Reason before passion: faculty views on internationalization in higher education

In this era of globalization, internationalization—both as an idea and an agenda—is receiving widespread attention at academic institutions across North America. Although faculty are necessarily key participants in initiatives to internationalize academia, surprisingly little work has been published that addresses the roles, responsibilities, and problems faced by the faculty on an operational level. This article has been written to provide administrators with some insight into faculty perspectives on the goals, strategies, and processes of internationalization. The authors present a case study of internationalization processes currently underway in the School of Architecture and Allied Arts at the University of Oregon. They discuss a faculty-driven approach that focused on mapping internationalization, addressing barriers to internationalization, and improving structures and systems to enhance internationalization. An in-depth critical analysis of the case leads to recommendations and a framework for navigating diverse tensions and responsibilities implicit in an internationalization imperative.

Reputation and reality: ranking major disciplines in Australian universities

League tables that rank universities may use reputational measures, performance measures, or both. Each type of measure has strengths and weaknesses. In this paper, we rank disciplines in Australian universities both by reputation, using an international survey of senior academics, and with actual performance measures. We then compare the two types of measures to see how closely they match. The criterion we use for both sets of measures is ‘international academic standing’. We find a high correlation between the survey results and the various measures of research performance. We also find a correlation between the quality of student intake and the survey rankings, but the satisfaction levels of recent graduates do not correlate well with the rankings by academics. We then construct an overall measure of performance, which gives very similar rankings to the survey results, especially for the top-ranked institutions.

Faculty and student engagement in the Argentine grassroots rebellion: toward a democratic and emancipatory vision of the university

Following Argentina’s economic collapse of December 2001, the authors examine the engagement of university faculty and students in various grassroots movements. Based on a qualitative study involving 24 formal structured interviews, 18 informal interviews, observation-based field work, and document analysis, the authors identify key forms of faculty and student engagement as well as the manner in which individuals discussed the relationship between universities and society. Findings are used to advance the idea of a more democratic and emancipatory vision of the contemporary university and build on the work of Boaventura de Sousa Santos. Throughout the article, the authors ground their discussion in international/comparative literature addressing globalization, neoliberalism, university reform, and social movements.

Remarks Made During “Dialogue on Intellectual Diversity,” a Forum Held 11 October 2007 at the University of Missouri–St. Louis

In 2006, a bill was submitted in the Missouri Legislature designed to address issues raised during a lawsuit by a Missouri State University social work student contesting requirements that Missouri public colleges and universities take steps to insure tolerance of diverse perspectives in the classroom and on campus. Although the legislation did not pass, it motivated university administrators among other measures to sponsor a forum on “intellectual diversity,” held on 11 October 2007 on the University of Missouri–St. Louis campus. In his remarks as a faculty panelist, J. Martin Rochester makes five distinct points about the realities and pitfalls of regulating tolerance and the true meaning of diversity on a college campus.

Exam Scams and Classroom Flimflams: Urban Legends as an Alternative Lens for Viewing the College Classroom Experience

Campus-based urban legends have the potential to convey and construct student culture in higher education. Basic qualitative and humanistic research methods were used to collect, analyze, and interpret legends related to the academic experience of collegiate life.

Graduation Rates and Accountability: Regressions Versus Production Frontiers

This paper suggests an alternative to the standard practice of measuring the graduation rate performance using regression analysis. The alternative is production frontier analysis. Production frontier analysis is appealing because it compares an institution’s graduation rate to the best performance instead of the average performance. The paper explains the differences between these two types of analysis and provides examples of their application using data for 187 national universities.

Intellectual innovation or intellectual retrofitting: on agency, culture and access to science education

A great challenge in education research involves the difficulty of differentiating between studies that apply commonly understood theoretical perspectives and recognizing studies that merely rename old theoretical frameworks. This conflict between intellectual innovation and intellectual retrofitting emerges as central to Basu, Calabrese-Barton, Clairmont, and Lock’s exploration of the relationship between critical agency and student identity development in science.

