Academic Staff Participation in University Governance: Internal Responses to External Quality Demands

Higher education in Croatia isconfronted with new trends and quality demandsmostly connected with Bologna processes. It isassumed that Croatian universities with theirexisting governance structures, characterisedby strong state regulation and weakinstitutional administration, cannot respondeffectively to new demands. Findings of thesurvey on conceptions of governance at theCroatian universities are presented in thepaper, with its main aim to explore academicstaff's perception of university governance.The idea of the university as a ``learningorganisation' with strong leadership and engagedacademic staff is taken as the desired model.Mapping the opinions of academic staff on thepresent governance structures, their role ingovernance issues, and making an inventory oftheir perceptions of strengths and weaknessesof governance processes, forms importantbackground for reflections on adequatemodifications in academic governance.     

Towards More Adaptive Universities: Trends of Institutional Reform in Europe

European universities are increasingly facing competitive environments, declining resources, and changing societal needs. Factors influencing this development are globalization, the changing role of the state, economic restructuring, information technology, and student and staff mobility. Adaptation to these new environmental conditions involves changes in major structures and processes of academic organization. This article describes these environmental demands and presents institutional responses illustrated through empirical results. The importance of governance, management, and leadership regarding adaptation are of special concern in this analysis. Implications for higher education research and practice include consequences for university management as well as for new areas for empirical work.     

Academics' perceptions of their professional development needs related to leadership and management: What can we learn?

Enquiries into the governance, structure and management of higher education institutions across the globe have stimulated changes to the legislative and policy frameworks within which universities operate and to their organizational structures and processes. These changes have subsequently brought into question the proper role of academics in relation to the leadership and management of their departments/institutions. While mainstream academic staff conceive of academic leadership as being strictly associated with teaching, research and community outreach, university administrators and policy makers conceptualize it more broadly. Their definitions often include the management of change, quality, information, finance, and physical and human resources - functions that many mainstream academics perceive as being the responsibility of departmental/institutional administrative or support staff. Such differences create major challenges for academic development units. What type of training should they provide? Should they embrace activities that support these new conceptions of leadership and management? These are among the central issues explored in this paper.     

Changes in organising and managing research in universities: Reconstruction or rediscovery

Abstract

The ways in which research production is organised in contemporary universities are different both from the often commonly expressed view of the individual researcher discovering new knowledge working alone, and from the traditional professor‐assistants organisation as the basic research production unit. This article presents ‐ on the basis of an empirical study of social science research organising in four different universities ‐ a number of characteristics of how basic research organisation takes place. The most are described common features of such organisation models described. The factors constructing new more dynamic and integrated models in practice are analysed. And the demands for efficient university governance structures, to ensure the development of basic organisations which can produce short‐ and long‐term high quality and successful research, are discussed.     

Preparing for new academic roles: An holistic approach to development

Abstract

In recent years there has been sustained emphasis in many countries on preparing academic staff for their teaching role. However, the necessary emphasis on teaching has distracted attention from the fact that university teachers are facing many other complex demands. University teachers are being appointed from a greater range of backgrounds and types of experience and performing an increasingly diverse range of roles. Moreover, while the emphasis has tended to be on the needs of full‐time tenurable staff, the numbers of casual and contract staff have grown. While much has been achieved, staff development provision is not coordinated, resources are not necessarily provided, centralized schemes do not link with departmental activities and responsibilities are often ambiguous.

The paper identifies some of the influences on preparation for academic roles being faced today and argues that new frameworks are needed. It suggests that a holistic view should be adopted: one which places as central the staff members and their roles, and which emphasizes negotiation and flexibility in response to the diversity of academic activities. The paper outlines the dimensions of such an approach.     

Blurring Boundaries and Changing University Staff: The Case of the University of Hong Kong

In the changing higher education environment, universities increasingly engage in areas outside the traditional teaching and research missions. The new missions extend over wide yet specialized areas, such as technological advancement, internationalization, entrepreneurship, and enhancement of teaching and learning. To effectively handle these areas, universities require specific talents that may not be found in conventional academic and administrative cadres. The transformation highlights blurred boundaries between academic and non-academic spheres of the university. Situated in the University of Hong Kong (HKU), this paper explores how the university utilizes new professionals and administrative staff in new missions. Qualitative interviews with university staff reveal their profiles and perceptions in evolving organizational structures. By examining understudied subjects in Hong Kong, it discusses implications of changing university staff and how universities may optimize their new talent.     

