Search results

Academic integrity in tertiary education is a global concern. This chapter describes academic integrity in Australian universities and proposes an “it takes a village” framework to guide universities toward a re-evaluation of academic integrity education. It takes a village to raise a child – a child needs role models and positive influences from multiple people for healthy growth and development. With regard to academic integrity, the parallel is that the entire university community needs to be involved to foster development of students of integrity. The institution and its community need to provide structures, multiple positive and effective learning experiences, and clear guidelines to support both staff and students. In this chapter, we argue that academic integrity needs to be seen as a complex system, one in which everyone involved has responsibility to develop and maintain a culture of integrity and one which supports a student throughout their academic journey.

The purpose of the article is to examine the motivation of the academics in a developing country, Cambodia, which is an under-researched country in order to look into the satisfaction level of the academics in various aspects of academic profession. This study helps inform policy makers and other stakeholders in higher education in Cambodia about the current status quo of academic profession in Cambodia, which acts to impede the quality of higher education in this country.

This study employed a survey design to examine the motivation of academics in a periphery country, Cambodia. The result from an online survey via Microsoft Form of 278 academics currently working at three public universities and four private universities across the country revealed that academics in higher education institutions in Cambodia were satisfied with their job (Mean = 4.1, SD = 0.74) and the organizational culture and value (Mean = 3.9, SD = 0.77), but dissatisfied with their salary (Mean = 3.1, SD = 0.90). The mean score of other variables also skewed toward happiness, yet this mean score remained low (between 3.2 and 3.8). Furthermore, the result from t-test and one-way ANOVA showed no significant difference in job satisfaction between public and private academics and among academics from different employment statuses. Job satisfaction of academics in this study did not come from salary or work environment, but may have come from the flexibility and status quo of academic career in Cambodia, in which the majority of academics have additional job while many others (38% of the participants) treat teaching as their secondary job and at the same time maintain the title as academic or even professor, which is relatively well-respected in Cambodia society, despite poor salary. The complexity of academic career in this context may present major setbacks to the quality of higher education in this periphery country.

This study revealed that although academics in higher education in Cambodia were satisfied with their job and organizational culture and value, they were not satisfied with their work environment and salary. The result from this study indicated that the reason why salary did not determine the satisfaction level of academics was that most of the academics in Cambodia higher education have additional job or business in addition to teaching. Moreover, they have other full-time jobs outside higher education and they can still teach part-time to earn extra income.

Since this study generated only 278 responses from academics, these data remain small compared to the whole population. Thus, this may affect the generalization of the finding to the larger population.

This study helps fill the existing gaps in literature on higher education in Cambodia and the findings from this study can be used to make informed decision regarding quality of higher education in Cambodia.

Higher education is a social institution that helps maintain professionalization of all professions and improve students competitiveness. Improving quality of higher education means that academics themselves need to be professional and ethical toward teaching. This research pointed out the unethical practices of academic procession, which in turn, de-professionalize academics and downgrade the quality of higher education in Cambodia.

This study provides a fresh insights into the motivation of academics in Cambodia higher education. This study also provides the framework for academic motivation in a developing country.

I historically compare changes in institutional frameworks creating academic positions linked to temporary employment by analyzing university employment statistics in Chile, Colombia, Germany, and the USA. I find that temporary academic positions were institutionalized through the creation of previously inexistent academic categories called a contrata in Chile, de cátedra in Colombia, “junior professor” without tenure in Germany and “postdoc” in the USA; used in higher education and employment laws since 1989, 1992, 2002, and 1974, respectively. Under institutional frameworks demanding the maximization of students and research, universities have increasingly contracted academics through temporary contracts under rationales that differ between regions. In Colombia and Chile, public university leaders and owners of private universities contract such teaching positions to expand student numbers through lowering costs. In Germany and the USA, employment insecurity is mostly driven by temporary scientific positions under a main rationale of scientific expansion. The share of temporary positions has increased exponentially in Colombia and Germany in recent decades, whereas in the USA there has only been an increase since 2012. Moreover, in Chile, the share of permanent positions has decreased since 2012. The common trend is one of isomorphism of vertical academic structures sharing a pyramidal form, with a wide base of academics working under conditions of contractual insecurity. Such trends follow a rationale for maximization of student numbers as well as administration, and scientific production that is in tension with prioritizing wellbeing and improvement of academics’ working conditions. Yet, in these environments, the institution of tenure in the USA and recent Chilean regulations on accreditation represent mechanisms counteracting precarious employment.

The present study aims to investigate the reasons for the gap between academic education and the required skills of the labor market in Iran.

For this purpose, the authors adopted a thematic analysis method. The participants in the study were connoisseurs from universities and research institutes in Iran, who were selected with purposeful sampling methods of snowball type. To collect the data, the authors used a semi-structured interview and performed a thematic analysis for data analysis.

