Edward T. Silva

Towards a Political Economy of Retrenchment: The American Public Research Universities

This article explores the dynamics of retrenchment at the state and federal levels using theories of fiscal crisis and state economic variation to interpret state and federal funding patterns for public research universities during the past decade. States with low levels of unionization attract business, gain new jobs, and have above average higher education spending, while highly unionized states are losing business and jobs, and are falling below average in educational spending. Federal R & D spending shows a tendency to follow state patterns. Business leaders’ profit maximizing strategies and capital investment patterns shape states’ abilities to finance higher education, while institutions’ capacity to attract R & D monies is influenced by states’ fiscal soundness. In this article, what these trends might mean for specific institutions in terms of state budget, R & D capacity, and prestige of graduate programs is explored in a case study. Finally, suggestions are given as to the strategies faculty and administrators can pursue to stabilize their economic environment.

The First Family: Presidential kinship and Its Theoretical Implications

We all know that several of the U. S. presidents had the same family. The Adams were father and son; the Harrisons were grandfather and son, and the Roosevelts were cousins. This everyday knowledge about kinship connections among the presidents provides a useful point of entre into the current debate about the nature of political leadership in the U. S. A. , and advanced capitalistic society. Our plan in this paper is to point out some of the importance that presidential kinship has for pluralist and elite theories of leadership, to present data on presidential kinship, and to evaluate the data on presidential kinship, and to evaluate