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The boundaries of higher education organizations (HEOs) are becoming increasingly porous both in the USA and globally. Research has shown that individuals within universities (e.g., trustees and faculty) can serve as boundary spanners who connect universities to their external environments. However, our knowledge of how individuals span HEO boundaries is limited, especially for university leaders. University presidents are leaders that bridge the boundaries of universities via the internal and external aspects of their role. We evaluate the connections presidents establish between universities and external organizations and how they change over time to expand our knowledge of boundary spanners. Drawing on literature on academic capitalism and the interdependencies between organizations, individuals, and environments, we conceptualize how presidents connect their institutions to external organizations and how these connections may differ across institutions over time. Using social networks and latent profile analyses, we examine the connections between elite US universities and external organizations via presidents between 2005 and 2020. Results show growth in connections over time as well as three distinct patterns of connections across institutions. This suggests that presidential connectivity differs across institutions and has changed over time in ways that have implications for university governance, decision making, policies (e.g., conflict of interest), and organizational inequality., Author(s): Sondra N. Barringer [sup.1] , Karley A. Riffe [sup.2] , Kate Collier [sup.3] Author Affiliations: (1) grid.263864.d, 0000 0004 1936 7929, Southern Methodist University, , Dallas, TX, USA (2) [...]

Background/context: A growing body of evidence indicates that trustees link the boards of research universities to organizations in other fields. It is less clear whether these board characteristics indicate distinct university contexts with which particular activities would be associated. Research questions: We ask three questions. The first two are descriptive and focus attention on the changing characteristics of university boards: How do boards tie universities to other sectors of society? How has the composition of these ties changed over time? The third is inferential and attends to possible relationships between board characteristics and university activities over time: Are there relationships between board ties to external organizations and university activities? Research design: We answered our first two questions using descriptive analyses. We answered the third question using regression analyses, inclusive of fixed board-level effects, which estimated the within-unit association among board characteristics, control characteristics, and the dependent variables associated with activities of interest. Data collection and analysis: Our sample consisted of the 54 boards that oversaw members of the Association of American Universities. Data were compiled in 10-year increments between 1985 and 2015. Historical data on university boards were created using Standard and Poor's Register of Corporations, Directors, and Executives and the Capital IQ Personal Intelligence database, both of which provided time-verified data about the affiliations of individual trustees at a given moment in time (e.g., 1985, 1995). We merged these data with information on university characteristics drawn from existing secondary data sources. Findings: Consistent with other analyses, sampled boards were increasingly connected to organizations in other fields over time. Connections grew especially rapidly between 1995 and 2015, with particularly notable growth in ties to the finance industry. In inferential analyses, the total number of ties to external organizations was associated with increases in total publications and with the share of publications in the biological sciences. Board characteristics were not associated with variation in other variables (e.g., endowment growth). Conclusions/recommendations: Our findings suggest that board characteristics are more likely to be associated with some university activities than others. It is less clear why this is the case. Our paper therefore lays important groundwork for future research on the ways in which individual trustees may directly coordinate, indirectly facilitate, or be selected because of their ties to particular external organizations.

Despite the importance of trustees as leaders in US higher education institutions, our knowledge and understanding of their behavior is limited. This is increasingly problematic as trustees engage more directly with institutions as institutional boundaries have become more porous. We utilize social network analysis and document analysis of exchanges to explore trustees' involvement in a qualitative comparative case study of four elite US research universities. We draw on the microfoundations tradition of neo-institutional theory to frame and evaluate how the actions of these individuals reproduce, expand and reorganize these institutions and their boundaries. Results show that these leaders are heavily involved with the universities they govern, but in widely varied ways and to different degrees. We inductively derive two forms of trusteeship -- traditional trusteeship (e.g., governance) and expanded trusteeship (e.g., capacity building and collaborative partnerships) -- that occur unevenly across our four institutions. These findings demonstrate that the nature of trusteeship at US research universities varies across institutions in profound ways that have substantial consequences for their boundaries, behaviors, and governance as well as the organizational stratification in the field of US higher education.

Academic structure shapes and reflects institutional behaviors as well as the work done in, and outputs of, higher education organizations (HEOs). Despite this critical role, research on boundaries within academic structure is limited, even in work focusing on the relative presence of core and peripheral disciplines. We thus lack an understanding of the boundaries within academic structures and their implications for the work and outputs of higher education including knowledge creation and legitimation. To address this gap, we analyze a novel dataset on the formal academic structures--colleges, schools, divisions and departments--of 115 Very High Research universities in the U.S. Within these structures we focus on hybrid academic units, which span the core-periphery field boundary, to enhance our understanding of boundaries within academic structures and consider their role in transforming or maintaining the status quo in HEO work and in knowledge creation, legitimation and dissemination. To do so, we evaluate the presence and location of, as well as the fields and disciplines represented by, these boundary spanning units within and across HEOs. We also evaluate the extent to which hybrid academic units reaffirm or challenge the core-periphery boundary via a case study of the structural, programmatic, and leadership features of eight hybrid academic units. Findings reveal that hybrid academic units are present within roughly half of our institutional population and represent a variety of academic fields. Case study results show that hybrid academic units both challenge and reaffirm the core-periphery boundary within these institutions. Institutional and scholarly implications are discussed.

