IHE RESEARCH FORUM SCHEDULE

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Over the past several decades, two major transforming trends in higher education are unfolding that are widely discussed, yet only rarely in relationship to one another. In fact, for many, these two trends represent polar opposites within formal education, that on the surface seem to create more conflict than harmony within the university. One trend, often considered pedestrian, is the unprecedented expansion and massification of higher education in not only wealthy nations such as the United States, but in most other nations as well. The other trend, often celebrated, is the rise and flourishing of what can be called the "super research university," mostly in the U.S., but increasingly now as a model aspired to by many research universities throughout the world. What is not often appreciated about these two trends is that at their root they are related, even symbiotic, to the point that each likely would not be happening if not for the other. Together these two trends act to intensify bedrock institutional values behind the university in modern society, and as such are shaping organizational responses in higher education worldwide.

Developed here is a conceptual model of the university's lead role in the construction of the schooled society through the education revolution of the past 150 years. The university is the cornerstone of a society based increasingly on the education model of knowledge and expert training that are now widely part of the culture of the schooled society. Through a unique epistemological charter won over a millennium of institutional development, the university is the origin of authoritative knowledge, univerisalistic inquiry of everything, and the construction (and production) of mass cohorts of experts. Based on neo-institutional theory and recent research on the origin and expansion of higher education, the model advanced here of the university as a robust institution is a radical break with common views of the university as a relatively weak institution under constant threats from outside, such as from forms of impinging capitalist interests or charges of decline of academic rigor and relevance.

The strong institution model of the university is used to interpret the dynamic relationship between the empirical trends of mass higher education and the rise of the super research university. This interpretation is used to develop a set of hypotheses about organizational responses in higher education institution into the future.

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David P. Baker is Professor of Comparative Education and Sociology, and Research Scientist at The Center for the Study of Higher Education and the Population Research Institute at Pennsylvania State University. His research focuses on sociology of education, cross-national analyses of mathematics and science achievement, and comparative study of institutional change in education. He earned a Ph.D. in sociology from Johns Hopkins University 1982.

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Both scholars and practitioners have begun to develop various metrics of university entrepreneurship. These benchmarks are important because what organizations measure serves to focus their attention. But the spread of entrepreneurial practices in U.S. universities has been met with mixed success, sometimes stagnant in academic settings rich with scientific potential, while provoking novel activities in somewhat unexpected places. We argue that these uneven outcomes are in part the result of using metrics that fail to capture the underlying structure of contemporary scientific work. We enter this discussion by suggesting different and more appropriate organizational and institutional measures that indicate the extent to which academic entrepreneurship has taken hold and become self-reinforcing. This paper extends our previous work on the life sciences at Stanford University, which delineated how commercialization practices became embedded in the rules, routines, and conventions of academic science. We examine the spread of entrepreneurial activity across laboratories, in particular attending to the degree to which graduate students and postdoctoral fellows become involved. We argue that current measures of inventive output and scientists' engagement overlook the extent to which entrepreneurial practices have become sustainable in an academic setting. Our analysis also addresses the ramifications for students and post-docs of early involvement in commercial science on their subsequent academic careers.

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Jeannette A. Colyvas is an assistant professor in learning and organizational change at Northwestern University's School of Education and Social Policy. She holds a Ph.D from Stanford University, and her research interests include organizations and entrepreneurship, comparing public, private, and nonprofit forms of organizing, and institutional change. Colyvas' work examines the relationship between institutions and resources, practices and their meanings, and how social and technical categories develop and become institutionalized. Her current research examines university-industry interfaces, focusing on the translation of basic science into commercial application and its ramifications for careers, identities, and public science.

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The paper provides an analysis of the mission statements of 100 baccalaureate colleges, including liberal arts colleges as well as colleges that provide primarily professional education. The authors use traditional elements of the liberal arts college and applied theories from linguistics to make sense of the ways these disparate institutions communicate their intentions, emphases, and unique qualities to prospective students within the confines of the highly institutionalized higher education environment.

Building upon earlier work by Morphew and Hartley (2006; forthcoming) that examined college viewbooks and the mission statements of a smaller number of more diverse postsecondary institutions, the authors argue that the colleges in their sample are careful in their signaling. These institutions alternately use nuanced versions of traditional liberal arts elements as well as vague descriptions of normative concepts to convey their legitimate affiliations. Simultaneously, colleges employ key words or phrases that identify their membership in one of the sub-sample groups that caters to either those seeking a liberal arts education or professional preparation.

The study's findings suggest that the communication patterns of baccalaureate colleges are at once both vague and idiosyncratic. The colleges describe their missions in terms that both communicate the institution's legitimacy and remain open to interpretation by savvy consumers.

