Higher Education最新文献

Traditionally, universities stand for independent, high-quality, and curiosity-driven research and education. Yet, since neoliberal reforms in the 1980s, they have been increasingly exposed to external pressures towards more efficiency and economic value orientation. To manage the tasks corresponding to these market-based values, a new and fast-growing group of professional staff has emerged. Some authors argue that they challenge academic norms, or academic professional logics, while importing market norms, or market logics, through previous employment in and current relationships with the private sector. We empirically test this assumption based on original survey data of three groups of professional staff of universities and associated medical centers in the Netherlands: business developers, grant advisers, and research policy officers. We asked them about their ideas about universities to capture their institutional logics. Respondents also indicated previous employment and the strength of their professional relationships. Using multiple linear regression models, we find that professional staff with private sector experience indeed have stronger market logics. We find the same for those with stronger relationships with private sector companies. Yet, on average, the academic professional logic of professional staff is considerably higher than their market logic. Additionally, the effect of private sector experience and stronger relationships with private sector companies on the market logic is moderate. Thus, our data suggests that professional staff do not challenge academic norms. Therefore, there seems to be little need for meeting them with skepticism regarding their role in unwanted organizational change.

In Australia, much like other colonized locations such as Canada, New Zealand, and the USA, the colonial legacies embedded within higher education institutions, including the history of exclusion and the privileging of Western epistemologies, continue to make universities challenging places for Indigenous PhD scholars. Despite this, and while the numbers of Indigenous PhD scholars remain well below population parity, they are carving a space within the academy that is shifting the academic terrain and enriching the research process. Drawing on in-depth interviews with Indigenous PhD scholars working in the field of health and a qualitative survey of doctoral Supervisors and Advisory Committee Chairs, this paper explores the doctoral experience of Indigenous scholars. What becomes apparent, through this research, is that despite ongoing experiences of racism and alienation, these scholars are finding ways to circumvent inadequate supervisory processes, systems support, and research paradigms, to carve a path that centers Indigenous ways of knowing, being, and doing.

The lack of highly-trained ocean science professionals constrains sustainable development and management of the oceans. In Kenya, the government is committed to improving access to education for all, regardless of gender, ethnicity, and social status. Increasing female student enrolment has been one of the top priorities, particularly in science-related courses, which have long been male-biased. Feminist political ecology is applied as an analytical framework to understand how gender and ethnicity influence student access to, participation in, and experience in ocean science-related programmes. Data was collected through a questionnaire survey with students undertaking ocean science courses in seven public universities in Kenya. The findings revealed an underrepresentation of women and minority ethnic groups. Fewer female respondents than males received financial support from their families, and more female respondents than males reported that they had experienced discrimination related to their ethnicity and gender. In addition, a higher percentage of female respondents reported having fewer opportunities in higher education and ocean science careers than males. These findings reveal the persistent inequalities among students and suggest that Kenyan public universities need to pay more attention to how intersectional identities, such as gender and ethnicity, influence and shape the distribution of resources and opportunities if equitable diversity and inclusion are to be achieved. Also, they need to strengthen their gender policies and actions to tackle these social inequalities to promote gender equality in ocean science education.

In this work, we sought to uncover the key strategies and challenges to the integration of Indigenous knowledge as knowledge management practices at a public university in The Gambia. It is often axiomatic in the literature that the incorporation of diverse epistemologies is a key resource for sustainable development; therefore, activities associated with the management of knowledge, particularly in higher education, are worthy of elucidation. We discovered that knowledge management activities at a university in The Gambia were often informal and required the invisible work of faculty. It was through the implicit use of tacit knowledge and epistemic disobedience that faculty were able to build upon a colonized curriculum that denied the presence of other knowledge. However, in the end, faculty were dependent on the power of referents within and without the institution to formalize their knowledge management practices. This work fills an essential gap in the extant literature on how the work of university faculty and managers, when situated within a knowledge management perspective, can contribute to decolonization and foster sustainable development.

