This is the story of an illustrious Romanian-born, Hungarian-speaking, Vienna- schooled, Columbia-educated and Harvard-formed, middle-class Jewish professor of politics and other subjects. Markovits ...revels in a rootlessness that offers him comfort, succor, and the inspiration for his life's work. As we follow his quest to find a home, we encounter his engagement with the important political, social, and cultural developments of five decades on two continents. We also learn about his musical preferences, from classical to rock; his love of team sports such as soccer, baseball, basketball, and American football; and his devotion to dogs and their rescue. Above all, the book analyzes the travails of emigration the author experienced twice, moving from Romania to Vienna and then from Vienna to New York. Markovits's Candide- like travels through the ups and downs of post-1945 Europe and America offer a panoramic view of key currents that shaped the second half of the twentieth century. By shedding light on the cultural similarities and differences between both continents, the book shows why America fascinated Europeans like Markovits and offered them a home that Europe never did: academic excellence, intellectual openness, cultural diversity and religious tolerance. America for Markovits was indeed the "beacon on the hill, " despite the ugliness of its racism, the prominence of its everyday bigotry, the severity of its growing economic inequality, and the presence of other aspects that mar this worthy experiment's daily existence.
Academic careers are complex, diverse, and increasingly competitive. Building on previous research on selection criteria for admission to early research careers, this research expands the analytical ...focus to examine attributes requested in job ads at each stage of an academic career. Our data, extracted from a European job platform, draws on over 40 different disciplines, 3000 universities, and 60 countries. We developed a taxonomy from the selection criteria data and analysed 40,819 advertisements for all stages combined and posted in 2016-2021. We analysed the most prevalent and salient attributes listed in academic job ads to determine the most important attributes in the five most represented countries and disciplines, and changes by stage and across the academic career lifespan. We find that degree and achievements play a principal role in academic recruitment at each stage of career, mobility is key to progression in senior roles, teaching gains importance towards professoriate, and senior academics need to be equipped with skills and/or experience in fundraising, curriculum, and outreach. The insights inform policy and practice for institutional researcher development, capabilities framework development, human resources, and academic recruitment, and provide guidance for academic career planning and development.
For decades, national surveys have shown faculty report high levels of dissatisfaction with the distribution of labor in their departments, especially women and underrepresented minority faculty. ...Research suggests this dissatisfaction is warranted, as these groups are often engaged in more service, mentoring, and institutional housekeeping than their peers. Despite the ample work revealing workload inequities and their consequences, few studies have examined the backdrop of conditions and practices within which workload is perceived as more or less fair, especially within departments. Drawing on survey data from 30 academic departments in Maryland, North Carolina, and Massachusetts, we empirically test three propositions about the conditions under which faculty experience their department workloads as equitable. We found departments where faculty reported equitable work conditions and practices (e.g., transparency, clarity, rotations of time-intensive roles) were significantly more likely than departments where faculty did not report these conditions and practices to report satisfaction with workload distribution, and satisfaction with teaching and service activities. Department work practices and conditions had a small or insignificant effect on faculty intent to leave. Interestingly, faculty confidence in the ability to enact these practices and conditions, which we termed action readiness, was not predictive of faculty satisfaction with workload distribution or teaching and service activities. We outline implications for academic leaders seeking to make academic workloads more transparent and equitable, and for future research.
Background
Faculty Learning Communities (FLCs) and Faculty Online Learning Communities (FOLCs) are ways to support STEM faculty implementing research-based curricula. In these communities, faculty ...facilitators take on the role of sharing expertise and promoting discussion. However, as members gain more experience, their needs change from addressing logistical to pedagogical issues. Hence, facilitators need to change their practices in response. However, there is little research on the mechanisms of faculty facilitator change. In this article, we provide a case study of a specific STEM FOLC facilitator and demonstrate the usefulness of a teacher change model to investigate facilitator change.
Results
Guided by our adaptation of the
Interconnected
Model
of
Professional
Growth
(IMPG),
we conducted interviews with FOLC facilitators, and selected a case facilitator who reported changes in facilitation goals and strategies over time. The model helped us identify specific areas of change and potential mechanisms for these changes. Using themes of change identified in the case facilitator interview, we developed coding schemes to analyze his FOLC meetings over a 2-year period. We found empirical evidence from multiple data sources, including FOLC meetings and facilitator reflections, that supported the change themes, including: changing his role as an “expert” by sharing his own expertise less and drawing on others’ expertise more frequently, changing his response to members’ comments by jumping in to answer less frequently and withholding his own responses more often to encourage member sharing, and a change in group discussions towards less logistical and more pedagogical conversations.
Conclusions
Our findings suggest that the IMPG can be fruitfully adapted to study facilitator change. A diagrammatic representation of the IMPG provides a description the types of change the case facilitator experienced and the factors that supported those changes. We discuss how the methodology used to analyze facilitator actions in FOLC group meetings may be useful to study other types of professional growth. Finally, because our analytical model allowed us to identify mechanisms of facilitator change, we describe the implications and provide suggestions to support facilitators in other faculty community groups.
