The dramatic salience of university rankings is usually attributed to a number of macro-level trends, such as neoliberal ideology, the spread of audit culture, and globalization in the broadest sense. We propose that the institutionalization of university rankings cannot be fully accounted for without a better understanding of the meso-level…

Economists have long recognized the importance of human capital in economic growth. In this series of papers, I study how various institutions of human capital formation affected economic development in a variety of contexts prior to 1900. These include both formal institutions of human capital formation such as universities and informal…

The undertaking of research that leads to new knowledge and original creative endeavour, together with research training, represents a fundamental and defining feature for any higher education provider seeking status as an 'Australian University'. This guidance note focusses on the requirements specifically applying to Australian Universities and…

As rankings have become increasingly institutionalized in higher education, so too have the strategic responses adopted by universities to address them. A key component of these responses is the development of new expertise, embodied in personnel and organizational units, dedicated to managing quantitative assessments. We draw on a qualitative…

Universities across the globe have begun to invest in transdisciplinary research: a complex form of collaboration that places divergent disciplinary specialists and community members in participatory research aimed at addressing an applied research question. For a collaboration to succeed in this knowledge work, participants must engage in radical…

This chapter provides community college leaders with recommendations to develop a transfer sending culture for Latinx students who want to pursue a pathway to a 4-year college/university. Community college leaders can create a transfer sending culture for Latinx students by standardizing a transfer process so that all Latinx students who aim to…

Universities seeking to establish or expand their research missions in developed countries have at their disposal well-established literature on strategies to foster research capacity in universities. On the contrary, the literature on these processes in the context of developing countries is quite recent and scarce. We offer a descriptive,…

Collegiality is at the heart of the academy's collective endeavour. It is central to how we think about academic governance structures, academic cultures, as well as the norms guiding academic work. This paper examines the less-explored affective dimensions of collegiality, probing the relationship between the collegial affect and the power and…

Higher education institutions in the UK have organised into mission groups for the advocacy of shared interests and ideologies. Although research productivity is claimed as a key point of difference between these groups, this claim has received relatively little empirical scrutiny. The current study examined the clustering of UK universities based…

Accreditation is one mechanism to review the quality of higher education institutions and programs. Having accredited programs can differentiate programs and provide opportunities to increase student enrollment and signify program excellence. Additionally, accreditation can be a forcing function for continuous improvement and program assessment.…

Canadian universities today assert their social relevance through highlighting processes such as community engagement, knowledge mobilization, and the promotion of equity, diversity, and inclusion. Much can be learned about such processes through examining an era in which Canadian universities asserted their social relevance through another…

This dissertation lays out conceptual foundations for building a public digital writing program archive, engages in conceptual modeling atop these foundations, then describes a tripartite platform structure for creating a digital resource that can make use of a writing program's everyday materials. This dissertation does not view its objects of…

This project is a study of the role interpretation has played during a few key moments in a culture war over the role of the university in society. It argues that in these key moments in which a political reflection has been undertaken regarding the way knowledge is produced and distributed, the nature and function of interpretation as such has…

Purpose: This article aims to address the response from the higher education (HE) sector in the United Kingdom (UK) to the full-scale war in Ukraine which started in 2022. Design/methodology/approach: Relying on theoretical ideas of neoliberalism and the collection and thematic analysis of relevant official communications from six UK universities,…

This research addresses two important developments in the academic field: First, universities are transforming into organisational actors, gaining more responsibilities and capacities for strategic action, and second, competition has reached a new level. An important driver of competition and universities' development towards strategic actorhood…