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Background/context: A growing body of evidence indicates that trustees link the boards of research universities to organizations in other fields. It is less clear whether these board characteristics indicate distinct university contexts with which particular activities would be associated. Research questions: We ask three questions. The first two are descriptive and focus attention on the changing characteristics of university boards: How do boards tie universities to other sectors of society? How has the composition of these ties changed over time? The third is inferential and attends to possible relationships between board characteristics and university activities over time: Are there relationships between board ties to external organizations and university activities? Research design: We answered our first two questions using descriptive analyses. We answered the third question using regression analyses, inclusive of fixed board-level effects, which estimated the within-unit association among board characteristics, control characteristics, and the dependent variables associated with activities of interest. Data collection and analysis: Our sample consisted of the 54 boards that oversaw members of the Association of American Universities. Data were compiled in 10-year increments between 1985 and 2015. Historical data on university boards were created using Standard and Poor's Register of Corporations, Directors, and Executives and the Capital IQ Personal Intelligence database, both of which provided time-verified data about the affiliations of individual trustees at a given moment in time (e.g., 1985, 1995). We merged these data with information on university characteristics drawn from existing secondary data sources. Findings: Consistent with other analyses, sampled boards were increasingly connected to organizations in other fields over time. Connections grew especially rapidly between 1995 and 2015, with particularly notable growth in ties to the finance industry. In inferential analyses, the total number of ties to external organizations was associated with increases in total publications and with the share of publications in the biological sciences. Board characteristics were not associated with variation in other variables (e.g., endowment growth). Conclusions/recommendations: Our findings suggest that board characteristics are more likely to be associated with some university activities than others. It is less clear why this is the case. Our paper therefore lays important groundwork for future research on the ways in which individual trustees may directly coordinate, indirectly facilitate, or be selected because of their ties to particular external organizations.

Despite the importance of trustees as leaders in US higher education institutions, our knowledge and understanding of their behavior is limited. This is increasingly problematic as trustees engage more directly with institutions as institutional boundaries have become more porous. We utilize social network analysis and document analysis of exchanges to explore trustees' involvement in a qualitative comparative case study of four elite US research universities. We draw on the microfoundations tradition of neo-institutional theory to frame and evaluate how the actions of these individuals reproduce, expand and reorganize these institutions and their boundaries. Results show that these leaders are heavily involved with the universities they govern, but in widely varied ways and to different degrees. We inductively derive two forms of trusteeship -- traditional trusteeship (e.g., governance) and expanded trusteeship (e.g., capacity building and collaborative partnerships) -- that occur unevenly across our four institutions. These findings demonstrate that the nature of trusteeship at US research universities varies across institutions in profound ways that have substantial consequences for their boundaries, behaviors, and governance as well as the organizational stratification in the field of US higher education.

Trustees span the boundaries between universities and their environments, and therefore may connect universities to other organizations. We use social networks and latent profile analyses to chart changes in the affiliations that trustees of AAU member universities maintained with other organizations from 1975 through 2015. Results identify a well-established hierarchy of connectivity across elite universities. We also chart change in profile membership over time. We observe decline in connectivity from 1975 to 1995, followed by a period of resettlement characterized by a steepened hierarchy of affiliations and a growing number of very highly connected boards. Evidence suggests that boards at the top of the connectivity hierarchy differ systematically from those with fewer affiliations. By 2015, very highly connected boards generally oversaw well-resourced private universities. A few public boards were once very highly connected, but this became less common over time. These results suggest important implications for future research on the relationship between governance and institutions' financial positions.

Background/Context: Research on academic capitalism often maps changing conditions in which faculty work occurs without explaining the mechanisms by which change occurs. We use Fligstein and McAdam's theory of fields to posit that the changing conditions in which humanities faculty members work reflect activities in overlapping (the academic profession more generally) and proximate (university administration) fields. We seek to illuminate the ways in which humanities faculty experience heightened administrative authority and strategically respond. Research Questions: We ask: 1) How do faculty members in the humanities understand the changes in their field? 2) How do faculty members in the humanities understand their relationships to members of overlapping (e.g., faculty in other areas) and proximate (e.g., administrators) fields? and 3) How do faculty members in the humanities strategize to improve their positions? Participants: We conducted semistructured interviews with 46 faculty members in humanities fields with various appointments (tenured, tenure-track, non-tenure-track). Faculty participants were mainly housed in English and history, two of the largest humanities departments at many institutions, but also in philosophy and religion departments. Research Design: Our multiple case study design took place at two public research universities to understand how faculty respond to changing conditions. The research sites, typical of many public research universities, experienced declining direct government support and therefore conditions in which academic capitalist processes occur were present at both. Humanities departments contributed a large portion of student credit-hour production at both research sites, yet such funds were centralized and allocated by university administration. Data Collection and Analysis: Our interview protocol focused on faculty perceptions of resource allocation within the institution, allocation of work within the department, perceptions of the department relative to others, and how faculty structured their time and careers in response to various pressures inside and outside of their university. Semistructured interviews ranged from 25 and 90 minutes and were recorded and transcribed. We analyzed data using a priori and emergent codes which were grouped into broad themes reflecting faculty responses to changing conditions. Results: Three strategic responses emerged among humanities faculty members we interviewed: utilizing lower status faculty members, exploiting weaker units in the field, and forming alliances. Conclusions/Recommendations: Strategies result in the improved status of some individual faculty members but do not arrest the diminishing status of the humanities as a field. Our analysis suggests that field-level analyses entail implications for the study of academic work and processes in the academic capitalism tradition.