View in EDS HTML Full Text PDF Full Text

An Outline of the Postliberal University: Public, Private, and Partisan Goods

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Title: An Outline of the Postliberal University: Public, Private, and Partisan Goods
Language: English
Authors: Barrett J. Taylor, Brendan Cantwell (ORCID 0000-0003-3882-4200)
Source: Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning. 2024 56(6):5-11.
Availability: Routledge. Available from: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. 530 Walnut Street Suite 850, Philadelphia, PA 19106. Tel: 800-354-1420; Tel: 215-625-8900; Fax: 215-207-0050; Web site: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
Peer Reviewed: Y
Page Count: 7
Publication Date: 2024
Document Type: Journal Articles
Reports - Evaluative
Education Level: Higher Education
Postsecondary Education
Descriptors: Universities, Governance, Cultural Context, Administrative Organization, Barriers, Administrators, Higher Education, Administrator Role, Modern History, Political Attitudes, State Regulation, Social Change, Public Colleges, Private Colleges, Politics of Education
DOI: 10.1080/00091383.2024.2419341
ISSN: 0009-1383
1939-9146
Abstract: Existing scholarship tends to understand university governance structurally (emphasizing formal authority and resource environments), culturally (focusing on history, norms, and leadership), or by combining both approaches (Kezar & Eckel, 2004). These models understand governance in instrumental terms, as the means for steering the university. Governance as steering implies baseline consensus about goals and mission. Pursuing these agreed-on goals can be managed through reform and leadership. In this article, the authors argue that higher education leaders and scholars will be better prepared to grapple with contemporary challenges by thinking about governance as the way universities are incorporated into and contribute to the formation of the state and society (see Pusser, 2018). Understood in this way, the underlying goals and mission of higher education are not agreed on. Instead, they are hotly contested because they are linked to partisan political struggles over the kind of society people want to have. To help kick-start a process of retheorizing governance, the authors chronicle a shift in how public universities in the United States are situated vis-à-vis the state. They identify these shifting governance arrangements through the transformation of the liberal university to the neoliberal and, now, postliberal university.
Abstractor: ERIC
Entry Date: 2024
Accession Number: EJ1453177
Database: ERIC
Full text is not displayed to guests.
FullText Links:
  – Type: pdflink
    Url: https://content.ebscohost.com/cds/retrieve?content=AQICAHj0k_4E0hTGH8RJwT4gCJyBsGNe_WN95AvKlDbXJGqwxwH2xZglLOulpSHzlDOOYfNsAAAA4zCB4AYJKoZIhvcNAQcGoIHSMIHPAgEAMIHJBgkqhkiG9w0BBwEwHgYJYIZIAWUDBAEuMBEEDC5RDNyOLrod3Ir5mAIBEICBm9qq53weEMaAS3n54P3g7zSLVWhozyYLnq1Hf0huGCc4_zVgsYIfWp07zyftvathrQLuBix6vrbEiQQuD5V7Li2muYBnMIG4ftdmxmIGBJ1f8O0OlbbQJX7-_4d3OjlyPbKju65L4XgTf0dRhFLmrenGNkiBUmT_-pLngiLe9DR51lN5nQgocoM0xUXDx7zJVK2KRXzFDqhPTqR4
Text:
  Availability: 1
  Value: <anid>AN0181549724;chg01nov.24;2024Dec12.05:10;v2.2.500</anid> <title id="AN0181549724-1">An Outline of the Postliberal University: Public, Private, and Partisan Goods </title> <hd id="AN0181549724-2">In Short</hd> <p></p> <ulist> <item> Previous governance models took higher education goals for granted and focused on how best to support (public good) or manage (private good) the pursuit of those goals.</item> <p></p> <item> Postliberal governance instead contests the underlying goals of higher education, leading to partisan struggles over curriculum, faculty working conditions, and other core elements of higher education.</item> <p></p> <item> Leaders who interpret postliberal problems through liberal or neoliberal frameworks are likely both to misunderstand the challenges they face and to fail to meet those challenges.</item> </ulist> <p>Existing scholarship tends to understand university governance structurally (emphasizing formal authority and resource environments), culturally (focusing on history, norms, and leadership), or by combining both approaches (Kezar & Eckel, [<reflink idref="bib13" id="ref1">13</reflink>]). These models understand governance in instrumental terms, as the means for steering the university. Governance as steering implies baseline consensus about goals and mission. Pursuing these agreed-on goals can be managed through reform and leadership.