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University presidents as agents of connection: an exploratory study of elite presidential ties in the United States, 2005–2020

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Abstract

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.

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Notes

  1. Henceforth referred to as higher education organizations or HEOs

  2. We use presidents to refer to all campus leaders.

  3. Additional information is in the Data section.

  4. These are the U.S. AAU member institutions in 2010.

  5. This approach has been used to understand a variety of behaviors at both the institutional and field levels including financial and degree granting behaviors, stratification, and trustee connectivity (Barringer & Jaquette, 2018; Barringer et al., 2019; Taylor & Cantwell, 2019) as well as patterns across individual behaviors such as student civic engagement and alumni giving (Weerts & Cabrera, 2018; Weerts et al., 2014).

  6. In those cases where there were multiple presidents, we included all ties from all presidents at an institution in the year of interest.

  7. The use of clustered standard errors “relaxes the assumption of independent of the errors and replaces it with the assumption of independence between clusters,” the clusters here being institutions which contain multiple observations over time StataCorp (2019).

  8. This was coded as a continuous variable centered on 2005.

  9. This determination was made based on a combination of indicator measures of model fit (AIC and BIC), the confidence with which cases were assigned to profiles, model stability, and the significance of the individual observed variables across the profiles (Masyn, 2013; Tein et al., 2014). Various combinations of these factors have been used to ascertain the number of latent profiles in higher education scholarship (e.g., Cantwell et al., 2020; Barringer & Jaquette, 2018; Taylor & Cantwell, 2019).

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Jessica Borne for her research assistance and Graham Miller for his comments on an earlier draft of this paper which was presented at the Association for the Study of Higher Education 2020 Annual Meeting. 

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This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under grant no. 1262522.

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  1. Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX, USA

    Sondra N. Barringer

  2. University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, USA

    Karley A. Riffe

  3. University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA

    Kate Collier

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Barringer, S.N., Riffe, K.A. & Collier, K. University presidents as agents of connection: an exploratory study of elite presidential ties in the United States, 2005–2020. High Educ 86, 1129–1150 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-022-00965-y

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