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There is currently a shortage of academic librarians in the United States. This shortage is affecting staffing levels at libraries and making it increasingly difficult to fill positions. Pollock (2002) reported that libraries across the nation are facing the same dilemma, “how to fill the growing number of vacancies in the ranks of professional librarians” (p. 94). There are several explanations for this trend. There is a phenomenon known as the graying of the profession. A large number of academic librarians are nearing retirement age and new librarians will be needed to replace them. Crosby (2001) stated that “many experienced librarians are expected to retire, switch occupations, or leave the occupation permanently for other reasons. This will create about 39,000 job openings for new librarians between 1998 and 2008” (p. 9). Wilder (2000) reported, “In demographic terms, librarianship in North America is a profession apart. Librarians are, as a group, substantially older than those in comparable professions, and they are aging at a much faster rate” (para. 1). Lynch (2002) reported that over 20% of the librarians currently employed in the United States will reach age 65 by 2014.

This chapter looks back over my more than 20 years as a librarian, considering how the often unexpected opportunities I’ve had to work with youth and families have been centered in connectedness, hope, and love. As a youth services librarian working in the library with families or providing outreach to the most vulnerable members of the community, and currently as a community college librarian, I can think back over my career in libraries, the people I’ve met, the experiences I’ve shared, and feel blessed. But there are also times I feel like Sisyphus, pushing the rock that continues to roll back on me. It is disheartening to see the same struggles getting worse in our communities, to have to fight to keep our doors open every time there is a budget crunch, to hear our work diminished by others. But I have come to understand that having hope doesn’t mean not understanding how trying times are or passively accepting the ways things are until they magically change. Hope means pushing through anyway, stubborn in our love for our patrons and our peers, in our belief that books and reading can help us through, in our faith that the world needs libraries.

Accounting practitioners and educators agree that effective oral and written communication skills are essential to success in the accounting profession. Despite numerous initiatives to improve accounting majors’ communication skills, many students remain deficient in this area. Communication literature suggests that one factor rendering these initiatives ineffective is communication apprehension (CA). There is general agreement that accounting students around the globe have higher levels of CA than other majors. Therefore, accounting educators interested in improving students’ communication skills need to be aware of the dimensions and implications of CA. This chapter provides a review of the relevant literature on CA, with a focus on CA in accounting majors. It also presents intervention techniques for use in the classroom and makes suggestions for future research.

This study takes advantage of abundant data from the Economics Department at National Tsing Hua University to empirically evaluate whether there exist academic performance differentials between undergraduate students from two entrance channels (exam-based and application-based methods) across courses and grades. We first evaluate the academic performance between the students based on two entrance channels, and then incorporate the General Scholastic Ability Test (GSAT) score (including five subjects of Chinese Literature, Mathematics, English, Science, and Society) into the independent variables to control for the students' ability. Our empirical results exhibit the students recruited through the application-based method outperform those admitted from the exam-based method in required courses after controlling for the students' individual characteristics. Nevertheless, we found that the advantage disappears for the elective courses. Furthermore, the academic gaps between the two groups of students tend to decline or disappear when students are seniors. The findings indicate that entrance exam scores (e.g., the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT) scores in the United States) are good indicators for predict college academic performance, making the potential function of entrance exam in Taiwan relatively comparable to that in the United States. The findings also detail that individual GSAT scores on English, Math, and Society are positively and significantly associated with his/her performance on the core courses in Economics, supporting a significant learning progression from the curricula of senior high school to the undergraduate college education.

