Challenges to the Work Life of Academics: The Experience of a Renowned University in the Chinese Mainland

Under the major educational reform movement in the Chinese Mainland, which began in 1985, higher education was considered the most important apparatus for national development. The Ministry of Education initiated 'Project 985' to develop two top national universities into world-class universities. As part of this project to raise educational quality and academic standing, the Ministry of Education carried out a reform of the university personnel system. The reform aimed to launch a new system of employment practices based on performance and contract, with an emphasis on competition and rewards. This research focuses on the severe constraints academics at a sample university in China faced at the state, university and faculty level. First, at the state level, the state directly set the direction of academic research. Second, at the university level, the new employment reform was imposed using a top-down model. Most academics conformed to it but some employed a 'double bookkeeping' strategy. 'Administrative domination' also reflected a centralised approach at the university. Third, at the faculty level, a few academic-administrators held most of the decision making power. Academics urged the university to offer a more supportive environment for conducting genuine scholarship.     

Afro-Caribbean Immigrant Faculty Experiences in the American Academy: Voices of an Invisible Black Population

Afro-Caribbean immigrants have been an integral part of the history and shaping of the United States since the early 1900s. This current study explores the experiences of five Afro-Caribbean faculty members at traditionally White institutions of higher education. Despite the historical presence and influence of Afro-Caribbean communities and the efforts within education systems to address the needs of Afro-Caribbean constituents, Afro-Caribbean faculty members continue to be rendered indiscernible in higher education and to be frequently and erroneously perceived as African–Americans. The study examines the lived experiences of these individuals in the hegemonic White spaces they occupy at their institutions with both White and Black populations. Through their narratives, issues of stereotyping, microaggression, and isolation are addressed. The participants also offer solutions to address these issues by university administrators, department heads, faculty development professionals, diversity officers, policy makers, and other stakeholders. The voices in this study shed light on an overlooked, misunderstood, and under-researched population within our faculty ranks in the American Academy.     

Antecedents of organizational commitment among faculty: an exploratory study

Faculty are the main asset of a university and determine its success. The attitudes of faculty toward their institution play an especially important role in the academic profession. This study examines the specific antecedents of affective, normative and continuance commitment of faculty to their university. This study is an online survey of 317 faculty of Russian higher education institutions. The results of the regression analysis showed that being an undergraduate inbred (i.e. working at the university from which one graduated) predicted affective and normative commitment toward the university, while having a post at another higher education institution predicted only affective commitment. Faculty who work at several universities have lower levels of emotional attachment to the primary university.     

Faculty attitudes and training needs to respond the new European Higher Education challenges

The main objective of the Bologna Process is to create a “European space” for higher education that allows for comparability, compatibility, and coherence between the existing systems of higher education across Europe. This objective is commonly known as the European higher education area (EHEA). The creation of the EHEA is a new and specific challenge for higher education in Europe, one that depends upon improved faculty development and training across Europe. The integration of Spain and other European countries into European higher education more generally entails these challenges. In order for necessary changes in faculty development and training to take place, university managers and policy makers must account for designing training plans, as well the knowledge, attitudes and needs of faculty members. This investigation was undertaken with these themes in mind. Conducted in Madrid, Spain, it included 257 professors from ten different schools of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. The aim of the investigation was to understand faculty knowledge and attitudes about changes in higher education in Europe. Moreover, with an eye to helping faculty members cope with the change that is accompanying the creation of EHEA, the investigators sought to understand the importance that faculty members place upon professional development and how current approaches to professional development at the university level could be improved. The results indicate a degree of ignorance regarding changes in European higher education as well as a feeling of resistance on the part of many faculty members. While many faculty members consider knowledge of change processes and adaptability to be important qualities, faculty responses also indicate a clear need for guidance if they are going to integrate new learning models and adequate coping strategies into their work in higher education.     

加强和改进高校青年教师队伍建设的探讨

青年教师是高校教师队伍的重要组成部分,是推动高等教育事业科学发展、办好人民满意高等教育的重要力量。但目前高校青年教师队伍仍存在问题和不足,影响并制约着高等教育质量的提高,鉴于此,提出加强和改进高校青年教师队伍建设的措施,以期为全面提高高等教育质量提供助力。     

Learning to teach with the web: Factors influencing teacher education faculty

Professional development at postsecondary institutions has primarily been supported through a central faculty development center. With purposive sampling, this small case study explored the ways in which teacher education faculty members were influenced to participate in decentralized professional development focused on learning to teach with WebCT. Results suggest that university faculty were influenced by both intrinsic factors (including convenience, comfort, common interests, and future purposes) and an extrinsic factor (external pressures). This research suggests that these factors also contributed to the faculty's satisfaction with the professional development. A follow-up interview explored how faculty coped with budgetary limitations and encouragement to pursue other distance education technologies.     

