University Governance

Upcoming Events

March 26th, 12-1pm PST The Politics of Instituitonal Neutrality in Trump's America: ambiguity, fear, and the effort to silence American higher education

In their recent article, Curtis Brewer and Michelle D. Young use critical policy analysis to examine the strategy of institutional neutrality and its relationship to the longstanding agenda of US conservatives to limit the societal and political influence of higher education within society. Specifically, they posit that policy ambiguity creates fertile ground for fear-based narratives to shape institutional meaning making...

Arizona State's Success Story: Model or Mirage?

Steven Brint
2021

What’s New About Neo-Nationalism, Anyway?

John Aubrey Douglass
2021

Universities in Russia face a dramatic turning point

John Aubrey Douglass
Igor Chirikov
2022

US universities face a precipice under a Trump presidency

John Aubrey Douglass
2023

Universities can expect a frontal attack if Trump returns

John Aubrey Douglass
2024

Earning My Degree: Memoirs of an American University President

David P. Gardner
2005

University in Transition: Research Mission, Interdisciplinarity and Governance by Anne MacLachlan, Detlef Müller-Böling, Evelies Mayer, and Jutta Fedrowitz (1998)

Anne MacLachlan
Detlef Müller-Böling
Evelies Mayer
Jutta Fedrowitz
1998

The major theme of this book is how the many kinds of changes and reforms which the research university needs to make to respond to conditions today could be made. While overall government support is a major concern in both Germany and the United States, the issues go beyond money to the basic organization of research universities: maintaining the integrity of basic university research while collaborating more with industry, recovering and sustaining the curriculum when research predominates, addressing the unruly development of instructional technology, coping institutionally with...

Clark Kerr and the Californian Model of Higher Education

Simon Marginson
2014

Fifty years on, Clark Kerr’s multiversity and the Californian Master Plan for Higher Education stand as signal high points in the building of not just great public institutions but high participation modern human society. Key features of the Californian Model have become a universal template for research universities and system design. Seminal ideas and practices of higher education developed by Clark Kerr, Martin Trow, Burton Clark and others continue to colonize the thinking of policy makers, scientists, scholars, students and citizens, with profound effects not just in the United States...

Dynamics of the Contemporary University

Neil Smelser
2013

This book is an expanded version of the Clark Kerr Lectures of 2012, delivered by Neil Smelser at the University of California at Berkeley in January and February of that year. The initial exposition is of a theory of change—labeled structural accretion—that has characterized the history of American higher education, mainly (but not exclusively) of universities. The essence of the theory is that institutions of higher education progressively add functions, structures, and constituencies as they grow, but seldom shed them, yielding increasingly complex structures. The...