The competitive funding of university research: the case of Finnish science universities

The present European higher education policy and research policy can be characterized as emphasizing external financing of universities, competition between and within universities, and the need for a more practical and economically profitable output from research and education. A theoretical framework of analysing the impacts of this new rationale can be constructed on the following two premises. First, the funding structure of universities and university research is a main factor that influences the situations in which universities and their members make their decisions on teaching, research and administering. Second, universities consist of various groups of personnel each having and developing objectives and preferences of their own. This theoretical framework is applied to the Finnish science university system. On the basis of the analysis it can be seen that although the new policy probably has clarified the division of labour between universities, there have emerged some negative unintended consequences of the new funding structure. Indications of weakening performance in research and education can be identified in the empirical analysis.

A research framework for creative and imitative reasoning

This conceptual research framework addresses the problem of rote learning by characterising key aspects of the dominating imitative reasoning and the lack of creative mathematical reasoning found in empirical data. By relating reasoning to thinking processes, student competencies, and the learning milieu it explains origins and consequences of different reasoning types.

Strategies and Intervening Factors Influencing Student Social Interaction and Experiential Learning in an Interdisciplinary Research Team

Faculty have long incorporated students into interdisciplinary research projects to meet increasingly common demands for collaborative research by federal funding agencies. Despite the critical role of experiential learning in building student research skills and capacity, few have explored social interaction mechanisms used to facilitate student experiential learning in an interdisciplinary research team. Drawing upon the New Rural Economy project as a case study, interviews with 13 students from eight Canadian universities were conducted to explore these social interaction mechanisms. While findings revealed an array of social interaction mechanisms used to develop student learning networks, the quality of these mechanisms were mixed; thereby influencing the utilization of these networks for guidance and feedback. As faculty organize social interaction mechanisms, they should consider factors such as previous experience, student and faculty relationships, finances, language, gender, ethnicity, and other issues, that will have an impact on student engagement with experiential learning.

Replication and Pedagogy in the History of Psychology VI: Egon Brunswik on Perception and Explicit Reasoning

Egon Brunswik (1903–1955) first made an interesting distinction between perception and explicit reasoning, arguing that perception included quick estimates of an object’s size, nearly always resulting in good approximations in uncertain environments, whereas explicit reasoning, while better at achieving exact estimates, could often fail by wide margins. An experiment conducted by Brunswik to investigate these ideas was never published and the only available information is a figure of the results presented in a posthumous book in 1956. We replicated and extended his study to gain insight into the procedures Brunswik used in obtaining his results. Explicit reasoning resulted in fewer errors, yet more extreme ones than perception. Brunswik’s graphical analysis of the results led to different conclusions, however, than did a modern statistically-based analysis.

Schools which are named, shamed and blamed by the media: school accountability in Norway

Since Norway introduced tests and other types of measurements the press, with a negative bias, has placed the spotlight on those schools which performed badly in attainment measurements. The press reconstructs from public sources “league tables” of aggregated student achievements but at present the official position opposes the public ranking of schools. This article discusses the consequences within schools of such negative media coverage and the responses within badly performing schools that have been named, shamed and blamed in prominent headlines. This media spotlight brings into play a complex emotional process which may spur schools into improvement mechanisms or provoke a hostile reaction, or result in panic measures.

Emerging from the Pipeline: African American Students,Socioeconomic Status,and College Experiences and Outcomes

This study focuses on how social class affects the college experiences and outcomes for African American students in 4-year colleges and universities. Using a national, longitudinal data base, the findings indicate that low SES African American students have less contact with faculty, study less, are less involved with student organizations, work more, and have lower grades than do their high SES peers or all African American students. Furthermore, 9 years after entering college, low SES students report lower incomes, lower rates of degree attainment and lower aspirations than their high SES peers, and were less likely to have attended graduate school. Logistic regression results indicate that sex, college GPA, and plans following college significantly affect the likelihood that a student will attend graduate school.