</p> <p>We argue that higher education leaders and scholars will be better prepared to grapple with contemporary challenges by thinking about governance as the way universities are incorporated into and contribute to the formation of the state and society (see Pusser, [<reflink idref="bib16" id="ref2">16</reflink>]). Understood in this way, the underlying goals and mission of higher education are not agreed on. Instead, they are hotly contested because they are linked to partisan political struggles over the kind of society people want to have. To help kick-start a process of retheorizing governance, we chronicle a shift in how public universities in the United States are situated <emph>vis-à-vis</emph> the state. We identify these shifting governance arrangements through the transformation of the <emph>liberal university</emph> to the <emph>neoliberal</emph> and, now, <emph>postliberal university</emph>.</p> <p>The liberal university was centrally planned, funded, and governed, yet relatively independent from direct partisan political control. These features made the liberal university a stabilizing institution that reproduced midcentury social inequities. The neoliberal university, by contrast, used corporatized governance to respond to declining direct funding and growing political scrutiny beginning roughly in the 1980s. Neoliberal university managers promised to be more responsive to state policy goals and the public, while being less attentive to professors and academic disciplines. Under the emerging postliberal model, policy makers and campus officials hold the university accountable not just to consensus policy goals like improving student outcomes but also to plainly partisan, mostly right-wing objectives, such as eliminating the study of racism and dismantling the administrative architecture designed to facilitate desegregation.</p> <p>We do not imagine a tidy unfolding in which one era ends and the next begins. Rather, all three of these models exist simultaneously and shape the way universities are governed. Failing to understand this situation means that higher education leaders may respond to one model's problems with solutions devised for another model. Doing so is likely to be ineffective if not harmful.</p> <hd id="AN0181549724-3">The Centrality of State–University Relations</hd> <p>The journalist George Packer ([<reflink idref="bib15" id="ref3">15</reflink>]) and other public commentators have focused on student conduct at Columbia and other elite universities to show what they frame as a rising tide of illiberalism in higher education. We devised the term postliberal independent for Packer, who casts a postliberal university as a combination of "moneymaking and activism." While students are integral members of the university community, we identify state governments as far more powerful actors in public university governance. As a result, our understanding of postliberal governance focuses on the changing relationship between the state and the university.</p> <p>Consider the example of Texas A&M University (TAMU). TAMU is very successful by most measures. As a member of the Association of American Universities, TAMU is recognized as one of the most productive research institutions in the country. While federal data show that undergraduate enrollment is down nationwide, TAMU is growing, with an undergraduate enrollment of around 60,000. Traditional markers of academic success might imply that TAMU enjoys a healthy academic culture where established norms about academic freedom and university governance thrive.</p> <p>According to reporting by the <emph>Texas Tribune</emph>, however, a culture of fear and intimidation gripped the campus in 2023 as "[f]aculty expressed shock at the extent to which political pressures have interfered in a university whose values of integrity, respect and excellence appear to have been challenged" (Serrano, [<reflink idref="bib17" id="ref4">17</reflink>], para. 8). At the same time that Texas Senate Bill 17 restricted diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in public higher education, Kathleen O. McElroy, a Black woman who held a faculty position at the University of Texas at Austin, was blocked from a tenured professorship and position as director of TAMU's new school of journalism. Opponents cited her prior work at the <emph>New York Times</emph>. The story kicked off a scandal resulting in the resignation of TAMU's president. In a separate incident, a nontenure-track TAMU professor was suspended and investigated (she was eventually cleared of wrongdoing) after giving a talk on her area of specialization, opioid research, that endorsed a policy response at odds with powerful members of the state's Republican Party (Gretzinger, [<reflink idref="bib10" id="ref5">10</reflink>]).</p> <p>This type of direct interference by powerful elected officials in university governance is not new. Over the course of the 20th century, conflicts raged over racial integration, unionized labor, evolution, and the "Red Scare." Like the events at TAMU, these historical struggles for control were over educational goals and mission—what should higher education do?