Study on the Current State of Textual Expression in Private University Charters in China: Based on Textual Analysis of the Charters of 105 Private Undergraduate Universities

Abstract

The key task in the establishment of a university charter is ensuring that the text of the charter is in conformity with the law, in compliance with regulations, and rational. This paper proposes a system of observed indicators for textual expression in private university charters in China, including 6 dimensions for Level 1 indicators and 20?key elements for charter content. Through textual analysis of the charters of 105 private undergraduate universities in China, the authors found that, in terms of their textual expression, private university charters universally exhibit issues such as incompleteness of the key elements of content, failure to highlight individual characteristics, an imbalanced internal power structure, unstandardized operations, imperfect mechanisms for democracy and oversight, and so on. The state’s implementation of categorized management of nonprofit and for-profit private schools should be regarded as a golden opportunity to further strengthen the effective supply of external institutions for private universities, perfect the internal governance structures of private universities, improve the mechanisms by which academic organizations at private universities exercise their roles, and achieve effective linkage between private university charters and concrete internal regulations.     

Reinventing Governance: The Role of Boards of Governors in the New Austrian University

In the last decade, the university sector in many European countries has undergone manifold changes in relation to the design of governance structures and processes. Accordingly, a board of governors with far-reaching competences was implemented by the latest reform of the Austrian higher education system in 2002. Drawing on an empirical research project, this paper contrasts the basic ideas of this reform with insights into the concrete practice of the new governance structure. The results show that board members’ personal factors such as personality, experience, and their attitude towards the multi-faceted nature of university governance, strongly influence the boards’ identity formation and actual work. It is concluded that such factors must be regarded when implementing governing boards in universities by means of university reform.

     

Teacher education budget cuts in Romania and the US: points of contrast and comparison

Background

Budgets for teacher education programmes have been substantially reduced as a result of the global economic crisis.

Purpose

The purpose of this study was to compare the teacher education budget cutting processes and procedures for universities in Romania versus one university in the United States.

Sample

The data were collected from six Romanian universities that all have teacher education programmes. These universities represent the range of higher education quality in the country as indicated by their publication rates. Data from these universities were compared with those from the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR). UNR is the flagship university in the Nevada System of Higher Education, and Nevada has been harder hit by the recent global economic crisis than any other state in the United States and cuts to teacher education there have been substantial.

Design and methods

Data about the budget cutting processes and decisions in the teacher education programmes of six Romanian universities were collected through an electronic survey. These data were compared with the processes and decisions made at the UNR.

Results

The budget cutting processes in Romania were less transparent, and involved less input from stakeholders such as faculty and staff. Most decisions were made at a higher level of authority in Romania, and cuts in Romania were more likely to be across the board rather than more strategically targeted as they were in Nevada.

Conclusions

These differences are discussed in terms of the historical legacy of structures and policies in Romania, and the resistance to reform inherent in those structures and policies.     

Review Essay

Abstract

Teachers and university professors hold strong, and often different, views on school subjects and academic disciplines. This paper explores the meanings of subjects and disciplines for teachers and university professors who have different subject or disciplinary affiliations as these emerge within discussions about curriculum in a professional development context. It describes a group of university professors and secondary school teachers who met to discuss new developments in research in the humanities and social sciences and their impact on school curriculum. The professors brought their expertise in their academic disciplines and their teaching experience to the conversations. Teachers brought their varied disciplinary knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge and a deep understanding of schools. They perceived their primary goal as making ‘translations’ and ‘transformations’ between university and school. There were many bridges to cross within these complex and multi‐layered conversations. The possibility of bridges was enhanced by sharing common experiences in dealing with dilemmas of teaching. However, it demonstrated the importance of exposing the key structures and arguments of the disciplines as a first step in building bridges among subject communities and between universities and schools.     