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Christopher Morphew is Associate Professor of Higher Education at Institute of Higher Education at the University of Georgia. His research focuses on issues of mission differentiation, including those related to state higher education policy and the means by which distinctive institutions identify, characterize, and communicate their unique attributes and goals. His most recent scholarly articles focus on analyses of college viewbooks and mission statements. His edited book (with Peter Eckel), The Privatization of the Public Research University, will be published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2008.

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Barrett Taylor is a doctoral student at the Institute of Higher Education at the University of Georgia. His research focuses on religious colleges and universities.

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Institutional theory — particularly the concept of isomorphism — has been welcomed by higher education researchers as a suitable "tool" to investigate organisational change in higher education. The concept seems particularly helpful in explaining patterns of organizational convergence in higher education systems. At the same time, higher education research has not yet profited fully from the further theoretical and conceptual developments that were published after DiMaggio and Powell's (1983) seminal article. A few research avenues are sketched which seem fruitful to better understand diversification and homogenisation processes in higher education. Empirical research is presented that seems to go against the isomorphism hypothesis. Content analysis of UK universities' welcome addresses reveals a myriad of ways of how universities construct their images. The research indicates that universities have considerable leeway to use their imagination, largely unconnected to their identities. The findings are difficult to reconcile with institutional theory arguments.

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Jeroen Huisman is Director of the International Centre for Higher Education Management (ICHEM). His current research interests are the (impacts of the) change from government to governance in higher education, the dynamics of organisational change, inertia and diversity in higher education, institutional management and governance, and internationalisation and Europeanisation. He has been involved in a number of national and international research projects, commissioned by national governments, the European Commission and the Organisation for Economic and Cultural Development. He is also involved in various consultancy projects across the world. His teaching portfolio (for the DBA in Higher Education Management) includes: governance, organisational change, diversity and Europeanisation. He is editor of two journals: Higher Education Policy and Tertiary Education and Management (TEAM).

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The Political, economic, and ideological conditions that facilitated the construction of mass higher education in the third quarter of the twentieth century no longer obtain, but sociologists' primary models of change in higher education have remained static since their development during that time period. This is a problem. Analytic techniques of historical sociology might usefully complicate our conceptions of change in U.S. higher education since World War II. In this paper I define historical sociology as a set of analytical premises emphasizing the convergence, temporality, and contingency of social phenomena. I then summarize the models of change already at work in the three major strands if inquiry pursued by sociologists of higher education; specify empirical questions about the postwar era that these models are inadequately suited to address; assemble canonical and contemporary scholarship which might serve as the building blocks for a more satisfactory sociology of U.S. higher education since World War II; and suggest five working premises for its pursuit.

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Mitchell Stevens is Associate Professor of Education and Sociology at New York University. He is the author of Creating a Class: College Admissions and the Education of Elites (Harvard, 2007), and Kingdom of Children: Culture and Controversy in the Homeschooling Movement (Princeton, 2001). With Elizabeth Armstrong and Richard Arum, he recently completed a critical synthesis of sociological approaches to higher education, forthcoming in Annual Review of Sociology.

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Higher education is most often studied as source of human capital and innovation linked to the economy and to the development prospects of nations. But, higher education expanded as a global institution, and is resolutely global in its organization and conception. The worldwide expansion of higher education has tremendous transformative potential, constructing individuals with common global identities and frames and linking them to each other. In other words, higher education can be seen as an important infrastructure for the construction of a cosmopolitan "world society." Consequently, it should have very broad consequences for nations, including serving as a major impetus for the formation of domestic association that mirrors global concerns and issues. Higher education systems play an important role in the reconstruction of modern individuals, firms, and states around models deriving from world society. Implications are explored via cross-national statistical analyses of a variety of outcomes, including the formation of civil society and the diffusion of state policy reforms. I find that higher education is linked to citizen participation in global and national civil society, as well as national policy reform. Results highlight the centrality of higher education in global diffusion processes and the (re)construction of modern societies and states.

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Evan Schofer is an associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine. His work traces the historical expansion of education and science, examining how these institutions serve to rationalize society and reshape political and economic activity. His cross-national research on science and educational systems has appeared in ASR, Social Forces, and in a co-authored book entitled Science in the Modern World Polity: Globalization and Institutionalization (Stanford 2003). He also conducts research in comparative political sociology and globalization, on topics ranging from political participation and civil society, to the origins and expansion of the global environmental movement. He is currently engaged in examining the long-term impact of educational expansion on the degree of economic inequality within societies. Professor Schofer received his PhD in sociology from Stanford University.