—and so entailed clear consequences for university governance. Eventually, faculty members won greater protections, and state systems emerged to insulate higher education from the whims of partisan politicians. Norms about academic freedom and institutional independence diffused throughout the sector. While some tension was built into the structures of shared governance, direct interference by politicians on matters of academic hiring and faculty expression within their field of expertise clearly violated governance standards. Understood from this vantage, the kinds of struggles for control that TAMU experienced in 2023 might have been hard to imagine for the prior generations of faculty and administrators.</p> <hd id="AN0181549724-4">Liberal and Neoliberal Models of Governance</hd> <p>The liberal model of mid-20th century governance may be the default image of a public university in the United States. States regularized support for operations and often invested in the construction of new campuses. The federal government generously funded academic research, especially, although not exclusively, in the natural sciences, and implemented a growing set of grant and loan programs to help students finance a college degree. The flow of public dollars bolstered the idea that higher education's core work was knowledge generation and transmission for the common benefit. As a result, participation rose, the pace of scientific discovery accelerated, universities were trusted to govern themselves, and higher education became a central social institution (Cantwell, [<reflink idref="bib5" id="ref6">5</reflink>]; Marginson, [<reflink idref="bib14" id="ref7">14</reflink>]).</p> <p>Under the liberal governance model, state officials and campus leaders understood higher education as a public good. However, the concept of <emph>the public</emph> was hotly contested. Most seats at high-status public universities went to white people, even after formal desegregation (Thelin, [<reflink idref="bib20" id="ref8">20</reflink>]). Campus decision makers often continued racially discriminatory practices and scholars such as Martin Trow openly worried about the ways in which broadened enrollment might transform higher education for the worse (Marginson, [<reflink idref="bib14" id="ref9">14</reflink>]). All this evidence suggests that the leaders of the liberal university interpreted (implicitly or explicitly) <emph>the public</emph> to mean white men.</p> <p>These social arrangements changed slowly over the second half of the 20th century. The political realities of the Cold War hastened the end of legal segregation (Bell, [<reflink idref="bib2" id="ref10">2</reflink>]), signaling meaningful, although vigorously resisted, changes to citizenship and civic life (Allen, [<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref11">1</reflink>]). As the 20th century progressed, activists slowly but surely made higher education a little bit more like the country.</p> <p>Growing diversity and inclusion provoked a backlash. Public funding stagnated and public confidence ebbed. Confronting these challenges, university leaders in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s often turned to what Elizabeth Popp Berman ([<reflink idref="bib3" id="ref12">3</reflink>]) called the economic style of thinking, which prioritized efficiency over other goals. By extension, policy makers and university leaders seemed to promise that better, more aggressive management was the best response to higher education's problems (Slaughter & Rhoades, [<reflink idref="bib18" id="ref13">18</reflink>]). Higher education became less like a public benefit and more like an enterprise to be governed by market competition and aggressive management. If the mid-century liberal university was understood by policy makers and campus leaders as providing a public good, the neoliberal university of the late 20th and early 21st centuries trafficked primarily in private goods. Higher education, the thinking of analysts and policy makers went, benefited somebody rather than everybody.</p> <p>Ambitious higher education leaders held out the prospect that astute, aggressive management could govern universities by turning market discipline into leaner, mission-driven institutions (Crow & DaBars, [<reflink idref="bib7" id="ref14">7</reflink>]). Policy makers and university leaders even gave closer attention to serving students from a diverse set of backgrounds, in part because shifting demographics demanded attention to new student markets and in part because of a bipartisan consensus that the private benefits of human capital investment should be made available to everyone who was willing to work for them. In other words, while the neoliberal university was more representative of the country than the exclusionary liberal university had been, this progress was understood by policy makers and university leaders in economic terms—as a means to an end—rather than as part of the public purpose of higher education (Berman, [<reflink idref="bib3" id="ref15">3</reflink>]).