Academic Citizenship: An Academic Colleagues’ Working Paper

Universities are facing a critical challenge; university citizenship has steadily declined over the last few decades. As a self-governing entity, most of the foundational elements of a university community are within its own control. As a result, the health and future welfare of the institution depends greatly on the quality of its leaders and robustness of its governing structure. These in turn depend on the quality of those undertaking leadership roles and serving on governing bodies and on the degree to which they reflect its values and aspirations. Maximising the probability that these desiderata will be achieved requires a broad-based faculty willingness to serve conscientiously on these bodies and to serve as administrators to be involved in selecting members, and to be involved on the myriad of sub-committees, task forces, departmental committees, and the like. It is not only an abdication of citizenship to leave governance and administration of the institution to a few willing faculty, it is dangerous and puts at risk the welfare of the institution. Even if these few were all able to place the welfare of the institution above their own particular agendas and their self-interest (not something on which to count), the process of self-selection could not be expected to result in a group that would adequately reflect, represent or understand the breadth and depth of the needs, aspirations and complex circumstances of the entire institution. The larger the pool of willing participants, the greater the probability that those selected will reflect best the institutional diversity. This paper draws out the rights and obligations of faculty citizens embedded in the structural arrangements common to universities in the western world. In part A we examine three fundamental components of those arrangements, components that collectively define certain rights and entail certain obligations of citizenship. These obligations flow in part from essential rights, and also in part from what is necessary to sustain the viability and vibrancy of the community. In Part B, we examine some of these essential obligations of citizenship. In Part C, we make recommendations about how to promote effective citizenship; these recommendations are collected after Part C under the heading “Recommendations.”     

How Financial Constraints Influence Consumer Behavior: An Integrative Framework

Financial constraints are economic limitations on behavior. Given that millions of people experience chronic or episodic financial constraints, we sought to review research that provides insight into how they affect consumer behavior. We propose an integrative framework that draws insights from multiple literatures that have examined financial constraints from different perspectives. The framework distinguishes between four perspectives, which are rooted in literatures on resource scarcity, choice restriction, social comparison, and environmental uncertainty and highlights different temporal stages of responding to financial constraints, distinguishing between reacting, coping, and adapting. Beyond the obvious negative effects of financial constraints, our framework emphasizes consumer resilience, highlighting that consumers often successfully cope with and devise adaptive strategies to deal with financial constraints. By broadening the behavioral and temporal scope of financial constraints considered within consumer psychology, this framework helps us to understand the often strong and sometimes counterintuitive effects of financial constraints on consumer behavior.     

A Systems Approach to Understanding and Improving Research Integrity

Science and Engineering Ethics - Concern about the integrity of empirical research has arisen in recent years in the light of studies showing the vast majority of publications in academic journals...     

Supporting Integrity of Discrete Trial Teaching via Tiered Consultation: A Pilot Study

Empirically supported consultation procedures for supporting implementation of evidence-based interventions for Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), such as performance feedback, may be challenging to implement in public schools. Educators may find performance feedback aversive, and support personnel may find its directiveness incompatible with their professional roles. This pilot study extends recent advances in implementation science, by investigating the influence of tiered consultation on intervention integrity of Discrete Trial Teaching (DTT). A less intensive form of implementation support was examined for its feasibility and effectiveness. Collaborative Student Data Review (CSDR) includes discussion, general feedback, and modeling. Preliminary findings indicate that CSDR is a feasible and acceptable form of implementation support, and that it shows potential as a form of implementation support for DTT.     

Teaching mands for information using speech generating devices: A replication and extension

Approximately 30% of individuals diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) fail to develop vocal communication and, therefore, use some form of augmentative or alternative communication system. The current study replicates and extends previous research on teaching “Who?” and “Which?” mands for information to 3 young children diagnosed with ASD using a speech generating device. Procedures were evaluated using a multiple baseline across participants design. All participants learned to mand for information and, subsequently, used the information to access preferred items.     

Kwasi Wiredu’s consensual democracy and one-party polities in Africa

How justified are those who think that the clamour for one-party politics in Africa was inspired by the character of African consensual democracy such as the one defended by Kwasi Wiredu? I show that though Wiredu’s consensual democracy may share some similarities with a one-party polity, it does not necessarily follow that it has inspired the emergence of one-party polities in Africa. Similarly, the absence of any discernible similarities between African consensual democracy and one-party polity may not also necessarily entail that the former has not inspired the latter. When one considers the ontological nature of Wiredu’s consensual democracy and the one-party polity, it becomes contentious to claim that the latter emerges from the former. However, based on Wiredu’s idea of consensual democracy, one might argue that consensual democracy has a common ancestry with a one-party polity because they both seem to emerge from “party₁”.     