How has Mexican faculty been trained? A national perspective and a case study

This article depicts how faculty members at Mexican higher education institutions have been prepared in order to assume their professional responsibilities. It relies on three elements: First, a secondary analysis of a national faculty survey composed of 3,861 faculty members from 65 institutions; second, 34 interviews conducted in eight higher education institutions; third, a primary analysis of an institution faculty survey in a public autonomous university. Results are presented regarding the following issues: first, the central traits of anticipatory or formative in-site faculty socialization; second, the changes in the highest degree faculty obtained at entry into academic life as compared to the obtained degree at the time of the survey; third, the formative time patterns during faculty’s higher education training, fourth, the conditions of study under which faculty members obtained their graduate degrees; and fifth, the academic inbreeding phenomenon.     

中国高校女教师队伍发展的现状分析

本文从社会性别和国际比较的视角对我国高校女教师队伍的发展现状进行了分析。论文以1994至2004年为研究范围,首先对我国高校女教职工队伍的基本构成及变化趋势进行分析,在此基础上,从性别视角对高校专任教师队伍的职称结构、学位结构和年龄结构进行量化研究,并进一步从女教授占教授总数比例的角度将我国女教师队伍置于国际视野之下进行比较,从而较为全面地对我国女教师队伍的发展状况在国际坐标中作出清晰的定位,最后,论文分析了女性在高级职称中占比例低的机构制度原因,同时指出高校女教师发展的现实策略。     

A game theoretic analysis of faculty competition and academic standards

Grade inflation, particularly but not exclusively in higher education, is a serious concern of educators, educational policy-makers and researchers. It has been suggested that student evaluations of faculty are among its principal causes because students tend to give favorable evaluations to professors who give high grades, and that these evaluations are used by university administrators as part of the criteria for promotions, salary increases and similar faculty benefits. This explanation suggests that faculty members compete for favorable student evaluations. It can be generalized to state that faculty members cooperate and compete not only for favorable evaluations, but also for the enrollment of students in the courses they teach. The relevance of faculty cooperation and competition suggests that the Theory of Games could be a useful instrument to analyze the interactions among university professors. The object of this paper is to present a model based on these assumptions and to analyze the consequences that can be derived from it that are relevant for university policy decisions.     

Exemplary senior faculty at research universities: Their guiding principles for balancing teaching and research

A qualitative, exploratory study consisting primarily of in-depth reflective interviews with ten exemplary, senior faculty at a large, southern, research university was conducted in 1993. One of the major goals of the study was to identify how exemplary senior faculty have balanced the roles of teaching and research within an institutional context that emphasizes research. The findings from this study indicate that how exemplary, faculty members balance the demands of teaching and research lies, in part, in ten guiding principles.Patricia Kalivoda works in the Office of Instructional Development at the University of Georgia. She holds an Ed.D. in higher education from the University of Georgia. Her scholarship focuses on faculty career development and faculty vitality.     

Impacts of university education reform on faculty perceptions of workload

Since the corporatization of national universities, the environment surrounding Japanese universities has dramatically changed in various respects. A series of government-led attempts have intended to support the domestic colleges and universities in gaining a competitive edge by improving the quality of teaching and research as well as guaranteeing the international validity of the country's higher education system. Impacts of all the challenges that have been tackled with internal efforts in the last few years could be enormous on the personnel workload. However, little is known about the impacts of Japan's recent university education reform, particularly on the changing workload of the faculty who engage at the forefront in student teaching and advising, administrative roles as well as research activities. Using results from individual faculty interviews, this paper attempts to link the changing workload of Japanese professors with specific reasons that are rooted in the country's recent university education reform. Reviewing the effects of the reform on faculty workload provides us with important insights for the long term and guides us to prevent the derailment from the endeavour to which a significant amount of resources have been dedicated by the country.     

试析菲律宾私立高等教育的政府资助体系

私立高等教育在菲律宾高等教育体系中一直占有重要地位,并为该国的经济建设和社会发展作出了很大贡献。为了提高私立高等教育的质量,菲律宾政府在学校建设、学生学业和教师发展等方面向私立院校提供了大量资助,但资助体系本身也存在一些问题。     

Blogging pragmatics and pedagogy: An adventure in faculty development

As university faculty are increasingly called upon to ‘do more with less,’ particularly to teach more students with fewer resources, technology can provide viable solutions to pedagogical dilemmas. Faculty developers are frequently tasked with introducing faculty to or coaching them in the use of technological solutions. With respect to blogs, the typical show-and-tell approach to technology awareness that our faculty development center uses seemed inadequate, given the complexity of blog design, implementation, and maintenance. Instead, we found the best way to instruct university faculty in the use of blogs is to give them an opportunity to participate in a blogging community as part of a Course in College Teaching (CCT). We experimented with two different approaches in two different sections of our CCT. This paper reports on the current blogging culture in higher education, describes our specific context for utilizing blogs, shares implementation decisions and learning affordances, and forwards a set of ‘lessons learned.’     

