University Political Engagement: A Mess Worth Studying

In recent years, the spotlight has been on universities as they navigate the political climate in the United States. The public observes the political engagement of universities closely and is not afraid to hold universities accountable for their actions. Universities engage in politics in a variety of ways, including but not limited to, releasing a statement in response to a current event, congressional lobbying, filing an amicus curiae brief to the U.S. Supreme Court, and/or divesting financial holdings from a company for a political reason. Different incentives and stakeholders influence universities to engage or not to engage in politics, which has created a messy and chaotic landscape of political engagement.

This thesis works to understand what drives universities to engage in politics and identify potential patterns in university political engagement. I develop five hypotheses of what might drive universities to engage in politics: 1) institutional autonomy, 2) internal stakeholder pressure, 3) external stakeholder pressure, 4) the modern-day expectations of universities, and 5) materialism out of self-interest, and select ten opportunities for political engagement since 1960 on which to test the hypotheses.

In Chapter 2, I conduct a statistical analysis of an original data set for nine issue areas since 2014 to determine which factors potentially drove universities to engage in politics. In Chapter 3, I conduct a most-similar case study of two colleges to determine what might have driven one college to divest its financial holdings from apartheid-era South Africa in the 1980s and the other to not.

From this research, I conclude that the “type of issue” on which the university can engage might impact which hypothesis of university political engagement is supported. Second, support for a hypothesis might depend on the “level of engagement” required for the university to engage politically on a particular issue area. Future research is necessary to build upon these findings, but they are an important step in understanding what drives the political engagement of universities. Now more than ever, we must work to untangle the mess of university political engagement.