</p> <hd id="AN0181549724-5">The Postliberal Model of Governance</hd> <p>The neoliberal model of the university weakened higher education's social position by repositioning higher education as a means for individual advancement rather than as the goal of furnishing knowledge for the common benefit. This transformation was accompanied by public disinvestment and swelling student debt. In other words, a rise in private dollars aligned with the understanding of higher education as a private good and a steady increase in tuition prices facilitated a decline in public trust in higher education. However, trust eroded unevenly, with those on the political right most skeptical of whether higher education was good for the country (Johnson & Peifer, [<reflink idref="bib12" id="ref16">12</reflink>]). Because partisan identification was increasingly linked to racial identity, states with contested partisan control and changing racial demographics sometimes undermined their own higher education systems to consolidate partisan control of the state. A process of deinstitutionalization—eroding the public trust and funding on which public higher education depended—began to unwind the position of universities as independent, knowledge-driven institutions at the center of society (Taylor, [<reflink idref="bib19" id="ref17">19</reflink>]).</p> <p>Where the liberal and neoliberal governance models cast higher education as a public or private good, respectively, the postliberal model understands higher education as a <emph>partisan</emph> good. These partisan commitments were asymmetric. The Democratic Party's preferences for higher education—affordability, accountability, and access (Gándara & Jones, [<reflink idref="bib8" id="ref18">8</reflink>])—were broadly consistent with elements of the existing liberal and neoliberal models. The Republican Party wanted a more thorough break with this recent past.</p> <p>Political partisans are generally skeptical of independent social institutions because, by nature of their independence, these bodies sometimes produce outcomes that limit or contest partisan power (Hacker & Pierson, [<reflink idref="bib11" id="ref19">11</reflink>]). Indeed, the state of Florida, led by a unified Republican government, argued in court that the state can restrict what professors say because Florida holds that public university professors' speech is government speech. In a real sense, then, the deinstitutionalized postliberal model casts the university as an extension of the political party. The university is supposed to buttress powerful partisans and avoid teaching, research, and administrative actions that might offend the party and its supporters, as illustrated in the anecdotes about TAMU.</p> <p>The postliberal model of governance is emerging quickly. Some right-wing activists have reached deep into daily university life to undermine institutional independence and remake higher education in the image of their political party. In the 2020s, political partisans in states including Alabama, Florida, Indiana, and Texas led curricular changes, enacted legislation that banned the use of DEI criteria in campus operations, and/or gutted the traditional protections of faculty tenure. These changes both remade the university in keeping with partisan goals and undermined institutional independence by exposing campus personnel more directly to partisan censure and critique. In some cases, new personnel were appointed to cement these changes. From the chancellorship of the University of North Carolina to the board of New College of Florida, leadership has been entrusted to individuals whose primary qualification is their partisan allegiance. In these ways and others, partisans on the right have indicated that the institutional independence of colleges and universities is a threat to be curbed or coopted rather than a benefit to be supported (liberal) or managed (neoliberal).</p> <p>Postliberal universities do not become arms of a political party overnight. Substantial institutional independence remains, in part because universities are large and complex organizations that are difficult to control. Campus leaders could use the remnants of university independence to defend the liberal and/or neoliberal model. Often, however, leaders marshal only partial defenses, meaning responses that attempt to sidestep rather than resist partisan overtures (Taylor, [<reflink idref="bib19" id="ref20">19</reflink>]). In still other cases, leaders may exceed the demands of new laws, enacting a form of <emph>repressive legalism</emph> that goes beyond what is required (Garces et al., [<reflink idref="bib9" id="ref21">9</reflink>]). We are not without sympathy for these leaders, who sit in an institutional trap between the demands of partisan entanglements and <emph>playing by the rules</emph> of liberal and neoliberal governance (Cantwell, [<reflink idref="bib6" id="ref22">6</reflink>]). Yet it is also true that in most cases the remnants of institutional independence have not stopped the expansion of partisan aims into higher education.