Research Universities

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...

The Dream is Over: The Crisis of Clark Kerr’s California Idea of Higher Education

Simon Marginson
2016

The Dream Is Over tells the extraordinary story of the 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education in California, created by visionary University of California President Clark Kerr and his contemporaries. The Master Plan’s equality of opportunity policy brought college within reach of millions of American families for the first time and fashioned the world’s leading system of public research universities. The California idea became the leading model for higher education across the world and has had great influence in the rapid growth of universities in China and East Asia. Yet, remarkably...

Searching for Utopia: Universities and Their Histories

Hanna Holborn Gray
2011

In Searching for Utopia, Hanna Holborn Gray reflects on the nature of the university from the perspective of today’s research institutions. In particular, she examines the ideas of former University of California president Clark Kerr as expressed in The Uses of the University, written during the tumultuous 1960s. She contrasts Kerr’s vision of the research-driven “multiveristy” with the traditional liberal educational philosophy espoused by Kerr’s contemporary, former University of Chicago president Robert Maynard Hutchins. Gray’s insightful analysis shows...

Dynamics of the Contemporary University: Growth, Accretion, and Conflict by Neil J. Smelser (2013)

Neil J. 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...