Three-Year Itch: Communicating Information to Minimize Faculty Anxiety During College and University Presidential Transition

Abstract

Through a mixed methodology study of college and university faculty and presidents’ perceptions as they experience presidential change in Christian higher education, researchers addressed these research questions: Are there factors present that contribute to successful change during administrative transition in Christian higher education? If so, what are these factors? Faculty were surveyed using the Best Christian Workplaces (BCW) instrument. Following analysis of survey results, faculty participated in focus groups to qualitatively respond to the BCW survey. Finally, an interim president and newly elected president were interviewed to assess their perceptions of presidential transitions in Christian higher education. Researchers affirm conclusions from the literature and explain a key finding that contributes to the field of presidential change in Christian higher education.     

The Role of UB Faculty Council During the Strike: Reflections of a Former Striker Crossing a Picket Line

This essay examines the role of the University of Bridgeport's Faculty Council in relation to the faculty union. The Faculty Council is a governing body composed of elected faculty representatives from different schools and departments within the university. Faculty Council leaders facilitated the certification of AAUP as the faculty's bargaining agent in 1973 and, under the author's leadership, the faculty petitioned the National Labor Relations Board to decertify the union in 1991. The author participated on the picket line during the 1975, 1978 and 1987 faculty strikes, but crossed the picket line during the 1990 strike.     

The Longest Faculty Strike in the History of U.S. Institutions of Higher Education: Perceptions of the Union President

The president of the AAUP faculty union at University of Bridgeport, from 1987 to 1991, offers a first-hand account of the circumstances leading to the fatal strike there. He refutes accusations that the union and its leadership destroyed the university and provides a dramatic, personal account of a faculty union under attack by union busters. The faculty, he argues, was resisting a concerted onslaught on traditional faculty rights. It fought desperately to stifle a retrograde revolution in higher education seeking the substitution of absolute Management Rights to traditional collegiality. He refers to faculty as the soul and mind of a university, and to administration as a necessary evil whose duty is primarily to assist the faculty in the accomplishment of the university's mission.     

Bystander training for faculty: A promising approach to tackling microaggressions in the academy

Microaggressions present significant barriers to entry and advancement for faculty from traditionally marginalized groups, yet workplace interventions to stymy them remain undocumented in the literature. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the impact of bystander training to deal with subtle expressions of bias in the academic workplace. We developed a 2-h interactive bystander training workshop that specifically addressed intervening in microaggressions university faculty experience; approximately 21% of the full-time faculty participated in the training. Results indicate that post workshop, participants endorsed higher levels of likelihood of bystander intervention and higher levels of bystander efficacy to deal with microaggressive events (compared to pre-test 4 days before the workshop); scores on these measures remained significantly greater than pre-test at both 6-week and 12-week follow-up. Furthermore, preliminary evidence suggests that both likelihood of bystander intervention and bystander efficacy scores predicted self-reported bystander behavior at both 6 and 12 week follow up. These findings suggest that bystander training may be a promising approach to tackling microaggressions faculty experience in higher education.     

Student and faculty gender in ratings of university teaching quality

The aim of this study is to test the assertion that student and faculty gender, together with their possible interaction, have little or almost no real effect on student ratings of university teaching quality, taking into account the diversity of academic disciplines as a modulating variable. A sample of 1,304 student ratings from a university in Madrid, Spain, was selected out of a total of 236,862. The Complutense University Teachers Evaluation Questionnaire was administered to students at the Complutense University of Madrid for assessing teaching quality. This instrument operationalizes two main dimensions in evaluation of teaching in higher education: Teaching Competence and Motivational and Interactive Skills. When the results were analyzed, taking into consideration both possible statistical significance and effect size, they supported the proposed assertion. These results may have implications on certain areas of higher education.     

Teaching Introductory Upper‐Level Religion and Theology Classes

The undergraduate study of religion is predominantly undertaken by non‐majors who are meeting a general education requirement. This means that, while curricular discussions make important distinctions between the work of lower‐ and upper‐division courses, many religion and theology faculty are teaching hybrid courses that we call “introductory upper‐level courses.” These play an introductory role in general education while also serving the study of religion in a more advanced way. Attention to how these courses fit into multiple curricular goals will be important for the scholarship of teaching and learning in religious studies and theology. This essay draws on scholarship about introductory teaching and a survey of faculty about introductory upper‐level courses to argue that the content of such courses should be understood as serving the study of religion at an advanced level, the context should be understood as introducing general education goals, and the goals for intellectual growth must strike a challenging balance between the two.     