Responding to mission creep: faculty members as cosmopolitan agents

Across the field of U.S. higher education, regional teaching and comprehensive universities are striving for national research status. This tendency has most often been explored at the organizational level, but in this paper, the views and actions of faculty members are the unit of analysis. Based on qualitative data, I put forward a three pronged frame-work that organizes overarching faculty responses to one university’s transition. I focus most specifically on one faculty response, which I call operationalizing in order to show how faculty members take agency in a moment of complex change that illuminates tensions between faculty, university leaders and the field of higher education, more generally. Contributing to the literature on faculty agency, mission creep/striving and change in higher education, I unpack specific ideas and practices that faculty used as they took agency over their careers.     

Faculty accountability and faculty workload: A preliminary cost analysis of their relationship as revealed by PhD productivity

General concerns for faculty accountability are examined in the context of faculty workload and costs. Graduating a PhD student is used as the unit for analysis. The unit is compared to instructional productivity. The data came from a 10-year interval at a major graduate university. Six liberal arts departments with a 225-member faculty provide the PhD output and workload information. Work equivalents are determined from institutional and faculty self-reports. Graduating a PhD is found to be equivalent to one-third of a full workload. Implications are given for comparisons between programs within a university and between types of institutions in the larger system of higher education. Concerns also emerge for improved personnel practices with respect to faculty work assignments.     

新形势下高校教师专业发展与高等教育质量提升——第八届两岸高等教育学术研讨会综述

提高质量是今后若干年高等教育发展的核心.在第八届两岸高等教育学术研讨会上,两岸学者就当下高校教师专业发展所面对的境遇和机遇、教师在工作中所存在的困惑、高校在教师发展与管理等领域的经验和问题等展开了广泛而深入的交流.与会学者一致认为,高校教师的专业发展在高等教育质量提升战略中起着不可忽视的作用,而高校教师的专业发展需要政府、大学以及教师个人等各方面的努力.     

Teacher educators in deaf education: why they entered higher education and their current priorities and accomplishments.

The study presents information on why teacher educators in deaf education move from school classrooms to universities. These educators' priorities as university faculty are examined in regard to teaching, scholarship, and service; their scholarly productivity and perceptions of workplace conditions in school and university environments are studied. Findings show that these schoolteachers moved to higher education for various reasons, but primarily to pursue research and a scholarly life, and to have a greater influence on deaf and hard of hearing children and deaf education. As faculty, they are most interested in and committed to teaching; they publish at a modest rate. These educators perceive workplace conditions that support autonomy, flexible schedules, collegiality, and decision-making opportunities as more evident in university environments than in school environments. The researchers discuss the need for teacher educators in deaf education to pursue scholarly interests and to consider working with colleagues at the university and in schools to design collaborative research. Universities' need to support these efforts is also discussed.     

ENHANCING QUALITY - TENSIONS AND TENDENCIES IN AUSTRALIAN UNIVERSITIES

Presenting the comprehensive quality control measures which have been taken in Australian higher education in recent years, the author argues that the way they have been imposed from top down without proper consultations with the faculty/staff members of the institutions concerned have led to their being discredited at this level. She proposes ways in which evaluation and awards systems might be introduced through proper consultations with staff/faculty members in ways which engage the support of the latter and are then conducted with their co‐operation and collaboration. In particular, she describes how the Guidelines for Effective University Teaching were developed by the Australian Vice‐Chancellors Committee and are now being introduced into the various Australian higher education institutions as the basis of an effective teaching evaluation and improvement system.     

Evaluation of adjunct faculty in higher education institutions

The role that part‐time faculty play in higher education is changing. No longer are part‐time faculty used on an occasional basis at a few institutions. These individuals now play a critical part in the delivery of higher education to students. This study was developed to answer questions regarding how the performance of adjunct faculty is evaluated. The researcher gathered data on what sources of information were used to evaluate adjunct faculty, and how this information was used by various administrators during evaluation and reappointment decisions. The underlying goal was to develop a better understanding of current evaluation practices so that higher education administrators can ensure that quality learning opportunities are available in the classroom.     

高校教师入职培训必要性探析

我国高校新进教师的入职培训非常必要,本文从三方面进行了阐述:一是从"高校学生"到"高校教师"的转变来分析我国高校新进教师的职业准备状况,二是从"职前教育"到"职后发展"的过渡来分析高校新进教师的入职期特点,三是从"精英高等教育"到"大众化高等教育"的发展分析我国高教质量建设面临的挑战,三个维度的分析都说明我国高校新进教师的入职培训必要且任重道远,值得关注,急需重视。