COVID-19 has caused the closure of university campuses around the world and migration of all learning, teaching, and assessment into online domains. The impacts of this on the academic community as ...frontline providers of higher education are profound. In this article, we report the findings from a survey of
n
= 1148 academics working in universities in the United Kingdom (UK) and representing all the major disciplines and career hierarchy. Respondents report an abundance of what we call ‘afflictions’ exacted upon their role as educators and in far fewer yet no less visible ways ‘affordances’ derived from their rapid transition to online provision and early ‘entry-level’ use of digital pedagogies. Overall, they suggest that online migration is engendering significant dysfunctionality and disturbance to their pedagogical roles and their personal lives. They also signpost online migration as a major challenge for student recruitment, market sustainability, an academic labour-market, and local economies.
Impact in the REF: issues and obstacles Watermeyer, Richard
Studies in higher education (Dorchester-on-Thames),
02/2016, Letnik:
41, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This article focuses on 'impact' as a new condition of research assessment for UK academics. It explores a history of resistance to an 'impact agenda' and how impact as a component of the Research ...Excellence Framework (REF) - a system of performance based funding - is viewed by academics as an infringement to a scholarly way of life; as symptomatic of the marketisation of higher education; and as fundamentally incompatible and deleterious to the production of new knowledge.
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Dostopno za:
BFBNIB, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
The COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly affected the university sector globally. This article reports on the Australian findings from a large-scale survey of academic staff and their experiences and ...predictions of the impact of the pandemic on their wellbeing. We report the perceptions of n = 370 Australian academics and accounts of their institutions' responses to COVID-19, analysed using self-determination theory. Respondents report work-related stress, digital fatigue, and a negative impact on work-life balance; as well as significant concerns over potential longer-term changes to academia as a result of the pandemic. Respondents also articulate their frustration with Australia's neoliberal policy architecture and the myopia of quasi-market reform, which has spawned an excessive reliance on international students as a pillar of income generation and therefore jeopardised institutional solvency - particularly during the pandemic. Conversely, respondents identify a number of 'silver linings' which speak to the resilience of academics.
The research impact agenda is frequently portrayed through 'crisis' accounts whereby academic identity is at risk of a kind of existential unravelling. Amid reports of academics under siege in an ...environment in which self-sovereignty is traditionally preferred and regulation is resisted, heightened emotionalism, namely fear and dread, dominates the discourse. Such accounts belie the complexity of the varying moral dispositions, experiences and attitudes possessed by different individuals and groups in the academic research community. In this article, we attempt to examine the role of the affective in response to a particular research policy directive - the impact agenda. In doing so, we reveal the contributing factors affecting the community's reaction to impact. In cases where personal, moral and disciplinary identities align with the impact agenda, the emotional response is positive and productive. For many academics, however, misalignment gives rise to emotional dissonance. We argue that when harnessed, further acknowledgement of the role of emotion in the academy can produce a more socially and morally coherent response to an impact agenda. We review academic responses from the UK and Australia (n = 51) and observe a community heavily emotionally invested in what they do, such that threats to academic identity and research are consequently threats to the self.
A focus on academic performativity and a rationalizing of what academics do according to measurable outputs has, in the era of higher education's (HE) neoliberalization and marketization, engendered ...debate regarding the 'authenticity' of academic identity and practice. In such a context, a 'performative' prioritization of leveraging 'positional goods', such as external research funds, presents a specific challenge to the construction of academics' identity where in being entrepreneurial they are perceived to compromise traditional Mertonian edicts of scholarship and professional ideals of integrity and 'virtuousness'. In this article, we consider how academics sacrifice scholarly integrity when selling their research ideas, or more specifically, the non-academic impact of these, to research funders. We review attitudes towards pathway to impact statements - formal components of research funding applications, that specify the prospective socio-economic benefits of proposed research - from (n = 50) academics based in the UK and Australia and how the hyper-competitiveness of the HE market is resulting in impact sensationalism and the corruption of academics as custodians of truth.
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Dostopno za:
BFBNIB, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
This paper reflects on the emergence of an impact agenda and its incorporation as a feature of the academic contract in UK universities. It focuses on the depositions of senior academic managers ...across a range of social science research centres, as they critically reflect upon their organizational strategy for capturing and communicating the socio-economic impact of their research. Their testimonies articulate manifold issues in impact capture yet focus mainly on a disjuncture between an impact discourse mobilised by research funders/regulators and the daily practice of academics. Respondents nevertheless identify the potential of 'impact capture' as an obligation that enriches the perceptual horizons of research and the critical reflexivity of academics as knowledge workers.
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Dostopno za:
BFBNIB, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Little is known about the process of evaluating the economic and societal impact of research undertaken in university settings. In this paper, we explore the accounts of senior academics and ...user-assessors, populating disciplinary sub-panels spanning the humanities and social sciences, convened to judge and 'score' the impact claims of researchers from UK universities as a new component of research evaluation within the specific context of the UK's performance-based research funding system (PBRFS), the Research Excellence Framework (REF). We perceive from their accounts the emergence of a new and liminal space in the production of scholarly 'distinction' that is unlike archetypal modalities of academic excellence. Analogously, we identify an emotional and intellectual vulnerability in the review process and the loosening of the structures reviewers traditionally call upon in making value-determinations that simultaneously facilitate their role as impact evaluators and create new modalities in scholarly distinction.
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Dostopno za:
BFBNIB, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Theoretical literature on institutions emphasizes the importance of logics - shared rationalizations - in determining many aspects of organizations. In this literature, universities are often ...discussed as an example of an institution with a particularly strong and cohesive logic, one rooted in notions of academic excellence and the pursuit of universal knowledge. However, more recent literature has argued that multiple institutional logics often compete and conflict with one another in a single organization. In this paper, we use the notion of competing logics to examine how academics in the United Kingdom understand the university as an institution. We perform a factor analysis on questionnaires completed by academics to identify overarching rationalizations of universities. Our analysis suggests three competing institutional logics characterize universities: autonomy, utilitarianism and managerialism. We show these multiple logics produce competing models of the university as an institution, and we discuss the practical and theoretical implications.
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Dostopno za:
BFBNIB, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Over the last decade, there has been significant investment made by the UK higher education policy and funding community in embedding public engagement within British universities. While some public ...engagement is undertaken by university staff - often on a voluntary and unpaid basis - much is carried out by public engagement professionals (PEPs), typically from within professional services divisions. The following account, based upon a multi-site case study of institutional leadership for public engagement, adopts a Bourdieusian lens to consider the challenges faced by PEPs as 'non-academics' working within the UK's university sector as a prestige economy. It reveals their struggle to gain a professional parity of esteem with academics, and how the discrediting of their expertise by the latter forms a challenge to their leadership and thus their displacement within universities as highly stratified organisations. Ergo, we find the evanescing of public engagement as a formal institutional commitment.
2018
2011
)t.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
BFBNIB, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
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