Search results

This article examines the discourse of appointment, promotion, and tenure (APT) documents for academic librarians. Discourse analysis can illuminate the social role of language, social systems, and social practices.

This qualitative research analyzes the APT documents for librarians from a group of US universities (n = 50) whose librarians are tenured faculty (n = 35). Linguistic features were examined to identify genre (text type) and register (language variety) characteristics.

The documents showed strong relationships with other texts; vocabulary from the language of human resources (HR); grammatical characteristics such as nominalization; passive constructions; few pronouns; the “quasi-synonymy” of series of adjectives, nouns, or verbs; and expression of certainty and obligation. The documents have a sociolinguistic and social semiotic component. In using a faculty genre, librarians assert solidarity with other faculty, while the prominent discourse of librarians as practitioners detracts from faculty solidarity.

This research is limited to librarians at US land grant institutions. It has implications for other research institutions and other models of librarian status.

This research can help academic librarians fulfill their obligations by understanding how values encoded in these documents reflect positive and negative approaches.

Higher education and academic librarianship are in a state of flux. Understanding the discourse of these documents can help librarians encode appropriate goals and values. Little has been written on the discourse of librarianship. This is a contribution to the understanding of librarians as a discourse community and of significant communicative events.

Navigating the tenure and promotion process can be a daunting task for faculty members regardless of race or gender at institutions of higher learning. The purpose of this paper is to reflect the experiences of a Black female as she navigates the tenure and promotion process at a predominantly White institution (PWI), most of which have an organizational culture dominated by males.

The author describes the process that many faculty members undertake, identifies three levels of peer involvement, and discusses some of the issues that she faced during her efforts to advance from Assistant Professor to Associate Professor to Full Professor and the lessons learnt along the way.

The goal is to illuminate: the impact of personality and communication style on career advancement for Black women in academe, the feelings of apprehension that some Black female faculty at PWIs have regarding the impact of speaking candidly about their experiences and about diversity issues impacting the work environment, and the need for peer coaching to gain tenure and promotion.

There are no guarantees that peer involvement will make the process less daunting or improve the chances of success for Black female faculty members at PWIs. However, this reflexive account provides insights into the process that can be useful to other Black females at PWIs, as well as, the faculty who mentor them and the administrators who seek to retain them.

Six tips for Black females who are going through the promotion and tenure process are set forth. Additionally, a model is proposed that describes peer involvement in faculty development.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive assessment of promotion and tenure for librarians in light of increased scrutiny and expectations by the administration of Idaho State University (ISU). This increased rigour was prompted by a move up in the Carnegie Classification System.

A literature review was performed using library databases, as well as assessing peer institution promotion and tenure documents. Additionally ongoing feedback from University administrators was solicited. The process took for the creation of a new promotion and tenure document for ISU library took two years from the beginning of the project to the final approved document.

The study found a dearth of performance benchmarks in both literature and peer institution policies and required the authors, along with other library faculty, to create evidence based benchmarks for ISU aligned with traditional standards of teaching, research and service.

This paper is an inclusive assessment of the literature on faculty promotion and tenure, the policies of ISU’s peer institutions, and the change of Carnegie Classification’s impact on the ISU policies.

The use of technology in teaching and scholarly publishing has become a vital part of the tripartite component (research, teaching, and service) of the promotion and tenure process. Information technology (IT) is new territory in this process. The evaluation of the use of IT as an integral part of mainstream instruction is gathering momentum and generating dialogue within the professional literature of most disciplines. This article addresses the issues now facing faculty who are coming up for promotion and/or tenure and the issues with which their evaluators must grapple in reviewing their promotion and tenure papers.

This study examines and describes the experiences and perceptions of women and men associate professors from various academic disciplines as they chart and navigate their academic career trajectories.

Using a case study approach, we interviewed 11 purposively selected mid-career faculty members and five department heads.

Through the Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT), we identified issues of clarity, climate, self-efficacy, and gender disparity as major concerns for mid-career faculty.

This research is limited to a research-intensive university in the southeastern United States. The small study population and unique context limit the generalizability of the study.

Findings of the study provide a lens for university and college administrators, human resources professionals, and other institutional leaders to view professional development programs for mid-career faculty members at their own institutions. The findings also suggest a need for improvements to current family-friendly policies to reduce gender bias and retain women faculty members.

This paper offers practical recommendations to higher education administrators and human resources professionals on how to positively cultivate a better work climate and culture for mid-career faculty members. It also offers suggestions on how to be sensitive to and improve gender equity among mid-career faculty in higher education.

This research explores whether gender affects faculty satisfaction with opportunity for advancement in rank at two elite liberal arts colleges in the United States.

We analyze survey data from associate and full professors to identify predictors of satisfaction with advancement. Focus group and interview data supplement our interpretations of regression results.

