Understanding the University-Sustainability Link through Media: A Spanish Perspective

This article provides a procedure to universities for understanding the social perception of their activities in the sustainability field, through the analysis of news published in the printed media. It identifies the Spanish news sources that have covered this issue the most and the topics that appear in that news coverage. Using a probabilistic topic model called Latent Dirichlet Allocation, the study includes the nine dominant topics within a corpus with more than seventeen thousand published news items (totaling approximately five and a quarter million words) from a database of almost thirteen hundred national press sources between 2014 and 2017. The study identifies the news sources that published the most news on the issue. It is also found that the amount of news on sustainability and universities declined during the covered period. The nine identified topics point towards the relevance of higher education institutions’ activities as drivers of sustainability. The social perception encapsulated within the topics signals how the public is interested in these activities. Therefore, we find some interesting relationships between sustainable development, higher education institutions’ missions and behaviors, governmental policies, university funding and governance, social and economic innovation, and green campuses in terms of the overall goal of sustainability.