‘Interdisciplinary strategies’ in U.S. research universities

In the context of increasing support for interdisciplinary modes of research, many in the policy, scientific, and academic communities propose that universities should change structurally to reduce the barriers to investigation that involves researchers from multiple disciplines. This paper examines ‘interdisciplinary strategies’ in U.S. research universities—deliberate efforts to spur collaborative research across traditional departmental and disciplinary boundaries, including the creation and adaptation of university policies, practices, and structures. It identifies and analyzes the use of incentive grants to initiate new interdisciplinary units, the establishment of ‘campus-wide institutes’ that steer campus investments in interdisciplinary areas, and new modes of faculty hiring and evaluation. Illustrative examples are provided, and the implications of these strategies are discussed.

“Coming Out” in a Feminist Classroom

Ideological differences in a writing class evoke the passion of political sensitivities. A graduate student tells of “coming out” as a pro-life advocate in an essay before his feminist classmates and professor. The exchange created instant and irreconcilable enemies, but he also found some unexpected support from a hesitant voice within that classroom.

Urban science classrooms and new possibilities: on intersubjectivity and grammar in the third space

In this article I explore research in urban science education inspired by the work of Kris Gutierrez in a paper based on her 2005 Scribner Award. It addresses key points in Gutierrez’s work by exploring theoretical frameworks for research and approaches to teaching and research that expand the discourse on the agency of urban youth in corporate school settings. The work serves as an overview of under-discussed approaches and theoretical frameworks to consider in teaching and conducting research with marginalized urban youth in urban science classrooms.

Social order perspective on raising student achievement

Despite significant and sustained gains recorded on the national secondary school leaving examinations between 1999–2004, South Africa’s large-scale secondary school reform has receive little international attention. Defenders of the reforms have argued that the ‘success’ in raising student achievement extended beyond gains in the percentage pass rates to include increased numbers of students completing secondary schooling, a growth in the number of students eligible for admissions to university and a decline in the number of ‘collapsed’ secondary schools in disadvantaged communities. Using a comprehensive dataset that includes national examination results for all candidates between 1996 and 2004, survey information from a group of ‘collapsed’ secondary schools located in disadvantaged communities, qualitative data from school ethnographies, as well as official and unofficial documentary sources, the paper locates student achievement within a framework of structural change in the post-apartheid social order. It shows how student achievement is embedded in complex shifts in the state, economy and civil society. Specifically, the paper examines how structural shifts are enacted at the levels of time-in-school, student expectations, school choice and student selectivity.

University–industry relations in Bolivia: implications for university transformations in Latin America

This article examines the implications of how academics respond to the debate on the production of knowledge and its transfer to the productive sector, for the transformation of Latin American universities. The empirical analysis is based on a survey of 349 lecturers from Bolivian public universities, which inquired into aspects of university–industry relations (UIR). Although the results indicate that lecturers are in favour of relations with firms, there are several barriers to such relationships, such as lack of institutional support, generally unfavourable atmosphere in universities, and an industrial structure comprising few firms in knowledge-intensive sectors and firms with low absorptive capacity. In the context of Bolivia, unlike what occurs in developed countries, UIR have been configured around scientifically unimportant activities—technological support and internship schemes to place students in firms—which has had a negative effect on the consolidation of research, an academic activity, to which lecturers devote little of their time. The results of our study show the tensions that exist in efforts to change the university model; there is a reluctance to intensify the commercialisation of research results, and a lack of enthusiasm for introducing complex relationship mechanisms, such as the creation of hybrid structures.

Postgraduate coursework in Australia: issues emerging from university and industry collaboration

Coursework masters degrees in Australia have experienced rapid, decentralised growth since deregulation at the end of the 1980s. The result is an extraordinarily high level of diversity and some confusion as to standards, strategic positioning, purpose and educational approaches. Throughout this period of growth, a sense that large-scale (often distance-education based) collaboration between universities and with industry would be beneficial has not always led to successful outcomes. Using a new collaborative, industry-funded postgraduate coursework program as a case study, this paper describes the issues that decision-makers need to address and evaluates the challenges and benefits of the coursework masters in higher education. The outcomes of industry surveys, student interviews and action research suggest that postgraduate coursework can facilitate technology transfer and aid capacity building, through mechanisms similar to ‘mode 2’ research. With some additional systems to ensure sustainability and standards, this could position coursework masters to be uniquely valuable nationally.