</p> <p>Because the postliberal model of the university is linked to partisan politics, this model is not evenly distributed across states. Neither, however, is it limited to states that are controlled by the Republican Party. Advocacy organizations such as the Goldwater Institute and James G. Martin Center, the rising salience of national politics in local elections, and the activities of high-profile donors can bring elements of the postliberal university even to states with Democratic or divided governments. The University of Colorado–Boulder, for example, hosts the Bruce D. Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization, a right-wing center affiliated with Trump lawyer John Eastman who sought to undermine the 2020 election. Partisan interference in higher education governance might even come from the federal government rather than the states. <emph>Mandate for Leadership</emph>, the book accompanying the Heritage Foundation's "Project 2025 Presidential Transition Project," called for a transformation of the relationship between universities and the federal government (Burke, [<reflink idref="bib4" id="ref23">4</reflink>]).</p> <p>Not all partisan threats stem from Republicans. Some Democratic legislators in Hawaii have an interest in eliminating tenure. Even more notably, few Democratic partisans seem keen on vocally defending governance arrangements that protect university independence. These policy makers may be adhering to the norms of noninterference in institutional matters. In a postliberal political contest in which the other side rejects those norms, however, partisans on the center and left are leaving higher education vulnerable to unchecked meddling. Republican officials pose acute challenges for the liberal and neoliberal models, but Democratic officials do not offer solutions to these problems.</p> <hd id="AN0181549724-6">Where Do We Go From Here?</hd> <p>The postliberal model of governance does not simply discredit its predecessors. It also creates a narrower form of instruction and scholarship that is linked to a particular political coalition rather than to academic or administrative decision making. What should higher education scholars and leaders make of this emerging model of higher education governance?</p> <p>The postliberal model is not yet dominant and no state system of higher education is wholly liberal, neoliberal, or postliberal. Rather, elements of all three models coexist simultaneously, if uneasily. Given this reality, we encourage scholars and policy makers to adjust the ways that they think about public higher education governance. We offer two concrete suggestions to guide this reconceptualization.</p> <p>First, analysts must carefully consider what they are recommending. Goals and mission are contested, not taken for granted, and the nature of that contest likely shapes the ways in which policy recommendations will be received. As an example, studies of the return on investment (ROI) for degree programs and institutions are broadly consistent with the neoliberal model. While we are not opposed to better management, we also note that not all elements of the university do or should conform to the neoliberal model. We should study the history of race and racism in the United States, not because it is remunerative, but because it is a crucial component of understanding the country—that is, because it serves the public good. If an analysis produced evidence that such scholarly efforts did not produce ROI for individual graduates, however, the neoliberal model would place limited value on them. That analysis in turn could inadvertently provide ammunition to advocates of the postliberal model who would like to discredit the study of race and racism for partisan reasons and could use ROI as a pretext to do so. Similarly, the strengthened managerial core of the neoliberal model could be captured and repurposed to consolidate the postliberal model, as may be underway when political partisans become campus leaders. In these ways, the liberal and neoliberal models—if not cautiously applied and carefully considered—could pave the way for their own replacement by the postliberal model.