David Weerts

Over the past fifteen years, my scholarly work has focused on helping college and university leaders build productive relationships with external partners including state policy makers, community partners, alumni, and donors. In pursuing this agenda, my research lies at the intersections of state-university relations, community engagement, institutional advancement, higher education leadership, and organizational development. My recent studies include historical analyses of state-university relations, longitudinal analyses of state appropriations for higher education, latent variable analyses predicting alumni support behaviors, and case studies of university-community engagement practices. These investigations rely on variety of disciplinary frames from economics, political science, sociology of organizations, social psychology, history, and religion.

My work on these topics has been greatly informed by my experiences as a major gifts officer at the University of Wisconsin Foundation and University of Minnesota Foundation, and as past director of the Center for Innovative Higher Education.