Abstract:

This paper reviews an extensive and diverse literature on academic governance and theorizes the extent to which academic governance, academic freedom, and disciplinary guided research is compatible with new models of social entrepreneurship. Given the challenges of poverty, health, safety, basic education, and so forth in developing countries, academic structures, including peer reviewed scholarship, have failed to keep up in terms of providing immediate solutions. Social entrepreneurs have stepped in increasingly over the past few decades and have provided unique solutions. Thus, universities have attempted to align with non-academic entities. A clear example of this is Teach for All/Teach for America. The organization, which aims to provide high quality teachers (defined by an elite higher education experience) in schools marked by high poverty, has intended to get around what it believes are the monopolizing entities of universities in terms of teacher certification. Though initially higher education institutions saw it as a threat, they have increasingly attempted to align themselves as partners with Teach for All/Teach for America, primarily because not doing so would have more immediate negative consequences.

Indeed, for the very survival of the institution of higher education, such alignments are necessary. Yet what gets lost in the academic tradition with such alignments? This paper explores from a variety of different examples of alignments between universities and social entrepreneurs the configurations that are useful to both the necessity of problem solving and the the furthering of the academic tradition. In other words, it seeks to understand how universities can maintain their scholarly structures, including the hallmarks of academia (tenure, peer review, academic freedom), without jeopardizing any additional leadership in solving the world's problems. Over thirty alignments are analyzed for the features that promote and inhibit (a) institutional survival and (b) problem solving. This research provides very clear guidance on what universities must do to assure academic processes can continue to provide legitimate solutions to societal problems in the coming decades. The paper concludes with very specific steps that universities must take to become more relevant while still maintaining their rigorous academic policies and structures.

Keywords:

Higher education, research, social entrepreneurship, partnerships.