Places of Inquiry identifies basic conditions and trends in modern systems of higher education that link or dissociate research, teaching, and student learning (“study”). The book is structured in two major parts. Part I, “Distinctive National Configurations of Advanced Education and Research Organization”, in five chapters organized by country, contrasts the national arrangements of the basic elements in the five major nations of Germany, Britain, France, United States, and Japan. These chapters give play to historical determination of national peculiarities and unique arrangements. Chapter 1 particularly highlights the preeminent role played in the construction of the modern research university by nineteenthcentury developments in the German system. Emerging disciplinarians learned by trial and error to use the laboratory and the seminar in a framework of university institutes. In “the institute university”, the academic research group was born, with Humboldtian thought serving as a useful covering ideology.Chapter 2 portrays English universities, in contrast, to be focused historically on elite preparation of undergraduates—a “thin stream of excellence”—in the small worlds of Oxford and Cambridge colleges. Here, in this model, against the grain of the structure, research-centered academics learned to use the apprenticeship model for a very limited number of “research students” who were supported for advanced study toward a late-developing Ph.D. “The collegiate university” has been very different from the German configuration.Chapter 3 presents the highly unusual historical arrangements in the French setting where the universities became in effect the party of the third part, caught between the elite nature of the grandes ecoles and the domination in research of a nonuniversity research establishment. An outside set of research institutes has provided the main research base, and university research-oriented activities had to be brought into alignment with it. The genetic imprints of the system, in contrast to both the German and the British, have been one of subordination of the university, with much broad structural separation of research activity from university teaching and the university education of students. A picture of historic subordination is also found in the case of Japan (Chapter 5), where much displacement to industry has taken place. Students graduating from first-degree study have been snapped up by industry and offered better opportunity, including in research, than what the university could offer. Advanced education at universities became severely constrained. In Japanese terms, Japanese graduate schools, although formally modeled after the American structure, became “empty show windows.”The chapter on the United States traces the development of a highly competitive system of higher education in which a graduate level, separately organized within universities from undergraduate programs, provided a broad foundation for small-group laboratories and seminars in which research activity could be a means of teaching and a mode of study. Peculiar American conditions of weak secondary schooling and generous admission to higher education left much general or liberal education to be accomplished in the undergraduate years, preempting specialization. Emerging disciplinarians tried repeatedly in the mid- and late-nineteenth century to build their new research interests into the undergraduate realm. It did not work. The emergent solution was a vertical one, to add a formal graduate school on top, with its arms in the graduate programs of the departments making it “the home of science.”This major internal differentiation, in comparison to the other four major international models, made the American university a “graduate department university,” with extensive provision developing in the last half of the twentieth century for research-based teaching and learning. What the German system had been able to do on a small scale in the nineteenth century, in the context of elite higher education, the American system developed systematically the capacity to do on a much larger scale, in the context of mass higher education on the road to universal higher education.Part II of the volume, entitled “The Research-Teaching-Study Nexus,” offers a conceptual framework for understanding how modern systems of higher education do or do not effectively bring research into alignment with advanced university teaching and advanced student training. The concept of a research-teaching-study nexus serves as leitmotiv. In Chapter 6, devoted to “forces of fragmentation,” adverse conditions for this nexus are largely subsumed under the twin concepts of research drift and teaching drift, with certain interests of government and industry strengthening inherent tendencies, already stimulated by mass enrollments and great growth in knowledge, for research on the one side and teaching and learning on the other to drift apart.But the nexus survives, often with great resilience and strength, and, in Chapter 7, the central part of the conceptual analysis takes the form of an explanation of how a modern integration is most strongly effected. Supporting conditions and processes are identified at three levels: whole national system, where differentiation, decentralization, and competition serve as broad enabling elements; the individual university, where diversified funding and deliberate organization of advanced education play an increasingly large determining role; and the basic unit (departmental) level within universities, where the activities of research, teaching, and study are located. At the base, operational conditions are captured in the twin concepts of research group and teaching group, each dependent on the other and closely intertwined in a veritable double helix of linkage and interaction. These twin settings for professors and students permit the linked transmission of tacit and tangible knowledge.As both the tacit and the tangible components of specialized knowledge bulk ever larger, they cannot be suitably conveyed by undergraduate or first-degree teaching programs alone, or by historic mentor-apprentice relationships alone. The research-teaching-study nexus is increasingly enacted by operational units of universities that bring together an advanced teaching program and the learning-by-doing of research activity. In this organizational nexus we find the heart of the graduate school phenomenon.The concluding chapter (Chapter 8) goes beyond analysis of the research-teaching-study nexus by offering three broad conclusions for the understanding of modern higher education: first, that inquiry remains the central activity, the dynamic element, in the university complex; second, that complexity and contradiction in university activities are inevitable and will continue to grow, ruling out simple solutions to long-term problems and placing a premium on how individual universities go about organizing themselves; and third, that research and teaching have an “essential compatibility.” Research activity itself is a compelling and rich basis for teaching and learning, primarily in graduate education in the arts and sciences but also secondarily in both advanced professional education and undergraduate or pre-advanced education. The much-voiced view that research and teaching are incompatible is short-sighted and regressive. The incompatibility thesis should give way to a more fundamental understanding in which research activity is seen both as a compelling form of teaching and as a necessary method of learning.For all modern and modernizing systems of higher education, the book emphasizes the great importance of organizing master's and especially doctoral work so that the activities of specialized research groups interact with structured teaching programs.In sum: Places of Inquiry concentrates on graduate (advanced) education, a level of higher education that has been rarely studied. It depicts distinctive configurations of academic research and advanced training in the five major national systems of higher education of the late twentieth century. It highlights research activity as a basic for teaching and learning. And it identifies generic conditions that pull research, teaching, and study apart from each other, and conversely and most important, focuses attention on the structures and processes that work to keep these central university activities closely linked.

