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

Academe, Jul/Aug 1998 by Geiger, Roger

Hugh Davis Graham and Nancy Diamond. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins

University Press, 1997, pp. 319, $39.95

THE VARIOUS RANKINGS OF UNIVERsities or their parts are often derided as conferring no more than bragging rights. Yet hierarchy may be the most fundamental attribute of American higher education. Hierarchy-or hierarchies, to be more precise-reflects the distribution of vital resources such as talented undergraduate and graduate students, productive scholars and scientists, support for research, and level of endowments. Reputation and prestige strongly influence the future flow of re sources. Forget bragging rights: the competition for relative distinction is one of the most dynamic forces in our system.

In The Rise of American Research Universities, Hugh Davis Graham and Nancy Diamond develop a novel taxonomy and ranking system intended to identify the emergence of a new class o rising research universities. The book contains an overview of the postwar evolution of academic research, but the central premise is that some comparatively unrecognized institutions have developed quality programs and deserve a place among the perennially topranked institutions. The usual gross measures of research expenditures or peer ratings obscure the accomplishments of these institutions by favoring large size and established reputation. Hence the need for a more discriminating means of evaluating the accomplishments of a wider range of institutions.

To avoid conflating quantity and quality, the authors converted all measures into per-capita or per-faculty figures. They used three kinds of data: institutional expenditures of federal research funds; publications by university-affiliated authors; and specially constructed quality measures consisting of (a) publications in forty-five leading science journals, (b) publications in forty-four leading social science journals, and (c) competitive grants and fellowships in the arts and humanities. Much like the other rating systems, however, methodology to a large extent determines the findings.

Questions might be raised about each of the indicators. For example, only federal research funds are counted, but the federal contribution to institutional research expenditures can easily vary from 40 to 80 percent. For publications, no allowance is made for multiple authorship. And many quibbles could be made about the choice of journals used for quality measures. Just two history journals are included, compared with seven in economics and six in sociology. Engineering has two journals, while the physical sciences have fifteen.

These numbers provide the numerators, but generally, when ratios are employed, the devil is in the denominator-in this case, the num ber of full-time faculty. The basic uncertainty is the extent to which the individuals represented in the denominator are responsible for the phenomenon represented in the numerator. In the case of federally funded research, the numerator contains both faculty and nonfaculty grant recipients, while the denominator is the entire faculty, including those who have nonfederal research grants and those not engaged in funded research.

The same problem of fit between numerator and denominator exists for publications, drawn from the natural sciences (65 percent), social sciences (23 percent), and humanities (12 percent). The choice of publications represents fairly well those universities focused on letters and sciences, but less so large state universities with multiple professional schools.

For example, what the authors call the "private advantage" reflects the fact that well-endowed private universities with small and productive faculties (hence smaller denominators) score significantly higher than their public counterparts. The authors frankly acknowledge that such differences are "an artifact of the method of institutional measurement itself." They nevertheless argue that the private advantage is real despite the methodological bias.

The structural difference at the root of this comparison pertains chiefly to the wealthier, Carnegie-classified Research I private universities. As one descends the Carnegie classification to Research II and doctoral-granting universities, the private advantage disappears. This interesting finding seems to suggest that private universities at these levels more closely resemble public institutions in their teaching and service roles and in their corresponding faculty structures. However, if the private advantage inheres only in Research I private institutions, perhaps it is as much an effect of wealth as of private control.

The most novel measures used in this study are the quality indicators for natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Here, however, the denominator problem becomes insuperable. In each of these areas, the achievements of one subset of faculty are divided by the entire faculty. Thus, the arts and humanities awards are divided by the number of faculty in the humanities, plus engineers, agronomists, and others. By such a calculation, the 23 awards to the University of California, Santa Cruz, yield a higher per-capita score than the 110 awards to the University of Michigan. Looking only at English, however, Michigan had 15 awards for 50 faculty members, while Santa Cruz had 1 award for 14. Here the denominator bears so little relationship to the numerator that the ratios are meaningless.