Community dynamics in a university environment.

Full Abstract

Scholars have characterized academic communities of faculty, administration, and students in U.S. universities as "organized anarchies." In contrast, we offer evidence that the community structures of two representative public university systems are notably systematic by applying empirical phase-diagram techniques from the nonlinear dynamics literature to reconstruct low-dimensional deterministic behavior from historic data on the coevolution of faculty, administration, and student populations in each system. Ecological community models, fit with population data for each university, reproduce the essence of this behavior. The models offer novel explanations of how university resources obtained from enrollments and other sources are systematically partitioned among faculty, administration, and student populations interacting in shifting and well-defined community roles. This work offers empirical evidence that ecological principles, typically reserved for characterizing nonhuman interactions in biological systems, can shed light on human interactions in social systems.

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Author information

Author/s: Huffaker, Ray (R); Mittelhammer, Ron (R); Barkley, Paul (P); Folwell, Raymond (R);

Affiliation: Department of Agricultural Economics, Washington State University, Pullman, WA 99164, USA. huffaker(-atsign-)wsu.edu

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Journal Article

Journal: Nonlinear dynamics, psychology, and life sciences (Nonlinear Dynamics Psychol Life Sci), published in United States. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2003-Apr; vol 7 (issue 2) : pp 181-203

Dates: Created 2003/07/23; Completed 2003/09/09; Revised 2004/11/17;

PMID: 12876440, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 11/6/2008)

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