The two colleges differ in the impact of gender, rank, perceptions of the full professor promotion process, and quality of department relationships on satisfaction with advancement. At one college, there is no gender difference, while at the other, women are less satisfied than men. The effect of gender at this college is fully mediated by department relationship quality.

This cross-sectional study was conducted at only two colleges. Interpretations of the quantitative results are inductively generated and not tested in the analysis.

We make recommendations to improve processes and pathways for promotion that recognize the role of department climates in fostering or hindering career progression. Gender may be less salient in contexts in which associate professors have positive department relationships and in which promotion criteria value their administrative service and other institutional contributions sufficiently.

Previous research about promotion to full professor has focused on research universities while we examine the issue at liberal arts colleges, institutions that emphasize undergraduate study.

Notwithstanding the rise of contingent faculty, tenured and tenured track faculty continue to play vital roles in US higher education and the tenure decision is central to the lives of many academics. While the literature is replete with anecdotes about faculty complaining about the process to which they were subject, there has been surprisingly little empirical research on faculty perceptions of the clarity and fairness of the tenure process and the relationship of these perceptions to work outcomes. The purpose of this paper is to examine the motivational impact of these processes on faculty who are pre-tenure as well as those who had successfully navigated the tenure process.

Self-reported survey data were collected from 410 full-time pre-tenured and tenured faculty at three universities in the Northeastern USA. Participants were assessed on their uncertainty and their perceptions of justice in the tenure process as well as their affective and continuance organizational commitment and work engagement. Data were subject to exploratory factor analysis, correlation, and hierarchical regression.

The results indicated that there was a lack of clarity with respect to both the criteria for tenure and the procedures by which institutions made tenure decisions. The results indicated no gender differences in the perception of clarity, but the results suggest women perceived the tenure process as being less just than men do. Perceived justice was positively related to both affective organizational commitment and work engagement with affective commitment fully mediating the relationship with there being no relationship between continuance commitment and perceived justice. These relations held for both tenured and later career faculty and pre-tenured and earlier career faculty.

The study extends understanding of the dimensionality of justice perceptions in higher education setting. The design was cross-sectional and data common was self-report.

The results provide empirical support to anecdotes of faculty feeling that tenure processes often lack clarity and appear to be capricious and unfair. It provides evidence that the negative impact of a process being viewed as unfair may affect the dedication and effort that the faculty who are granted tenure and remain at their institutions for decades afterward. At a time, when higher education is resource challenged, it behooves both faculty and administrators to critically review their tenure processes against best practices.

This study adds to the limited empirical literature on the tenure process and does so from a motivational perspective.

Black faculty members navigating the tenure process in higher educational settings, especially historically Black colleges or universities (HBCU), quickly learn within their careers that the job at hand requires a lot of time, energy, and persistence. Extant literature highlights the difficulties Black scholars face in such settings; however, it is vital to shedding light on the positive aspects that occur daily. This chapter highlights a component of collaboration that is often under shadowed in the educational setting, the faculty–graduate student partnership. Given the lack of resources and infrastructural elements that often plague HBCUs, in comparison to other institutions, faculty members inadvertently and unconsciously establish partnerships with advanced undergraduate and graduate students. Without the assistance of young, emerging scholars, tenure-earning faculty may struggle with maintaining a healthy work–life balance. Moreover, forging strong partnerships with mentees aids in faculty and student development alike. This narrative encompasses the views, experiences, and perceptions of a young, tenure-earning faculty member. Additionally, past and present graduate students provide insight on perceptions of faculty–student interactions and their subsequent development as scholars, researchers, and clinicians.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate motivation to teach for higher education faculty within schools of education.

This study utilized survey research methods to collect data from higher education faculty at nine universities identified from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of teaching website.

The predictor variables of gender, years of teaching in higher education, percent of overall workload devoted to teaching and two dummy variables for type of institution (i.e. doctoral granting and research II institution) when considered together did not statistically significantly predict whether or not a faculty person achieved tenure with outstanding teaching. In total, 14 of the factors influencing teaching (FIT)-choice scale components statistically significantly predicted whether or not a faculty person achieved tenure with outstanding teaching, only social dissuasion statistically significantly added to the model.

This is the first study to use the FIT-choice scale with university education faculty, and the findings suggest that higher education faculty may be motivated to produce high-quality instruction based on different factors than K-12 teachers.

Develops a series of factors to be considered when developing criteria for determining the quality of a research article, as well as the quality of a publication (journal) for tenure or promotion decisions. Discusses ways to measure the quality of a particular publication and the research article using a checklist format. Raises commentaries on each perception and variable to enlighten the novice regarding philosophical and ethical issues. The process described is not prescriptive but explorative, allowing the institutional evaluators to compare their individual evaluations using a standardized format and rating scale. The values assigning to each exclusive factor can be varied according to the institutional objectives.