What meaning means for same and different: Analogical reasoning in humans (Homo sapiens), chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), and rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta)

Thus far, language- and token-trained apes (e.g., D. Premack, 1976; R. K. R. Thompson, D. L. Oden, & S. T. Boysen, 1997) have provided the best evidence that nonhuman animals can solve, complete, and construct analogies, thus implicating symbolic representation as the mechanism enabling the phenomenon. In this study, the authors examined the role of stimulus meaning in the analogical reasoning abilities of three different primate species. Humans (Homo sapiens), chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), and rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) completed the same relational matching-to-sample (RMTS) tasks with both meaningful and nonmeaningful stimuli. This discrimination of relations-between-relations serves as the basis for analogical reasoning. Meaningfulness facilitated the acquisition of analogical matching for human participants, whereas individual differences among the chimpanzees suggest that meaning can either enable or hinder their ability to complete analogies. Rhesus monkeys did not succeed in the RMTS task regardless of stimulus meaning, suggesting that their ability to reason analogically, if present at all, may be dependent on a dimension other than the representational value of stimuli.     

Cue-elicited negative affect in impulsive smokers.

Impulsivity is associated with cigarette smoking, but the nature of this relationship and the mechanisms that maintain it are relatively unknown. The relationship has often been thought to reflect appetitive processes, but research suggests that an affective pathway exists as well. The present study tested the effect of impulsivity on affective responses to an environmental smoking cue. Adult smokers (N=62) were exposed to a neutral cue and a smoking cue in separate experimental sessions in a repeated-measures design. Mixed-effects regression analyses showed that larger postexposure increases in negative affect were associated with high scores on 2 facets of impulsivity: urgency, t(179)=6.16, p<.001, and sensation seeking, t(179)=4.75, p<.001. Heightened impulsivity was associated with lower levels of positive affect generally but not with positive affective responses to cue exposure. Findings provide support for the existence of a negative affective pathway linking impulsivity and cigarette smoking, and they suggest that this pathway may be specific to the urgency and sensation-seeking components of impulsivity.     

Mindfulness,Self-Esteem,and Unconditional Self-Acceptance

Ellis (Ellis, A. (1996), Psychotherapy, 22(1), 149–151) has been a longstanding critic of the concept of self-esteem and has offered the notion of unconditional self-acceptance as an alternative. Other researchers have suggested that cultivating mindfulness––attention directed towards one’s immediate experiences with an attitude of non-judgment––also offers a healthier alternative to self-esteem (Ryan, R. M., & Brown, K. W. (2003) Psychological Inquiry, 14(1), 71–76). This study examined the relationship between mindfulness, self-esteem, and unconditional self-acceptance. A sample of 167 university students completed two measures of everyday mindfulness, and measures of self-esteem and unconditional self-acceptance. Positive correlations were found between mindfulness, self-esteem, and unconditional self-acceptance. Mindfulness skills may offer a means to cultivate unconditional self-acceptance and to shift from an emphasis on self-esteem as a measure of worth. This paper was based on data collected for the first author's Master's project.     

How incidental sequence learning creates reportable knowledge: the role of unexpected events

Research on incidental sequence learning typically is concerned with the characteristics of implicit or nonconscious learning. In this article, the authors aim to elucidate the cognitive mechanisms that contribute to the generation of explicit, reportable sequence knowledge. According to the unexpected-event hypothesis (P. A. Frensch, H. Haider, D. Rünger, U. Neugebauer, S. Voigt, & J. Werg, 2003), individuals acquire reportable knowledge when they search for the cause of an experienced deviation from the expected task performance. The authors experimentally induced unexpected events by disrupting the sequence learning process with a modified serial reaction time task and found that, unlike random transfer sequences, a systematic transfer sequence increased the availability of reportable sequence knowledge. The lack of a facilitative effect of random sequences is explained by the detrimental effect of random events on the presumed search process that generates reportable knowledge. This view is corroborated in a final experiment in which the facilitative effect of systematic transfer blocks is offset by a concurrent secondary task that was introduced to interfere with the search process during transfer.