</p> <p>Second, with its roots in partisan politics, the postliberal model suggests that higher education systems may become increasingly different across states. Indeed, over time it might become difficult to compare universities from different political contexts even if they share formal characteristics, such as Carnegie classification. A university in a state where the liberal and neoliberal models held sway might feature units that specialize in gender theory and human-caused climate change. A university in a state where the postliberal model dominated might focus its efforts on "traditional gender roles" while ignoring climate change. Both universities would engage in teaching and research but would do so under conditions that are incommensurate. Governance and the core principles associated with it—academic freedom, institutional independence, and the goals of decision makers—might differ just as much as the core academic enterprise. By extension, scholars and leaders should be wary of assuming that state actors under a postliberal model are making good-faith efforts to improve higher education as a system of delivering public or private goods. Policy making and implementation may reflect the partisan goals that underlie shifting state–university relationships and the renegotiation of educational goals rather than an effort to make existing operations more effective or efficient. In such contexts, analyzing whether a policy works to improve outcomes or efficiency would miss the policy's intention of transforming public university governance.</p> <p>There is much to criticize about the liberal and neoliberal models. Even so, we believe that higher education is best positioned to fulfill its mission when it is relatively independent from partisan political demands—that is, when the goals and mission of higher education are not themselves the object of partisan contest. We hope we have overestimated the challenges to that independence. Insofar as our analysis is correct, however, the emerging postliberal model that would make higher education a partisan good threatens what we understand the core of the enterprise to be—the generation and transmission of knowledge. This is a serious and destabilizing threat that is rooted in shifting state–university relations, and we encourage all scholars of higher education politics and policy to recognize it as such. Doing so will allow analysts and leaders to accurately describe complex reality and to identify where and how the core mission of higher education is under threat.</p> <hd id="AN0181549724-7">Disclosure Statement</hd> <p>No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).</p> <ref id="AN0181549724-8"> <title> References </title> <blist> <bibl id="bib1" idref="ref11" type="bt">1</bibl> <bibtext> Allen, D. (2004). Talking to strangers: Anxieties of citizenship after Brown v. Board of Education. The University of Chicago Press.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib2" idref="ref10" type="bt">2</bibl> <bibtext> Bell, D. (1980). Brown v Board of Education and the interest-convergence dilemma. Harvard Law Review, 93 (3), 518 – 533.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib3" idref="ref12" type="bt">3</bibl> <bibtext> Berman, E. P. (2022). Thinking like an economist: How efficiency replaced equality in U.S. public policy. Princeton University Press.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib4" idref="ref23" type="bt">4</bibl> <bibtext> Burke, L. M. (2023). Department of Education. In P. Dans & S. Groves (Eds.), Mandate for leadership: The conservative promise (pp. 319 – 362). The Heritage Foundation.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib5" idref="ref6" type="bt">5</bibl> <bibtext> Cantwell, B. (2018). Broad access and steep stratification in the first mass system: High participation higher education in the United States of America. In B. Cantwell, S. Marginson, & A. Smolentseva (Eds.), High participation systems of higher education (pp. 227 – 265). Oxford University Press.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib6" idref="ref22" type="bt">6</bibl> <bibtext> Cantwell, B. (2021). The culture war has come for higher ed: Now is the time for academic leaders to fight. The Chronicle of Higher Education.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib7" idref="ref14" type="bt">7</bibl> <bibtext> Crow, M. M., & DaBars, W. B. (2015). Designing the New American University. The Johns Hopkins University Press.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib8" idref="ref18" type="bt">8</bibl> <bibtext> Gándara, D., & Jones, S. (2020). Who deserves benefits in higher education? A policy discourse analysis of a process surrounding reauthorization of the Higher Education Act. The Review of Higher Education, 44 (1), 121 – 157.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib9" idref="ref21" type="bt">9</bibl> <bibtext> Garces, L. M., Johnson, B. D., Ambriz, E., & Bradley, D. (2021). Repressive legalism: How postsecondary administrators' responses to on-campus hate speech undermine a focus on inclusion. American Educational Research Journal, 58 (5), 1032 – 1069.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Gretzinger, E. (2023, September 29) Texas A&M tries to turn the page from its summer of scandal: How a "top down" leadership culture weakened shared governance, leaving the institution vulnerable. The Chronicle of Higher Education.