International Higher Education, Winter 2005

The Character of the Entrepreneurial University

Burton R. Clark
Burton R. Clark is the Allan M. Cartter Professor Emeritus of Higher Education, at the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, University of California at Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA. E-mail: clark@gseis.ucla.edu.

How are entrepreneurial universities initially formed and how do they sustain themselves? In Creating Entrepreneurial Universities (Pergamon-Elsevier, 1998), I traced developments in a few European universities from 1980 to 1995 to determine how they had gone about significantly changing the way they operated—how they moved to a much more proactive style. I argued that five pathways of transformation could be induced from these cases: diversified funding base; strengthened steering core; expanded developmental periphery; stimulated academic heartland; and integrated entrepreneurial culture. More recently, my latest book, Sustaining Change in Universities: Continuities in Case Studies and Concepts (Open University Press, 2004), substantially expands on that earlier analysis and provides a further look at the evolving character of the entrepreneurial university.

In the new book I searched for exemplars of entrepreneurial action—and stronger conceptualization. I turned to 14 internationally distributed case studies to clarify anew the earlier stated pathways of transformation and, further, to suggest dynamics that produce a new steady state committed to ongoing change. Five narratives pursue sustaining developments during the late 1990s in the European universities previously studied: the University of Warwick in England, the University of Strathclyde in Scotland, the University of Twente in the Netherlands, the University of Joensuu in Finland, and Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden. Three new accounts, drawn from the work of other scholars, portray transformed universities in Africa (University of Makerere in Uganda), Latin America (Catholic University of Chile), and Australia (Monash University). Additional brief narratives report on six diverse research universities in the United States (two private, four public), which exemplify aggressive institution building under the spur of intense competition—Stanford and MIT, Michigan and UCLA, North Carolina State University and Georgia Institute of Technology.

The newly highlighted dynamics of change stress, first, mutually supportive interaction among transforming elements; second, a newly established forward-looking “perpetual momentum”; and, third, behind the scenes, an institutionalized volition, a collective will, stimulates and guides a self-sustaining and self-selecting forcefulness in responding to societal demands. In one case after another, we find an “assertive bureaucracy” of change: such professional staff as development officers, grants and contracts officers, and continuing education officers—nonacademic personnel who are much more forward-oriented than the traditional “administrative” staff who served on behalf of the funding public authority and higher regulatory boards and councils. We see the overall sustaining capacity become a virtual steady state of change, a character not dependent on a commanding CEO or a brilliant management team. Change becomes a habit, an institutionalized state of being.

Since each university is unique in combining common elements with particular features, the case studies produce “amplifying variations” of the overall themes. Chalmers, in Sweden, illuminates particularly well how to generate centers of initiative in a small to medium size university; the Catholic University of Chile dramatizes how to modernize an old-fashioned faculty in a decade and a half; the University of Michigan reveals how a massive public university, busily multiplying resources, can match up against the sharp competition of the richest private universities in the world. The exhibited variations are as much a source of transferable insight as the old and new concepts that bring formal order to wide-ranging empirical examination of very complex entities. Case study narratives additionally weave uniquenesses around common elements and their amplifying variations. There is, finally, only one MIT, one Twente, one Monash.

Without doubt, active complex universities, operating in different complex environments, develop complex differentiated answers. In contradistinction to system-level analysis, institution-level inquiry stays close to those realities. System analysis misses key aspects of university development, particularly the organic nature of university change. It readily loses its way in the swirling fog of national policy statements and the iron cages of categorical state steering. Institutional studies are better grounded.

In short, institutional case studies allow us to identify instructive exemplars of successful university adaptability under a wide range of and cultural conditions in various societies. The needed exemplars provide on-the-ground demonstration of how, in the study of universities, we can combine research for use with research for understanding.

From such cumulative analysis, we gradually grasp the entrepreneurial university as a place possessing a capacity for change. We learn also that within universities that is a collective phenomenon, an accumulation of entrepreneurial groups stretching from disciplinary departments and interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research centers at the base, to faculties and schools at intermediary levels, to the entire university. We find faculty and managers intertwined at all levels, encased in a common understanding that academic values are the bedrock upon which managerial values are brought into play.

Perhaps most enabling of all, we find the entrepreneurial university to be a place that diversifies income to the point where its financial portfolio is not heavily dependent upon the whims of politicians and bureaucrats who occupy the seats of state policy, nor upon business firms and their “commercial” influence, nor even upon student tuition as main support. Funds flow not only from such well-identified sources but also, crucially, from a host of public agencies (other than the core-support ministry or department) and alumni and other private donors who provide moral and political support as well as direct year-to-year funding and accumulation of endowment. Effective stewardship comes to depend not on the state or on “the market,” but on university self-guidance and self-determination. The entrepreneurial university does indeed provide a new basis for achievement.

My qualitative case studies of exemplars of change offer a strong lesson for future research. Concepts induced from exemplary practices are strengthened by the reassurance of solid facts—documented actions taken in defined contexts. More good case studies that lay bare those facts will be needed to further illuminate the character of entrepreneurial universities emerging and evolving at a rapid rate, internationally, in the early years of the 21st century.