Research Universities

Student Experience in the Research University (SERU)

Anne MacLachlan

Senior Researcher and Visiting Scholars Coordinator

Anne J. MacLachlan is a retired senior researcher at CSHE who continues to be devoted to increasing access, persistence, and success in postsecondary education for underrepresented groups (URM) including domestic minorities, women, and those from uneducated/poor families with an emphasis on those in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). Her research areas cover the spectrum of postsecondary populations including community college and transfer students, undergraduates in general, graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and faculty. Among these, doctoral...

Press Release--SERU Multi-Engagement Report

March 18, 2025

SERU report cover

Student Success at Risk: New Study Finds Lasting Post-Pandemic Declines in Student Engagement in American Public Universities —Proposed Federal Funding Cuts Could Slow Recovery

March 18, 2025 – A new study from the University of California, Berkeley, finds that student engagement across key areas of research university experience – academics, research, extracurriculars, civic engagement, and career...

Actually, university students are not ‘academically adrift’

Igor Chirikov
John Aubrey Douglass
Gregg Thomson
2025

How to enhance the credibility of academia in public life

John Aubrey Douglass
2022

University Research and the COVID Vaccine Race – Who Owns What IP?

John Aubrey Douglass
2021

New ideas in the face of rankings and ‘world class’ fatigue

John Aubrey Douglass
2023

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...

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...