Research Universities

The COVID-19 pandemic is all-absorbing, requiring university leaders and academic staff to deal with major transitions in teaching to online formats, probable declines in revenue, hiring freezes and lay-offs and attempts to plan for what lies ahead.

To navigate this difficult path, universities need to intensify their institutional data collection and analysis. Yet most universities, especially outside of the United States and a few other countries, have limited formal policies and strategies for gathering institutional data and for employing trained staff to generate the...

Global university rankings influence students’ choices and higher education policies throughout the world.When rankers not only evaluate universities but also provide them with consulting, analytics, or advertising servicesrankers are vulnerable to conflicts of interestthat may potentiallydistort theirrankingsThepaperassessesthe impact of contracting with rankers on...

In the discourse that swirled in the mid-1800s around the creation of new American public universities, three major and interrelated tensions became evident: the first related to the continued debate regarding the proper curricular balance between practical education and classical studies; the second focused on the appropriate autonomy of institutions intended to serve the public interest in a society often racked by sectarian and class conflict; and the third centered on the degree to which these public institutions should be selective in their admissions and representative of the state’s...

International partnerships have become increasingly important for the mission and goals of universities and colleges globally. Understanding the nature of these partnerships and the perspectives of their senior leaders is critical. Senior international officers (SIOs) at 59 US public and private universities and colleges and 4 non-US universities completed surveys regarding: goals and criteria for developing the partnerships; number and country of their partners; types of existing partnerships; ways the university/college promotes/rewards international partnerships; challenges faced and...