Recruiting students to study abroad is a difficult challenge for American colleges and universities. Study abroad advisors and directors of international programs are searching for better ways of marketing the overseas academic experience. Approximately 3% of U.S. students who pursue a bachelor’s degree study abroad at some point in their college career. In any given year, less than 1% (0.8%) of U.S. students take part in study abroad (Hayward, 2000, p. 9). American higher education falls far short of the Presidential Commission’s target of 10% by 2000 set in 1979 (Strength Through Wisdom, 1979). The typical college student who participates in study abroad is an undergraduate liberal arts major who spends one semester in a country in Western Europe. In 1999–2000, 63% of American students studying abroad were in Europe (Snapshot of Report on Study Abroad Programs, 2000, p. 1). Almost one fourth go to one country – Great Britain. Fifteen percent of study abroad students travel to Latin America, 6% to Asia and 3% to Africa (Hayward, 2000, p. 10). The small number of U.S. students (129,770) who experienced foreign study in 1998–1999 compares unfavorably with the much larger number of foreign students (490,933) who enrolled in U.S. institutions (Hesel & Green, 2000, p. 5). Even more disheartening is the fact that nearly 50% of students entering 4-year colleges say that they want to study abroad and that three out of four adults agree that students should study abroad (Hesel & Green, 2000, p. 1). When asked to choose which activity in college is most important to them, entering freshmen rank study abroad second only to internships (Hesel & Green, 2000, p. 3). There are obviously a number of barriers to student participation in foreign study.

Throughout the early 1980s, schools of business struggled with ways to internationalize their faculty, students and curriculum. In the face of an increasingly global economy, it was necessary for schools to meet this challenge. Various strategies were employed: infusion of global topics into the classes, creation of International Business departments, the implementation of the CIBER program (Center for International Business Education and Research) and faculty exchanges. Although the Kelley School of Business tried all of these, our most successful efforts to internationalize students has been by facilitating overseas experiences through organized study abroad programs.

Most institutions around the world provide opportunities for students to study outside of their own country for short- or long-term educational experiences. There is a gender imbalance for those seeking these experiences, with more women than men applying to study outside of the United States and only slightly more men than women are looking to study abroad in the United States. A qualitative study was conducted in the United States with American men who had studied abroad and male international students studying in the United States. Understanding what motivates men to take advantage of these learning opportunities will lead to greater promotional efforts to attract more men to these experiences.

Puerto Rico (PR) is among the US jurisdictions with the lowest passing rates on the Certified Public Accountant (CPA) exam (National Association of State Boards of Accountancy (NASBA), 2016, 2017). No prior studies have addressed this issue. To fill this gap, the authors conducted a survey among candidates to examine the factors perceived as challenges on the exam. The authors also studied the relationship between respondents’ individual, educational, and CPA exam-related characteristics and the likelihood of success on the exam. Results reveal there are three factors perceived by respondents as their main challenges: level of technical difficulty, cost of the exam, and not enough time to study for the exam. Additional analysis indicates that age, major Grade Point Average, weekly study hours, and the time interval between graduation and the first attempt at the exam are significant factors that affect the passing rates on the exam. These findings suggest that a combination of individual, educational, and exam-related factors affect Puerto Rican candidates’ results on the exam. The socioeconomic background of PR may heighten the impact of such factors. Considering that the accounting profession is always adapting to the evolutionary demands of the business environment, these results may contribute to the development of adequate measures in support of Puerto Rican and other minorities with diverse backgrounds.

Teacher education for social justice aims to enable teachers to work toward equity and justice in society and humanizing the educational experience of their students. Conceptualizing teaching as a political and ethical endeavor, social justice teacher education must engage seriously with the local and lived experiences of both teacher educators and student teachers. How then does teacher education for social justice move across communities and identities, and through cultural, social, geographic and temporal spaces? This chapter presents an autobiographical narrative inquiry into social justice teacher education across sociocultural and sociopolitical contexts, across time, and within different educational communities. Bakhtin's dialogic theory (1981) helps to trace the narrative threads wherein “each word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life” (p. 293). The study examines my ideological becoming (Bakhtin, 1981) as a critical teacher educator in the context of a youth mentoring service-learning course for undergraduate teacher candidates. I examine the complexities and tensions in exploring experiences and co-constructing understandings of oppression, privilege and social justice with my student teachers on the youth mentoring course in dialogic struggles with my experiences of justice and education in the USA and Hong Kong as an English-speaking Chinese American. Providing an in-depth examination of the convergence of identity, social relations, place, and time in my knowledge formation, I critically reflect upon the notion of social justice to suggest that social justice teacher education is multi-voiced and lived both locally and globally.