For decades, science policy has been promoting interdisciplinary research (IDR), but universities have not responded uniformly. To explain this variation, we integrate insights from the organizational literature, especially research on microfoundations, and highlight the role of both administrators and faculty. We collect and, with the help of machine learning, code vast amounts of textual data from 156 universities nationwide to measure universities' structural commitment to IDR as well as key explanatory variables, including top-down administrative support for, and bottom-up faculty engagement with, IDR. We integrate these measures with extant data from the Survey of Earned Doctorates, Higher Education R&D Expenditures Survey, NIH, NSF, and IPEDS to analyze how internal university dynamics influence the degree to which a university commits to IDR. Our results reveal that the level of structural commitment to IDR differs at universities with and without medical schools, as do the precursors to this commitment. At universities with medical schools, we find that bottom-up engagement is positively associated with structural commitment to IDR, and that status moderates the relationship between top-down administrative support and structural commitment to IDR. For universities with low levels of supportive administrative discourse status significantly impacted their structural commitment to IDR. At universities without medical schools, top-down support and bottom-up engagement are interrelated and mutually reinforcing such that universities with high levels of both administrative support and interdisciplinary research grants have higher levels of structural commitment to IDR. We discuss the implications of these findings for university administrators, policy makers, and researchers.

Trustees span the boundaries between universities and their environments, and therefore may connect universities to other organizations. We use social networks and latent profile analyses to chart changes in the affiliations that trustees of AAU member universities maintained with other organizations from 1975 through 2015. Results identify a well-established hierarchy of connectivity across elite universities. We also chart change in profile membership over time. We observe decline in connectivity from 1975 to 1995, followed by a period of resettlement characterized by a steepened hierarchy of affiliations and a growing number of very highly connected boards. Evidence suggests that boards at the top of the connectivity hierarchy differ systematically from those with fewer affiliations. By 2015, very highly connected boards generally oversaw well-resourced private universities. A few public boards were once very highly connected, but this became less common over time. These results suggest important implications for future research on the relationship between governance and institutions' financial positions.

Objective: Despite extensive debate about the curricular mission of community colleges, prior research has not sufficiently analyzed differences in the kinds of degrees (i.e., the field of study and award level) community colleges produce. Therefore, we explore both the fields of study and the levels at which public community colleges grant degrees and analyze how this has changed over time. Method: Multilevel latent class analysis is used here to estimate latent degree-granting profiles, and colleges are allocated into the profiles based on their observed degree-granting behaviors from 1987 to 2012. Results: The analysis shows that public community colleges can be allocated into five distinct degree-granting profiles over the period of study. A small minority of colleges have and continue to engage almost exclusively in a vocational mission. The two degree profiles that increased in prominence over time suggest an overall shift toward the simultaneous pursuit of transfer and vocational missions. However, a majority of colleges (68%) exhibited stable degree-granting behaviors between 1987 and 2012, indicating a relatively high level of stability in degree-granting patterns across community colleges during this period. Contribution: These patterns highlight variation across colleges and both stability and change within institutions over time. This suggests that public community colleges are simultaneously situated in strong institutional and technical environments and, thus, are subject to constraints and incentives that shape not only their stated policies but also their actual degree-granting behaviors.

Despite the importance of trustees for higher education institutions, few studies address how they influence the institutions they steward. To address this gap, we used a social network approach within a comparative case study design to evaluate how trustees interacted with two private, elite universities: Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While trustees interacted with these institutions in differing ways, results indicated that some of them significantly influenced institutional behaviors, structures, and policies. This suggests that the role of trustees should be re-conceptualized to reflect their ability to influence higher education institutions, making them a fundamental part of the microfoundations of these institutions.

This paper examines the growing number of affiliations between research universities and the "affiliated nonprofit organizations" (ANPOs) that exist to support them. We posit that universities' increasing ties to ANPOs represent strategic responses to unfavorable environmental conditions. In other words, it is likely that the practice of affiliating with many ANPOs reflects an institution's position within the field of research universities. Panel regression results indicate that the practice of affiliating with large numbers of ANPOs is associated with particular indicators of field position (e.g., tuition revenues for public universities and research spending for private universities). These results indicate that universities that were relative incumbents were more likely to affiliate with ANPOs than were either low-status or the highest-status institutions. The paper concludes with implications for research on institutional stratification, university management, and the nature and role of ANPOs in US universities.