新自由主义常识与全球性大学：高等教育中的知识商品化

知识是组织高等教育活动的基本材料和学术生活的基础。传统上作为公共产品的知识正在发生转向,其商品属性和交换价值趋于增强,成为兼具公共产品与私人产品性质的一种混合型产品。在高等教育领域,知识商品化具有多种表征形式,侵蚀了高等教育的公共性。本文结合哈贝马斯和布迪厄的理论框架,阐述了以下观点:知识的公共产品性质是高等教育的公益性、高校的公共形象和学术人的公共身份的基础,也是基础研究的核心价值观之一。坚持知识的公共产品性质,抵制知识商品化的消极影响,既是知识的内在要求也是高等教育的内在要求。     

Models of academic governance during a period of nation-building: the Hebrew University in the 1920s–1960s

This paper explores the development of the structures of university governance at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem between the 1920s and 1960s. The model that ultimately prevailed, a state-sponsored model of governance, dominated the higher education system in Israel until the early 2000s and was characterised by the dominance of academic faculty, a status that the government accorded to the faculty in exchange for their acceptance of the state’s normative vision for universities’ role in society. Two main governance models that were instituted at the HU are identified: (1) the Diaspora university, 1925–1950, a distinctive governance model that emerged in the pre-state period and was controlled by Jewish communities in the Diaspora, and (2) the state university, 1950s–2000s, which shifted the centre of gravity to the state. These models are further divided into sub-models and the processes described through which academic autonomy was institutionalised during a period of nation-building.     

Where are we now? Auditing the implementation of an equal opportunities policy ‘on the ground’ in a new university

Abstract

A strongly held belief in the importance of individual merit makes it difficult for universities to move beyond a limited liberal interpretation of equal opportunities, which emphasizes equality of opportunity focusing on the absence of overtly discriminatory practice. Using the findings of a faculty equal opportunities’ audit, this paper demonstrates the conflict at ground level between traditional notions of academic excellence and the more radical aspirations of equality of outcome. It also reveals that an exclusive focus on conventional generic areas of discrimination such as gender, ethnicity and disability can obscure more contextually specific issues such as the perceived devaluing of ‘non‐academic’ staff by their academic colleagues.

The faculty audited was sited in a new university and comprised four departments with an overall total of 1115 students and 153 staff. Data was gathered in four stages namely (a) compilation of a demographic data base, (b) semi‐structured interviews with heads of departments, (c) two course audits including questionnaires to staff and students, and (d) semi‐structured interviews with administrative and technical staff. Findings were also related to those being generated by simultaneous audit activity in other parts of the university.     

Strategic management in European universities in an age of increasing institutional self reliance

Abstract

This paper contrasts the emphasis on planning in universities when funding from the state was stable and resources followed student numbers, with the emphasis on strategic management when state funding is declining and universities are of necessity much more market orientated. Planning processes could work well when universities had a predictable future, but are less appropriate when the climate is turbulent. The paper suggests that the following are the key words for successful universities in the new environment, competitiveness, opportunism, income generation and cost reduction, relevance, excellence and reputation. It goes on to argue that this framework of key characteristics demands a new approach to strategic management in universities requiring universities to take a holistic view of their activities, to coordinate institutional strengths so that they reinforce one another and to create machinery whereby academic, financial and physical planning strategy is decided on an integrated basis.     

Changing Values? Early retirement and the new universities

Abstract

This article examines the potential impact of the recent changes to the Teachers Superannuation Scheme (TSS) and the resulting wave of early retirements, on the nature of academic work and cultures in the ‘new’ universities. In doing so it considers the potential for one externally driven initiative, implemented outside of the control of organisational managers, to have a quite extraordinary effect on workers across a whole occupational sector. It assesses the force of an early retirement programme as a catalyst for increased managerialism, relative to other recent pressures, drawing upon the literatures of organisation culture, strategy and labour process; and utilising new empirical research concerning academic careers, culture, change and security. Findings indicate that academic staff in new universities may be insulated from the effects of managerialism, albeit that this may vary between and within institutions. It speculates on whether the effects of large‐scale early retirement will have an impact on academic cultures through the ‘releasing’ of staff with old values and the ‘buying’ of replacements who have new values. Further, it argues that because the TSS changes affect only the new universities, the resultant changes may differentiate them from the pre‐1992 universities, making at least some of them more similar to the managerially focused further education sector, and reinforcing the binary divide within a supposedly unified university sector.     