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Hacker, J. S., & Pierson, P. (2020). Let them eat tweets. Liveright Books.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Johnson, D. R., & Peifer, J. (2017). How public confidence in higher education varies by social context. The Journal of Higher Education, 88 (4), 619 – 644.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Kezar, A., & Eckel, P. D. (2004). Meeting today's governance challenges: A synthesis of the literature and examination of a future agenda for scholarship. The Journal of Higher Education, 75 (4), 371 – 399.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Marginson, S. (2016). The dream is over: The crisis of Clark Kerr's California Idea of higher education. The University of California Press.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Packer, G. (2024, April 25). The campus left occupation that broke higher education. The Atlantic. https://<ulink href="http://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/04/campus-left-university-columbia-1968/678176/">www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/04/campus-left-university-columbia-1968/678176/</ulink></bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Pusser, B. (2018). The state and the civil society in the scholarship of higher education. In B. Cantwell, H. Coates, & R. King (Eds). Handbook on the politics of higher education (pp. 11 – 29). Edward Elgar Publishing.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Serrano, A. (2023, July 27). Faculty worry about Texas A&M's future after controversies over higher ed politicization. The Texas Tribune. https://<ulink href="http://www.texastribune.org/2023/07/27/texas-tamu-faculty-disappointment/">www.texastribune.org/2023/07/27/texas-tamu-faculty-disappointment/</ulink></bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Slaughter, S., & Rhoades, G. (2004). Academic capitalism and the new economy. The Johns Hopkins University Press.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Taylor, B. J. (2022). Wrecked: Deinstitutionalization and partial defenses in state higher education policy. Rutgers University Press.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Thelin, J. R. (2021). Going to college in the sixties. The Johns Hopkins University Press.</bibtext> </blist> </ref> <aug> <p>By Barrett J. Taylor and Brendan Cantwell</p> <p>Reported by Author; Author</p> <p></p> <p>Barrett J. Taylor is Professor and Coordinator of the higher education program at the University of North Texas. His research focuses on higher education politics and policy, university organization and governance, and institutional inequality.</p> <p>Brendan Cantwell, PhD, is the 2024–2027 Dr. Mildred B. Erickson Distinguished Chair in Higher, Adult and Lifelong Education at Michigan State University. He is interested in understanding how higher education relates to broad social and economic organization.</p> </aug> <nolink nlid="nl1" bibid="bib13" firstref="ref1"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl2" bibid="bib16" firstref="ref2"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl3" bibid="bib15" firstref="ref3"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl4" bibid="bib17" firstref="ref4"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl5" bibid="bib10" firstref="ref5"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl6" bibid="bib14" firstref="ref7"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl7" bibid="bib20" firstref="ref8"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl8" bibid="bib18" firstref="ref13"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl9" bibid="bib12" firstref="ref16"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl10" bibid="bib19" firstref="ref17"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl11" bibid="bib11" firstref="ref19"></nolink>
Header DbId: eric
DbLabel: ERIC
An: EJ1453177
AccessLevel: 3
PubType: Academic Journal
PubTypeId: academicJournal
PreciseRelevancyScore: 0
IllustrationInfo
Items – Name: Title
  Label: Title
  Group: Ti
  Data: An Outline of the Postliberal University: Public, Private, and Partisan Goods
– Name: Language
  Label: Language
  Group: Lang
  Data: English
– Name: Author
  Label: Authors
  Group: Au
  Data: <searchLink fieldCode="AR" term="%22Barrett+J%2E+Taylor%22">Barrett J. Taylor</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="AR" term="%22Brendan+Cantwell%22">Brendan Cantwell</searchLink> (ORCID <externalLink term="https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3882-4200">0000-0003-3882-4200</externalLink>)
– Name: TitleSource
  Label: Source
  Group: Src
  Data: <searchLink fieldCode="SO" term="%22Change%3A+The+Magazine+of+Higher+Learning%22"><i>Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning</i></searchLink>. 2024 56(6):5-11.
