states broader social and economic diversity. US Census data and University admission data on socio-demographic characteristics, including race, gender, place of residence, family income and education levels, are used in conjunction with geo-spatial mapping to portray the distribution of access to the University for a variety of sub-populations over time. The data reveal persistent patterns of disproportionate representation, with the highest degree of access to the University concentrated predominately among Caucasian students in suburban areas of the state. The authors argue that such disproportionate access to the University has implications for the distribution of the public goods produced by elite public universities.

A State Theoretical Approach to Understanding Contest in Higher Education

The year 2013 marks the fiftieth anniversary of Clark Kerr’s Godkin Lectures at Harvard University, published in the first edition of his influential work, The Uses of the University (Kerr 1963).

What Wouldn't We Do Revenue?

The fifth edition of Clark Kerrs The Uses of the University reflects on an original theme visited over four decades. Over time his views of American higher education became more somber. Although Kerr does not deal with the politics of university policy and governance, this book is useful as both record and forecast.

Moving From Theory to Action: Building a Model of Institutional Action for Student Success

This chapter assesses the contemporary role of the state and the civil society in the continuing contest over academic capitalism in higher education in the United States and globally. Particular attention is turned to instances of resistance to neoliberal policies shaping postsecondary education and training, challenges to increasing levels of tuition and student loan debt, and continuing efforts to address the growing stratification of postsecondary institutions in the United States and other national contexts. A renewed commitment in the United States to realizing the public interest through higher education is evidenced by state efforts to reconsider policies financing the expansion of the for-profit postsecondary sector, the emergence of coalitions in the civil society in support of the DREAM act, and in the efforts of students seeking to shape institutional policies and practices through collective bargaining. The author suggests that, taken together, these nascent shifts in the political economy of higher education point to a variety of emerging transformations, and to the continued significance of the university in the public sphere.

Returning to Learning: Adults' Success in College Is Key to America's Future

This thoroughly researched and highly engaging book adds to a growing body of scholarly works on higher education that address the impact of changing sources of revenue on university mission and practice. Slaughter and Leslie’s Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies and the Entrepreneurial University (1997), Simon Marginson’s Markets in Education (1997), Ron Ehrenberg’s Tuition Rising: Why College Costs so Much (2000), David Kirp’s Shakespeare, Einstein and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education (2003), Derek Bok’s Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education (2003), Roger Geiger’s Knowledge and Money: Research Universities and the Paradox of the Marketplace (2004), and Engell and Dangerfield’s Saving Higher Education in the Age of Money (2005), have all been published in just over a decade. These, of course, follow in a historical tradition of works that have wrestled with higher education and commerce, such as Veblen’s The Higher Learning: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men (1918) and Robert Maynard Hutchins’s The Higher Learning in America (1936). Thus, on the one hand, it is high praise to say that this book stands out from the crowd in its detailed and well-documented coverage of the challenges contemporary universities face in financing mission-related activities. On the other hand, we should probably begin to move our research and scholarship beyond money, which has served as an un-deconstructed proxy for a very long time, and begin, as the authors of this volume advise near its conclusion, “confronting the fundamental tension in higher education.” They suggest, as their title would have it, that the tension is between mission and money, much the same challenge that Veblen and Hutchins addressed decades ago. This may mean that over the past seventy years mission versus money has proven itself an exceptionally intractable intellectual dilemma in higher education, one that has become particularly problematic (and book worthy) of late. It may also be that we aren’t asking the right questions. This book is at its best when it marshals a wide array of data to document changes in the degree and kinds of revenue flowing into colleges and universities of various types. It offers useful insight into the ways in which revenue demands shape such complex arenas as tuition setting, endowments, development, patent licensing, the distinctions between public, nonprofit and for-profit institutions, and intercollegiate athletics. While much of this ground has been traversed before, the quality of the work here is such that readers will find some new revelation in every one of these areas. The essential conceptual lens used throughout the work is what the authors call the “two-good framework,” an approach that reduces university activity to two forms of behavior, “mission goods” and “revenue goods.” That is, efforts to meet university goals, and those endeavors in which universities engage to pay Book Review 1