Whither publicness?: the changing public identities of research universities
Date
2018
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
This dissertation examines changes to the publicness of American research universities from the mid-20th to the early 21st century. The changes are discerned by analyzing salient higher education public policies, contemporary pressures affecting research universities, and a Research University Publicness Dashboard, which contains publicness indicator data about 211 research universities between 1975 and 2015. A case study of the University of Delaware’s publicness adds to the aggregate analysis. It is argued that research university publicness is not unidimensional, as many university models contend, but is comprised of six dimensions, each of which reflects an important aspect of the universities’ public interactions. A new conceptualization of research university publicness is posited, which considers research university publicness as the result of the continuous interaction of the university’s relational and conditional publicness. Key findings include: 1) research university publicness experienced significant change after 2010, called the publicness inflection point; principally but not wholly caused by declining public research funding; 2) research universities are using their own funds to make up for declining public support, a finding contrary to the entrepreneurial university model’s expectations; and 3) three publicness clusters encompassed research universities over the 40 year study period. The dissertation closes by offering four emergent themes – sustainability, stratification, vulnerability and differentiation –that will impact research university publicness in the 21st century.
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Keywords
Social sciences, Education, Higher education history, Higher education public policy, Publicness concept, Publicness dashboard, US research universities