“My Entire World Stopped”: College Students’ Psychosocial and Academic Frustrations during the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted normalcy for college attending young adults which resulted in a loss of the campus environment and classroom setting. This change in setting may interfere with a student’s personal and academic wellbeing. This study used an online survey to evaluate college students’ academic and psychosocial frustrations during the COVID-19 pandemic. Data were collected from March–April 2020 at a land-grant university in the Appalachian region. Data were available from 2643 undergraduate and graduate students. There was a 65.8% and 15.7% increase in the number of students who reported their learning and health as fair, poor, or very poor after the COVID-19 pandemic, respectively. Qualitative responses were coded and 8 themes and 24 subthemes emerged. College students expressed frustrations regarding technology, classwork, research, family, social, emotional, behavioral, and financial aspects of life. These results can be used by higher education administration, faculty, and staff when planning for online courses. Ensuring that student frustrations and barriers to success are recognized and considered may help prevent students departing from higher education during this time.

     

Differences in mathematics anxiety by sex, program, and education of university mathematics students in Turkey

In this study, we aimed to re-examine sex-related differences in mathematics anxiety and to investigate the effects of two different programs associated with mathematics education applied in Turkish universities on mathematics anxiety. Mathematics anxiety scores were assessed in 221 male and 142 female students, 238 in the education faculty and 125 in the science faculty. There were no sex-related mean differences for mathematics anxiety scores, and scores were not related to faculty program. The lower mean mathematics performance on the university entry examination of the students of science faculty may be associated with the mathematics anxiety.     

Are Faculty Strikes Unethical?

It has been argued that strikes are morally objectionable in the university context. They injure third parties – the students – and for this reason ought to be rejected. More generally, the strike weapon has led to a reduction of the power of Boards of Governors to adjust universities to changing times. And furthermore, the use of the strike weapon and the ensuing conflicts can injure the collegial form of governance that is essential to higher education. It is here argued that these arguments are hardly conclusive, and that there are virtues to having the strike as a means to resolve disputes. But keeping things on track requires both parties to adhere to the moral and social virtue of civility.     

Hidden Agendas and the Learning-Earning Controversy: A Reply to Robert J. Nash and Kenneth P. Saurman

Student personnel administrators have a vital role to play in the university as facilitators and counselors, but they should not attempt to be “comprehensivists” or “meaning makers.” The Nash-Saurman emphasis on such roles, and on “personal meaning” in higher education, misrepresents the activities of faculty members and the primary mission of the university and invites continued dilution of academic rigor. Such emphases also reflect a continuation of, rather than a break with, the marketplace mentality in higher education and constitute a politically self-serving position on the part of professional educators.     

Counsellors becoming counsellor educators: a New Zealand example

ABSTRACT

The international literature on adjunct faculty in higher education, including professional education, does not yet cover counsellor education in particular, although many programmes rely on the teaching services of experienced practitioners in adjunct faculty positions. This article reports on a small, exploratory study conducted with adjunct faculty members appointed to one-year, full time fellowships in the counsellor education programme in which the authors are full time academics. The study identifies the mutual benefits of this practice, to the practitioners who teach as adjunct faculty and to the counsellor education programme. It also identifies areas that are problematic. In view both of the identified benefits and the difficulties experienced, the authors discuss their responsibilities as permanent academic staff to the practitioners who teach as adjunct faculty. The authors suggest that programmes benefit from the ethic of hospitality that adjunct faculty can offer and invite academic staff to bring (un)conditional hospitality to the collegial relationship in counsellor education.     