Abstract Background There have been many efforts to increase the number of women surgeons. We provide an update of women surgeon representation along the pathway to surgical academia. Methods Data ...was extracted from Association of American Medical Colleges FACTS and Faculty Administrative Management Online User System as well as GME annual reports starting in 1994 until the last year available for each. Results The proportion of graduating women medical students has increased on average .5% per year from 1994 to 2014. Women general surgery trainees have more than doubled in number over the same period but represented 38.3% of all general surgery trainees in 2014. Women Full Professors increased on average .3% from 1994 to 2015 but still make up less than 10% of all Full Professors. Conclusions Despite improvements over the past 20 years, there are still large gender gaps in surgery for trainees and academic leadership. At the current rate of increase, women Full Professors will not achieve gender parity until in 2136.
Academic career systems have been in focus lately as a means to attract talented researchers and teachers. In this paper, we compare tenure tracks at three Swedish universities. The analysis relies ...on qualitative data, including interviews and policy documents, and revolves around three questions: How is the tenure track designed? What were the drivers behind the new tenure track? How is the tenure track designed to handle emerging tensions? We identify three common drivers and rationales: transparency, recruitment of early career researchers and long-term retention of staff. The article ends with a discussion of important considerations that were made when introducing the tenure track. The considerations derive from the tensions between research and teaching, between scope and funding and between the needs of the institution and the rights of the individual. The results are important in an increasingly competitive higher education sector aiming to construct and implement attractive career systems.
The workload of most academics involves two main activities: research and teaching. Despite the dual nature of the work, career advancement usually chiefly depends on research performance. Since ...academics are rational actors, warnings are beginning to emerge that current predominantly research-based performance evaluation systems may be detrimental to creativity and innovation in teaching. This paper investigates the substance of these warnings by revisiting the relationship between research performance and teaching quality. Using a large cross-disciplinary sample of academics within a research-oriented university, we find, consistent with prior evidence, that research productivity is not related to teaching quality, whereas research quality is positively related with teaching quality. These findings discount fears that research-based performance evaluation in academia may be detrimental to teaching quality.
Mentoring to develop research skills is an important strategy for facilitating faculty success. The purpose of this study was to conduct an integrative literature review to examine the barriers and ...facilitators to mentoring in health-related research, particularly for three categories: new investigators (NI), early-stage investigators (ESI) and underrepresented minority faculty (UMF). PsychINFO, CINAHL and PubMed were searched for papers published in English from 2010 to 2020, and 46 papers were reviewed. Most papers recommended having multiple mentors and many recommended assessing baseline research skills. Barriers and facilitators were both individual and institutional.
mentioned most frequently were a lack of time and finding work-life balance. UMF mentioned barriers related to bias, discrimination and isolation.
included lack of mentors, lack of access to resources, and heavy teaching and service loads. UMF experienced institutional barriers such as devaluation of experience or expertise.
were subdivided and included writing and synthesis as technical skills, networking and collaborating as interpersonal skills, and accountability, leadership, time management, and resilience/grit as personal skills.
included access to mentoring, professional development opportunities, and workload assigned to research. Advocacy for diversity and cultural humility were included as unique interpersonal and institutional facilitators for UMF. Several overlapping and unique barriers and facilitators to mentoring for research success for NI, ESI and UMF in the health-related disciplines are presented.
Increasing faculty diversity is a stated priority across higher education in the United States. The extent to which Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) are part of these discussions is ...unclear as the group is considered faculty of color but not always underrepresented minorities. Using data on all four-year postsecondary institutions, this study examines AAPI faculty representation over more than two decades, focusing on the intersection of race and gender across the tenure pipeline. Results indicate a persistent underrepresentation of AAPI women as full professors similar to other women of color. Through an analysis of past and current faculty representation across rank, this study has implications for initiatives aimed at increasing faculty diversity.
The number of adjunct faculty members in higher education has been increasing nationally over the past two decades, and schools of social work are no exception to this trend. There has been robust ...debate about adjunct use, given concerns about low pay, poor access to benefits, lack of inclusion in academic decision making, and little support outside the classroom. Given the growing reliance on such part-time faculty in social work programs, and cognizant of ethical considerations, it is important to find ways of supporting adjuncts that both honor their contributions to social work education and promote the quality of education they offer the next generation of social workers. This paper explores the creation of a multi-faceted, adjunct-centered initiative for part-time social work instructors at a large, urban public university. The authors discuss the existing literature on perceptions of adjunct instructors across various constituencies, address issues around the inclusion of adjuncts in the faculty community, and share obstacles encountered and lessons learned in their endeavor to bolster programmatic support for adjunct instructors.
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