The Ties that Corporatize: A Social Network Analysis of University Presidents as Vectors of Corporatization

• In Event: 4385 - Education in a Changing World

Abstract

This paper contributes to research on the corporatization of higher education by examining the knowledge flows between for-profit, not-for-profit and private sector firms. We conceptualize university presidents as critical organizational links between institutional sectors. As university presidents move across organizations, they bring with them practices and beliefs in the form of social networks. We ask if not-for-profit colleges have become more corporate at the leadership level and if corporatization looks the same for different sectors of higher education. This paper uses social network analysis to trace presidents’ career histories across a heterogeneous sample of U.S. colleges and universities (n=237) to address these questions. The sample includes public colleges (as opposed to private colleges), for-profit colleges, and minority-serving institutions. We find two distinct network typologies between public universities and for-profit universities with very few paths connecting the two. Minority serving institutions and corporations are present in both the public and for-profit network. There are seven times the number of corporations than baccalaureate colleges; doctoral universities are the most numerous type of institution in the entire network. We find that 40.5% of university presidents have never held a tenure track faculty position at any university or college. Findings suggest that the corporatization of the academy may be driven by university presidents who have non-academic backgrounds. But, there are limits to this preference: Despite embracing a fully corporate model of higher education, for-profit colleges share very little knowledge capital with traditional higher education at the leadership level.. These findings are consistent with claims of higher education’s increasing corporatization. They also suggest mechanisms for the increased dominance of market logics in not-for-profit higher education reside in prestigious extra-institutional sites like large firms, elite professional services and non-profit boards.

Authors

• Jennifer A. Johnson, Virginia Commonwealth University

• Tressie Cottom, Virginia Commonwealth University

• Sally Hunnicutt, Virginia Commonwealth University