The findings showed that the views and perceptions of the connoisseurs participating in the study about the reasons for the gap between academic education and the skills required in the labor market in Iran can be classified into four main themes including lack of attention to labor market needs in the academic curricula, lack of attention to practical and entrepreneurial skills in the academic curricula, the weak link between universities and industry and society, and shortage of academic resources and equipment in some academic disciplines.

The present study had three implications. First, the human capital theory, the social closure theory, the positional conflict theory and the labor market segmentation theory are more compatible with the labor market of Iranian graduates, compared to other theories of the labor market. Second, the lack of coordination between academic education and the required skills in the labor market has weakened the Iranian economy. Third, the absence of practical and entrepreneurial skills in academic graduates has led to increased unemployment in Iranian society.

Within the last two decades, entrepreneurship education has become institutionalized in Germany. It is offered as a stand-alone program or as part of a business degree, combining academic knowledge, practical skills, and personal development to enhance the entrepreneurial success of university graduates. While entrepreneurship education has experienced similar growth worldwide, its emergence in Germany is closely tied to the country’s political and economic developments. The significance of entrepreneurship education for a thriving entrepreneurial ecosystem and contemporary economic policy has been instrumental in advancing its academic recognition. This chapter provides a historical analysis of the academization of entrepreneurship in Germany. It explores the recursive and often idiosyncratic processes involving state and financial institutions, companies, and universities that have created, respecified, and mutually reinforced a subdiscipline and field of study. Academic entrepreneurship knowledge successively not only became relevant for starting a business but also for employment within the entrepreneurial infrastructure and beyond. This chapter follows a chronological order, highlighting three key stages in the academization of entrepreneurship education. First, the academic, financial, and political roots (I) of entrepreneurship up until the 1970s. Second, it explores the transformation (II) of entrepreneurship into a viable policy alternative and the challenges faced in establishing complementary research and education in higher education institutions during the 1980s. Finally, it sketches the institutionalization (III) of entrepreneurship as a central driver of government economic policy, allowing for the late bloom of entrepreneurship education and research at universities around the turn of the millennium.

Although universities have been decentralized for academic freedom and autonomy, resources are being increasingly centralized, and the role of central administration is growing for efficiency and excellence reasons. At the same time, a division of labor is progressing by assigning specific tasks to professionals. The professionals are also centrally managed. Educational development was introduced by central administration to cope with the massification and quality assurance of higher education. Although it played a great part in promoting educational reform, it also suffered from the rejection of academics and the lack of methodology. Unlike ITC service and student service, educational development touches the autonomy of academics and is always torn between the central administration and academics. This chapter analyzes the structural and cultural difficulty of educational development in Japan by tracing its historical development and by comparing to other countries.

Based on a review of professional staff (PS), which includes research managers and administrators, in 54 academic publications, I propose a novel definition for this category of staff: ‘degree holding university employees who are primarily responsible for developing, maintaining and changing the social, digital and physical infrastructures that enable education, research and knowledge exchange’. The proposed definition facilitates the development of new research questions that target the level of the organisational fields of higher education and science, to complement research on the university and individual levels. This view supports the study of the contributions of PS to higher education and science. I anticipate that such a broader focus will help to counter and nuance accounts of ‘administrative bloat’ by focusing on how PS as a group shape and are shaped by the organisational fields of higher education and science, rather than dismissing them as superfluous or parasitic.

For researchers and sector agencies around the world, poor academic integrity is seen as a significant risk to universities (Bretag & Harper, 2017; QAA, 2020; TEQSA, 2019). Given the existential threat that acts of academic misconduct are deemed to pose to higher education, interest in ways of developing academic integrity is correspondingly high and often invokes the concept of values (Macfarlane et al., 2014; Morris, 2018). However, to ascribe to academic integrity, the status of a self-evident, perhaps universal, value of contemporary higher education is contentious on many levels. This chapter takes in turn three of the most common ways in which students and scholars infringe on the principles of academic integrity – plagiarism, collusion, and contract cheating – and explores what the prohibiting of each of these acts reveals about the values of contemporary higher education. It argues that, far from neutral or universal, the values of academic integrity appear both normative and culturally specific, promoting a particular conception of higher education which risks excluding large sections of the global population. To counter this, the notion of threshold values – borrowing from Meyer and Land's (2005) notion of the “threshold concept” – is proposed, identifying the development of shared values as crucial to ensuring that contemporary, globalized universities are inclusive and accessible spaces.

While the university as an institution is a great success story, one hears the constant chatter of the crises in higher education usually associated with the organizational transformation of universities. Regardless of one’s normative assessment of these observations, the institutional success of the university has been accompanied by the emergence of universities as organizational actors. I reflect on how these changes could alter the university as an institution, using the Australian higher education sector as an example. In doing so, I explore how universities as organizational actors, in responding to the demands of their external environment, set in motion a series of changes that redefine highly institutionalized categories, and, in doing so, radically remake the university as an institution.