Analysis of strategic planning practices can offer insight into how universities operate and are structured as organisations, both in terms of where importance is placed and what is elided, and through discursive consideration of how strategy texts legitimate certain ways of thinking and acting and seek to produce consent around managerial decisions. This paper applies a strategy-as-practice approach (Jarzabkowski and Whittington in Journal of Management Inquiry, 17, 282-286, 2008) to explore how the academic workforce in English universities is conceptualised and represented in institutional strategic planning, specifically in the genre of text referred to as a strategic plan or strategy document. Through qualitative content analysis of a sample of eight university strategic plans (following Brandtner et al., in Urban Studies, 54, 1075-1091, 2016; Hellström in Policy Futures in Education, 5, 478-490, 2007), we find the academic workforce occupying an uncertain position in the documents, especially in the case of staff with teaching responsibilities, whose position is particularly ambiguous.

Research on Student Evaluation of Teaching (SET) has indicated that course design is at least as important as teachers’ performance for student-rated perceived quality and student engagement. Our data analysis of more than 6000 SETs confirms this. Two hierarchical multiple regression models revealed that course design significantly predicts perceived quality more strongly than teachers, and that course design significantly predicts student engagement independent of teachers. While the variable teachers is a significant predictor of perceived quality, it is not a significant predictor of student engagement. In line with previous research, the results suggest it is important to highlight the vital impact of course design. The results are discussed particularly in relation to improved teaching practice and student learning, but also in terms of how student evaluations of teaching can be used in meaningful ways.

The COVID-19 pandemic and its consequences have put a lot of strain on the world’s population, including academics. Universities were closed or went online worldwide due to lockdown regulations. In Malaysia, the first strict lockdown started on March 18th 2020 and was extended until May 12th 2020. The purpose of this four-month study is to examine the hypothesized change in affective states among academics during and after the initial lockdown in this country. To explore patterns of change in both positive and negative affective states, we employed multivariate latent growth curve (LGC) modeling and analyzed data from 214 academics at three distinct time points: at the onset of the COVID-19 lockdown, at its conclusion, and two months thereafter. While we did not observe a significant linear change in affective states, the considerable variability around the means of academics' positive and negative affective states prompted us to adopt an exploratory approach to further investigate whether four time-invariant covariates assumed to remain constant throughout the four-month study period (i.e., academic rank, disciplinary background, gender, and experience outside higher education) could account for these variations. Our results showed that academic rank significantly accounted for differences in academics’ affective states. From a practical perspective, our results suggest that policies should be revisited to increase the positive affect level as well as to minimize the negative affect level experienced by academics during any future pandemics. These policies, irrespective of academics’ disciplinary background, can be universally implemented for male and female academics or academics with and without previous work experience outside higher education. Nevertheless, the policies for high and low rank academics should be tailored to those groups.

The article interrogates the ‘mobility imperative’ and its impact on precarious academics. Drawing on 40 biographic interviews with academics with experience of long-term precarity in Irish higher education, and using a Bourdieusian framework, we identify the specific conditions, uses and impacts of international mobility for these workers. This method offers a unique retrospective advantage for an analysis of the utility of international capital for a cohort of workers typically excluded from studies of international mobility. Among the specific obstacles we identify which are faced by precarious academics in the accumulation and conversion of international capital are the lack of or compromised initial social capital; the dubious value of international capital in Irish academia, especially when associated with precarity; and the difficulty for workers to construct acceptable career scripts when both precarity and mobility have led them off-script. We suggest that the ability to accumulate and convert usable forms of international capital while working abroad is in part predetermined by prior struggles in the national field.

Despite challenging and uncertain circumstances and the perception of being tokenized symbols in Japanese universities, the majority of international academics are more inclined to remain in their affiliations. The study intends to elucidate how international academics make sense of their decision to remain in Japanese universities. The data are from a qualitative dataset examining the integration experiences of international academics in Japan. Following the philosophical foundations of purposive sampling in interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA), which was applied as a methodological framework, the study recruited a total of 30 participants. The study reveals varied sensemaking strategies among the interviewees, characterized as survivors, pragmatists, and ambitionists. Survivors refer to those who were compelled to remain in their current affiliations often due to constraints related to their academic roles or age restrictions. Pragmatists prioritize the practical benefits of their positions or affiliations, deriving from professional aspects, sociocultural dimensions, and personal considerations. Ambitionist academics generally view experiences in their current affiliations as a stepping stone toward future professional opportunities elsewhere. The study suggests that insufficient dedication to recruiting and retaining international academics may pose potential long-term risks for Japanese higher education institutions (HEIs) in the global academic sphere, affecting their internationally competitive standing and resilience in an evolving academic landscape. The study provides theoretical and practical implications to researchers, university administrators, and policymakers.