Unions Come to Campus

After more than two decades of rapid growth, the Australian universities have now entered a prolonged period of “steady state”. Apart from creating new kinds of organisational strain, the steady state has also contributed towards increased trade unionism amongst both the teaching and non‐teaching staff.

In the case of the former group, a unique question arises: if a university is truly a self‐governing collegium, does this mean that the academic staff are simultaneously employers as well as employees, in the context of industrial relations.

Active unionisation in the universities may have positive as well as negative consequences. After considering these individually, the paper concludes by briefly looking at the impact of strikes in an educational institution.     

Research policy and the changing nature of Australia's universities

Two central features of Australian universities are a strong research base and a structural organisation which reflects a close relationship between teaching and research. Current policy deliberations have produced recommendations in the national interest for the future development of Australian university research which are incompatible with these two central features. The recommendations consolidate the recent trend towards greater centralisation, co-ordination, selectivity and concentration of university research and its funding. Although certain sectors of Australian university research will benefit from the changes, the recommendations reflect neither a longer term view of the total higher education system, nor a sufficient concern with preserving the excellent and productive qualities of the current system. Their implementation will mean the adoption of research goals inimical to the fundamental purposes of universities; a less flexible and more conservative research system; a re-orientation of the research role of universities so that it is less harmonious with their teaching role; and a potentially harmful differentiation of academic staff, subject areas and institutions. In responding to the new demands of government, universities face a challenge in preserving their current strengths and core functions.     

Academic work in the information age: a speculative essay

Abstract

Both campus-based universities and distance teaching universities are highly bureaucratised organisations that have eroded the traditional autonomy of the academic and created environments in which education is dehumanised. Developments in telecommunications and computer-based communications open up the possibility of creating new forms of interactive universities that can operate globally, irrespective of the place of abode of either students or staff. Exploiting these possibilities to advantage will require the development of new social relations, and in particular of different cash relationships between academics, students, and validating or licensing authorities that will, in many ways, mirror the artisanal organisation of the twelfth-century university. Such interactive universities will, however, be well suited to meet the lifelong learning needs of mobile knowledge workers.     

The changing racial profile of academic staff at South African Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), 2005–2013

South Africa has undergone transformation since the end of apartheid governance in 1994. Legislatively enforced, this transformation has permeated most sectors of society, including higher education. Questions remain, however, about the extent to which transformation has occurred in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in general, and across the academic staff body in HEIs in particular. In this study, we examine the transformation of academic staff profiles at HEIs throughout the country. Initially, we graph the racial profile of academics across multiple positions (junior lecturer to professor) from 2005 to 2013. We then use correlational analysis to identify which characteristics of universities in South Africa can be used to explain the racial inequities evident in South African HEIs. Our results indicate that world university ranking; percentage black African staff; percentage black African student body; and whether the university is ‘historically disadvantaged’, all influence the racial profile of the academic staff body to varying degrees. The size of the overall staff and study body does not appear to influence the racial profile of universities’ staff component. We conclude that transformation of the academic staff body of HEIs in South Africa is indeed occurring, albeit slowly. Rather than seeing this as a negative, we argue that the pace of ‘academic’ transformation in the country needs to be interpreted within the framework of academic governance.     

International academic staff in UK higher education: campus internationalisation and innovation in academic practice

Abstract

Amidst opportunities for universities to consider international academic staff in supporting internationalisation and innovation in academic practice, there is very little research to provide insights into their attitudes towards institutional approaches and frameworks in place to enable this. This article focuses on this research gap, suggesting that this academic community might enhance the development of internationally-informed and innovative pedagogic practice. The research reported within the article constitutes a preliminary study, set within a UK higher education case study setting. Methods included focus groups and themed in-depth interviews with a sample of 34 international academic staff from over 15 countries. The findings and discussion provide insights into the perspectives and experiences of international academic staff in relation to the Postgraduate Certificate in Teaching and Learning and other institutional practice. Innovative pedagogic practice as enabled by international academic staff is discussed, as are approaches to the internationalisation of the curricula. The findings are relevant to the UK higher education context but also to the global context: academic institutions need to consider whether curriculum and processes are limited and limiting in favour of a narrow cultural lens.