The Difference Catholic Makes: Catholic Faculty and Catholic Identity

This study examines, for the case of Catholics, the thesis that a "critical mass" of devoted faculty members—50 percent or more, according to the papal document Ex Corde Ecclesia—serves to promote or preserve the religious character of religiously affiliated institutions of higher education. Factor analysis and structural equations are employed to analyze a random sample of faculty members ( n = 1,290) and institutional profiles ( n = 100) of American Catholic colleges and universities. Catholic faculty show higher support for Catholic identity in latent structures of aspiration for improved Catholic distinctiveness, a desire for more theology or philosophy courses, and longer institutional tenure. Institutions having a majority of Catholic faculty exhibit four properties consistent with stronger Catholic identity: a policy of preferential hiring for Catholics ("hiring for mission"), a higher proportion of Catholic students, higher faculty aspiration for Catholic identity, and longer faculty tenure in the institution. These latter two characteristics are not due simply to aggregation, but are stronger, on average, for Catholic faculty when they are in the majority. Preferential hiring marks Catholic identity, but is ineffective to increase the proportion of Catholic faculty. I conclude that the prediction of the critical mass thesis is correct.     

High Aspirations: Differences in Employee Satisfaction Between University Faculty and Staff

Employee satisfaction surveys were examined for five universities in the US, UK and Canada, selected because they presented results for faculty and other staff separately. Faculty consistently score more negatively on employee satisfaction across a wide range of areas. The most negative responses are for areas such as personal/worklife balance, work demands/workload, university direction, and whether the employee would choose to work at the same institution again/would recommend it for employment. The results are consistent with previous studies which have shown that education level is negatively associated with job satisfaction. The results suggest that university faculty have high aspirations, since in a number of indicators faculty working conditions appear superior to those of staff (tenure; average income; sabbatical leaves; work control; involvement and consultation in university decision-making), although junior faculty prior to tenure may experience more stress than staff. Employers undertaking employee satisfaction surveys need to take into account systematic differences in aspirations among their employees, when interpreting survey results.     

Feeling the structures of Québec's 2012 student strike at Concordia University: The place of emotions,emotional styles,and emotional reflexivity

Based on experiences of geography students at Concordia University in Montreal, Québec, who participated in the provincial unlimited general student strike in 2012, this article explores how the physical and symbolic spaces of the university were key in determining these strike participants' emotional experiences, particularly confusing for being wrapped up in the collegial context. The relevance of emotions and affect in social movements has gained attention in the past decades in the geography literature, yet the latter has tended to focus on autonomous politics or on the streets where these strike participants or other protestors gathered. Complementing such scholarship, I highlight how a specific place -the site of the university, the geography department, and the student association structures housed within them- affected these strike participants' emotional experiences and styles via the materialities and emotional expectations of, as well as feelings of belonging to, that place. By focusing on the emotional geography of an academic department and institution during this tumultuous time, this article seeks to widen our understanding of emotional dynamics, emotional styles, and emotional reflexivity for diverse activist positionalities in a setting akin to a more traditional ‘workplace’: the place of study where this strike emerged, the educational institution.     

Pursuing a Comprehensive Faculty Development Program: Making Fragmentation Work

Arizona State University (ASU) serves as a case study of a comprehensive faculty development program in a large university characterized by numerous overlapping and fragmented resources and services. In this setting, the task of faculty development is to provide the leadership that is necessary to mold these fragments into a coherent vision and mission that promotes the aims of the university and supports the needs of the faculty. Programs based on the consortium, the cooperative, and the distributed models make fragmentation work for, rather than against, the program. In addition, faculty development must work to establish an academic environment that values teaching, research, and scholarly outreach—the constituent elements of a comprehensive program.     

Crossing the Picket Line: A Brief Faculty Memoir of the Historic University of Bridgeport Strike

This memoir provides the personal story of a tenured poet who initially walked the picket line during the 1990 University of Bridgeport faculty strike. During the strike's second week, he made the difficult decision to cross the picket line of a union he helped create seventeen years earlier. He continually relives his strike experience.     

Gracious Play: Discipline,Insight, and the Common Good

The article is a theological reflection on the vocation of university teaching that describes the heart of the matter of what faculty do in the classroom. The author draws on personal narrative, social‐psychological analyses of how insight occurs and contexts for insights are constructed, and sociological accounts of shifts that have altered significantly the context of university teaching and learning at the cusp of the millennium to make her case. She argues that the vocation of university teaching involves creating spaces of gracious play that are potentially transformative for students and faculty. Creating such spaces, however, draws faculty into an asceticism that can be understood as a spiritual path. The article is a revision of the author's 1999 St. Elizabeth Seton Lecture at the College of Mount St. Joseph, Cincinnati, Ohio.