The Institutional Design Frontiers of Publicness and University Performance

• Author: Derrick Anderson,Andrew Whitford
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12627
• Published date: 01 September 2016
• Date: 01 September 2016

The Institutional Design Frontiers of Publicness and University Performance 753

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 76, Iss. 5, pp. 753–755. © 2016 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.12627.

Andrew Whitford is the Alexander

M. Crenshaw professor of public policy in

the Department of Public Administration

and Policy at The University of Georgia.

Andrew ’ s work concentrates on strategy

and innovation in public policy and

organization studies.

E-mail : aw@uga.edu

Derrick Anderson is assistant

professor in the School of Public Affairs

and the Center for Organization Research

and Design at Arizona State University.

He studies the political, managerial, and

market control of knowledge intensive

organizations.

E-mail : derrick.anderson@asu.edu

Symposium

Introduction

Abstract : This introduction to the symposium on the institutional design frontiers of publicness and university

performance summarizes the range of diverse intellectual and practical perspectives converging on the idea that issues

of design and publicness are important for thinking about the future of higher education. Collectively, the articles

featured in this symposium demonstrate that the challenges facing higher education exhibit assorted social, economic,

and political complexities. Public administration perspectives can play a key role in understanding and reshaping our

higher education system into a more responsive social enterprise.

C olleges and universities are social value

enterprises that have endured for centuries with

relatively little change. The historical stability of

higher education shows the enduring significance of the

model. Beyond maintaining financial solvency, colleges

and university are expected to benefit a wide range of

social, economic, and political stakeholders. Thus, in

higher education, success is rarely determined solely on

the basis of financial performance—but it often entails

effectiveness and credibility in achieving social value

objectives.

In recent years, however, the long shadow of tradition

that informs so much of higher education institutional

design has given way to doubt and concern. Even

though the diminished-value proposition of higher

education is debatable, most scholars and practitioners

agree that higher education has entered an era of

complex change, characterized in part by a proliferation

of new consumer groups, rapidly evolving demands of

existing stakeholders, and emerging technologies that

fundamentally change the conventional operational

paradigms of colleges and universities.

Public administration, as a domain of theory and

practice, has engaged these challenges in a general

way for decades. The contributors to this symposium

are aware that public administration perspectives on

these challenges can help us understand and shape the

future of higher education. The contributors apply

key organization, policy, and management insights

from the field of public administration to a wide array

of issues in higher education.

The focus of this symposium is the institutional

design frontiers of publicness and university

performance. While evolutionary theories of

organizational change contend that transformation

comes about through responses to environmental

stimuli, institutional design perspectives hold that

change can embody purposeful maximization of

preferences and human values. This way of thinking

informs the contributions presented here.

Within this context, publicness theory reveals how

organizations and systems of organization exist at the

convergence of varying levels of economic and political

authority. Insights rooted in publicness are in no way

trivial to challenges faced by higher education. New

organizational models implemented in colleges and

universities seem to invert the publicness configurations

that prevail in traditional higher education. For

example, privately held, for-profit universities now

have far greater proportions of their revenue that

come from government sources than many large-scale

public research universities. Publicness dynamics have

important implications for the frontiers of institutional

design in higher education.

This symposium includes four perspective essays,

four research articles, and three book reviews. In

addition to a mix of senior and junior scholars in the

field of public administration, contributors to this

symposium include a current and two former college

presidents, a number of current and former executive-

level university administrators, a cofounder of one of

the largest for-profit universities in the world, policy

experts, and a former government official. Together

their views represent a range of diverse intellectual and

practical views all converging on the idea that issues

of design and publicness are important for thinking

about the future of higher education.

Derrick Anderson

Arizona State University

Andrew Whitford

The University of Georgia

The Institutional Design Frontiers of Publicness

and University Performance