Rise of American Research Universities: Elites and Challengers in the Postwar Era, The

Journal of College Student Development, May/Jun 1998 by Creamer, Don G

The Rise of American Research Universities: Elites and Challengers in the Postwar Era

Hugh Davis Graham and Nancy Diamond

Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997, 319 pages, $39.95 (hardcover)

Knowledge production of the research university is one of the great accomplishments of the American system of higher education. Adapting to conditions of decentralized administration of the system, federal research and development policies, market conditions in the U.S., and powerful competitive forces for students and faculty, the American research university has shown its prowess in attracting large grants to fuel its knowledge creation capacities. The institutional type has gained international recognition since World War II, according to historian Hugh Graham and policy scientist Nancy Diamond, and has established itself as an enviable university prototype within the pluralist system of American higher education. Reputational studies and knowledge production studies of faculty have consistently pointed to an elite class of research universities. Graham and Diamond present some refined evidence in the rank-ordering competition among research universities with some unexpected results.

Federal science policy immediately following WWII was relatively insignificant in academic research but by the 1960s became a dominant force, driven party by Sputnik and a need for "national defense" basic research and partly by an ever expanding group of federal agencies providing academic Research and Development (R&D) funds to meet their needs for knowledge. Early in this period the elite research universities were well known: UC Berkeley, Chicago, Caltech, Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Illinois, Johns Hopkins, MIT, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Princeton, Stanford, Wisconsin, and Yale. Of these 16 institutions,11 were private.

Important changes occurred under the presidencies of Kennedy and Johnson to open the competitive processes for R&D funding to more research universities. The development of the Carnegie Classification System in 1970 (revised in 1976, 1987, and 1994) was intended to aid this process of broadening access and changing the way money was invested in American higher education by identifying the different types of institutions and to legitimize their differences. It used two simple threshold variables to classify research universities: annual totals of federal financial support, and annual awards of doctoral degrees.

Most studies of knowledge production in American higher education have relied upon the Carnegie system to identify the research universities. Graham and Diamond have modified this classification system to control for institutional size (larger institutions tend to receive more federal funds than smaller institutions) by creating five per capita indexes (based on the number of faculty at each institution): (a) an R&D Index and (b) an index of total campus publications based on a refinement of the Institute for Scientific Information's (ISI) Science Citation Index (SCI) used as quantitative measures; and (c) a Top-Science Index based on publications in 45 leading natural and physical science journals, (d) a Top-Social Science Index based on publications in 44 leading social and behavioral science journals, and (e) an Arts and Humanities Index based on counts of competitive grants and fellowships given to a campus used as qualitative measures.

The application of these five indexes to the universe of research universities often reveal surprising finding about productivity of faculty at research universities (for example, faculty at private universities often far outstrip the productivity of faculty at public institutions). Graham and Diamond also demonstrate leverage effect of universities with medical schools and health centers (vastly increasing these institutions' capacities for attracting R&D funding) and the enormous advantages of private status (allowing these institutions to shape their institutions to sharpen their competitive advantage without constraints of broad social demands on public institutions). They also show the effects-often negative-of special institutional missions, such as the land-grant mission, and of regional location in their interpretations of findings. Thus, Graham and Diamond's findings are presented in a context of per capita production, private versus public status, medical facilities impact, special missions (sometimes which ruled such institutions out of the study), and regional location.

While acknowledging the methodological problems with their study (which pale in comparison to the methodological issues in earlier studies), Graham and Diamond introduce their own system of classification based upon faculty per capita comparisons and show that many of the elite research institutions remain among the top knowledge producers in the American system of higher education, but that they are joined in this new analysis by several newcomers. Their methods reclassified research universities (and reduced the universe of research institutions from 213 in the Carnegie classification to 203 in their revised classification) into four categories called Research 1, 2, 3, and 4 based on cutoff scores on the R&D index and the publications index (separate cutoff scores were used for public and private institutions for the top two categories).