Abstract
The American system of innovation and new knowledge production can best be described as highly decentralized and multipolar; that is, prominent roles are played by business/industry, government, and universities. Most of American university R&D involvement is concentrated in a group of perhaps 200 leading research universities that undertake contract research for the federal government and have close relationships with business and industry. At the same time, higher education contributes to the R&D enterprise through the training of an increasingly sophisticated cadre of knowledge workers. The past two decades have seen a vast expansion of graduate education as well as professional doctorates. The emergence of the knowledge society in the United States context has also included a redefinition of higher education’s service function with “new” curricular components, e.g., service learning, and a reemphasis of the faculty role in public service projects above and beyond their teaching and research. At the same time, increased performance pressures to do more with less, including the transition to part-time and short-term faculty appointments, has led both to diminished career prospects for many academic staff and lower morale in a prevailing managerial university. This chapter represents these core trends impacting US higher education.
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Notes
- 1.
That said, pressures to conduct research and disseminate it in the form of peer-reviewed publications has spread widely through the four-year, institutional sector of U.S. higher education, adding research and publication to the work repertoire of the vast majority of four-year faculty members.
- 2.
Historically, the birth of U.S. National Science Policy. The report “Science: The Endless Frontier” (Bush, 1945) represents the seminal thinking with regard to the importance of science as the engine of economic growth; emphasis was placed on the role of the federal government in building scientific capacity and ensuring national security and the establishment of scientific agencies to coordinate government interests, such as the National Science Foundation (NSF), to provide funding for basic research and to coordinate research activities of interest to the national welfare (https://www.nsf.gov/about/).
- 3.
For more information, visit: https://www.congress.gov/committees.
- 4.
For more information, visit: http://www.nationalacademies.org.
- 5.
However, in recent years, spending on R&D has increased markedly in some emerging markets, most notably in China with $409 billion (21% of the global R&D total) in 2015 (NSB, 2018).
- 6.
The federal government tends to support basic research, while business and industry tend to support more applied and commercially oriented research.
- 7.
Overall, the limited available data suggests that about three quarters of the academic staff that apply for tenure are successful in attaining it—perhaps only one half, at the 200 or so research-intensive universities (and 1/10 at the handful of most elite institutions). This excludes, of course, those who leave their jobs or academe before the year of their tenure eligibility.
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Finkelstein, M., Bain, O., Gregorutti, G., Cummings, W.K., Jacob, W.J., Kim, E. (2021). The Emerging Role of American Universities in the Twenty-First-Century Knowledge Society. In: Aarrevaara, T., Finkelstein, M., Jones, G.A., Jung, J. (eds) Universities in the Knowledge Society. The Changing Academy – The Changing Academic Profession in International Comparative Perspective, vol 22. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76579-8_22
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