FACULTY WORKLIFE: Establishing Benchmarks Across Groups

Pressures on colleges and universities have spawned numerous studies to improve our understanding of faculty and their worklives, including examinations of faculty satisfaction, morale, motivation and productivity, reward, and retention and turnover. In response to external pressures for improved accountability in higher education, institutional leaders seek to identify outcome measures and generate benchmarks that can be used to assess change over time. The purpose of this study is to propose a structural model of faculty worklife and to test its generalizability by examining possible differences in the model across three cross-sectional samples of probationary faculty at a major research university. Identified trends in faculty perceptions about their worklife over time can be used as benchmarks to aid institutions in retaining faculty by monitoring and improving aspects of their worklives.     

Desktop Video Conferencing

As a relatively new delivery medium, desktop video conferencing (DVC) promises to bring traditional face-to-face teaching to computer screens. Although ample literature covers incorporating technology into classrooms, little documents the experiences and perceptions of participants in DVC courses and DVC's effects on teaching and learning. A recent ethnographic study that examined incidental learning in five DVC courses offered at an American university found that incidental learning often overshadowed the planned curriculum and found a high level of participant frustration. The study's results reaffirmed the importance of incidental learning in a DVC course and of developing an environment that reduces faculty and student frustrations.     

Religious 'Doctrines' and the Closure of Minds

In a recent essay, Tasos Kazepides has used the later Wittgenstein's account of religious beliefs as either 'superstitions' or non-rational to condemn such beliefs as 'doctrines'. By this term he means teachings which close minds to alternative truth-claims. In this paper we criticise his interpretation and use of Wittgenstein and argue that, far from closing minds, an appropriate education in religious beliefs can open minds to possible realms of existence unconsidered in other subjects of the curriculum.