In Search of Relevance in the Twenty‐First Century

• Author: Jan L. Youtie
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12614
• Published date: 01 September 2016
• Date: 01 September 2016

816 Public Administration Review • September | October 2016

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 76, Iss. 5, pp. 816–818. © 2016 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.12614.

Jan L. Youtie is director of policy

research services and principal research

associate in Innovation Partners, a unit

of Georgia Tech ’ s Enterprise Innovation

Institute. She is also adjunct professor

in Georgia Tech ’ s School of Public Policy

and cofounder of the program in Science,

Technology, and Innovation Policy. Her

research focuses on technology-based

economic development, advanced

manufacturing, emerging technology

assessment, bibliometric and patent

analysis, and innovation and knowledge

measurement and evaluation.

E-mail: jan.youtie@innovate.gatech.edu

Book Reviews

U niversities have been criticized in recent

years for high tuition fees and inability of

graduates to obtain employment (National

Research Council 2012 ). In response, universities

argue that governments have reduced their support

to universities, forced additional and increased

fees, and added evermore burdensome rules and

regulations that require expanding bureaucratic

structures (Bozeman 2015 ). These administrative

strictures parallel the growth of expectations of the

roles of universities such that the university, according

to legendary former president of University of

California at Berkeley Clark Kerr ( 2001 ), has become

a multiversity. Proposals at the national level have

been made to reduce these regulations and improve

university administrative efficiency with little change

in the situation. It is thus reasonable to look to the

states to put forth novel solutions to these problems,

as they have been called “laboratories of democracy”

by Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis. Making

the case for one such novel approach is Designing the

New American University by Michael Crow, president

of Arizona State University (ASU), and William

Dabars, a senior research fellow in the Office of the

President at ASU, and it indeed falls in this vein

(Crow and Dabars 2015 ). Many of the core ideas

of the book can be traced to the 2002 address that

President Crow made on his inauguration to the ASU

presidency , and refined during subsequent years of

experience implementing and expanding ideas. The

book is essentially a blueprint for how ASU has been

reconceptualized to better serve its diverse populace,

conduct research that responds to societal problems,

and connect more closely with its current and

potential clienteles.

The book has attracted much attention. For starters,

endorsements for the book are written by a collection

Danny L. Balfour and Stephanie P. Newbold , Editors

Jan L. Youtie

Georgia Institute of Technology

In Search of Relevance in the Twenty-First Century

Michael M. Crow and William B. Dabars , Designing

the New American University (Baltimore, MD:

Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015). 360 pp.

$34.95, ISBN: 9781421417233 .

of elite political and academic leaders, including

former President Bill Clinton, Governor Jeb Bush,

and Mitchell Daniels, president of Purdue University

and former governor of Indiana. Although the book

was published in February 2015, it has already drawn

three reviews published in journals indexed by the

Web of Science (Boardman 2016 ; Hayford 2015 ;

Maienschein 2015 ) as well as reviews in magazines

such as the Los Angeles Review of Books (Newfield

2015 ) and the Chronicle of Higher Education (Dirks

2015 ). The book has also had an influence on

universities outside the United States (Shapira 2015 ).

One of the strengths of this book is its evidence base.

The book begins with three chapters that draw on

a broad history of U.S. universities, beginning with

Harvard and especially Johns Hopkins, which the

authors emphasize is the better model of the early

American university because it represents a merger

of residential campuses of Oxford and Cambridge

and the German paradigm of graduate research

training. The book chides the disproportionate

legitimacy awarded to the Harvard model as an

example of “filiopietism” and pairs this concept

with that of “isomorphism”—the tendency of other

higher educational institutions to try to become like

Harvard and other prestigious universities in their

pursuit of high-performing students and high-status

research grants. However, the authors argue that these

elite universities produce knowledge that is often

narrow and not always considered useful by society.

The book contrasts this view with the origin of the

Morrill Act, which sought to diversify the student

population through the creation of land-grant state

colleges and universities, some of which are elite

private and public universities and others of which

are for underrepresented groups including persons

of color, and the Hatch Act ’ s funding of agricultural

research and technology transfer centers with their

emphasis on knowledge relevant to the development

of the agricultural industry. The book offers an

extensive set of data about the U.S. educational

situation in comparison with other countries. The