– Name: Avail
  Label: Availability
  Group: Avail
  Data: Routledge. Available from: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. 530 Walnut Street Suite 850, Philadelphia, PA 19106. Tel: 800-354-1420; Tel: 215-625-8900; Fax: 215-207-0050; Web site: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
– Name: PeerReviewed
  Label: Peer Reviewed
  Group: SrcInfo
  Data: Y
– Name: Pages
  Label: Page Count
  Group: Src
  Data: 7
– Name: DatePubCY
  Label: Publication Date
  Group: Date
  Data: 2024
– Name: TypeDocument
  Label: Document Type
  Group: TypDoc
  Data: Journal Articles<br />Reports - Evaluative
– Name: Audience
  Label: Education Level
  Group: Audnce
  Data: <searchLink fieldCode="EL" term="%22Higher+Education%22">Higher Education</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="EL" term="%22Postsecondary+Education%22">Postsecondary Education</searchLink>
– Name: Subject
  Label: Descriptors
  Group: Su
  Data: <searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Universities%22">Universities</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Governance%22">Governance</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Cultural+Context%22">Cultural Context</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Administrative+Organization%22">Administrative Organization</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Barriers%22">Barriers</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Administrators%22">Administrators</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Higher+Education%22">Higher Education</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Administrator+Role%22">Administrator Role</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Modern+History%22">Modern History</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Political+Attitudes%22">Political Attitudes</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22State+Regulation%22">State Regulation</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Social+Change%22">Social Change</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Public+Colleges%22">Public Colleges</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Private+Colleges%22">Private Colleges</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Politics+of+Education%22">Politics of Education</searchLink>
– Name: DOI
  Label: DOI
  Group: ID
  Data: 10.1080/00091383.2024.2419341
– Name: ISSN
  Label: ISSN
  Group: ISSN
  Data: 0009-1383<br />1939-9146
– Name: Abstract
  Label: Abstract
  Group: Ab
  Data: Existing scholarship tends to understand university governance structurally (emphasizing formal authority and resource environments), culturally (focusing on history, norms, and leadership), or by combining both approaches (Kezar & Eckel, 2004). These models understand governance in instrumental terms, as the means for steering the university. Governance as steering implies baseline consensus about goals and mission. Pursuing these agreed-on goals can be managed through reform and leadership. In this article, the authors argue that higher education leaders and scholars will be better prepared to grapple with contemporary challenges by thinking about governance as the way universities are incorporated into and contribute to the formation of the state and society (see Pusser, 2018). Understood in this way, the underlying goals and mission of higher education are not agreed on. Instead, they are hotly contested because they are linked to partisan political struggles over the kind of society people want to have. To help kick-start a process of retheorizing governance, the authors chronicle a shift in how public universities in the United States are situated vis-à-vis the state. They identify these shifting governance arrangements through the transformation of the liberal university to the neoliberal and, now, postliberal university.
– Name: AbstractInfo
  Label: Abstractor
  Group: Ab
  Data: ERIC
– Name: DateEntry
  Label: Entry Date
  Group: Date
  Data: 2024
– Name: AN
  Label: Accession Number
  Group: ID
  Data: EJ1453177
PLink https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&site=eds-live&db=eric&AN=EJ1453177
RecordInfo BibRecord:
  BibEntity:
    Identifiers:
      – Type: doi
        Value: 10.1080/00091383.2024.2419341
    Languages:
      – Text: English
    PhysicalDescription:
      Pagination:
        PageCount: 7
        StartPage: 5
    Subjects:
      – SubjectFull: Universities
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Governance
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Cultural Context
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Administrative Organization
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Barriers
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Administrators
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Higher Education
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Administrator Role
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Modern History
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Political Attitudes
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: State Regulation
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Social Change
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Public Colleges
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Private Colleges
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Politics of Education
        Type: general
    Titles:
      – TitleFull: An Outline of the Postliberal University: Public, Private, and Partisan Goods
        Type: main
  BibRelationships:
    HasContributorRelationships:
      – PersonEntity:
          Name:
            NameFull: Barrett J. Taylor
      – PersonEntity:
          Name:
            NameFull: Brendan Cantwell
    IsPartOfRelationships:
      – BibEntity:
          Dates:
            – D: 01
              M: 01
              Type: published
              Y: 2024
          Identifiers:
            – Type: issn-print
              Value: 0009-1383
            – Type: issn-electronic
              Value: 1939-9146
          Numbering:
            – Type: volume
              Value: 56
            – Type: issue
              Value: 6
          Titles:
            – TitleFull: Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning
              Type: main
ResultId 1