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Faculty status for academic librarians is an issue that has been the subject of much debate in recent decades. The purpose of this paper is to examine the key points raised during this debate, in the hope of achieving a suitable resolution.

This paper begins with an overview of the issue of faculty status for academic librarians from an historical perspective and then continues with a review of literature from the past three decades. The pros and cons of granting faculty status are examined, as well as alternate models, followed by a proposed recommendation.

While there are a number of concerns regarding the value of faculty status for academic librarians, such as disagreement with the basic tenet that librarians are primarily teachers, the weight of the evidence seems to support the granting of faculty status to academic librarians. This status provides academic freedom, recognition of librarians in their role as educators, and financial benefits and job security and is supported by the Association of College and Research Libraries, the Association of American Colleges, and the American Association of University Professors.

While this paper is a review of selected relevant literature, only a small portion of the literature was of an empirical nature. There is a need for more studies which directly measure the impact of faculty status for academic librarians on the librarians themselves and the students, faculty, and institutions they serve.

The paper shows that with faculty status, academic librarians receive the same rights and privileges as other faculty and participate in college or university governance, thereby increasing the integration of the library with the institution.

The purpose of this paper is to develop and test a comprehensive model of personal and institutional input variables, composed of elements describing status‐based antecedents, job/organizational context antecedents, and individual level antecedents, which may contribute to the production of significant (top‐tier) research outputs in the management discipline.

The development and empirical examination of this model were done with two main goals in mind. First, the nature and degree to which certain factors lead to the production of top‐tier research productivity in the management discipline were explored. Second, it is hoped that information about these relationships could then be used by institutions and individuals so that they could better understand what it takes to adequately prepare faculty members to achieve increased productivity or, alternatively, to decide whether the goal of top‐tier research production is consistent with individual and institutional resources. As such, the results of this investigation should have interesting and potentially important implications for both academic status attainment and career success.

Hierarchical moderated regression analyses of 440 faculty records revealed that the status of current affiliation of the faculty member, editorial board membership, faculty rank, and the availability of doctoral students were related to top‐tier research productivity.

The findings from this study have important implications for the careers of management faculty at AACSB‐accredited business schools. Faculty at higher status institutions appear to enjoy a number of cumulative advantages due to increased social, human and cultural capital that support the production of top‐tier research. Additionally, faculty with doctoral student support and those with memberships on editorial boards seem to possess the resources and connections necessary to produce top‐tier research on a consistent basis. Future research should investigate institution‐specific inducements to research productivity (e.g. research support and remuneration) and the exact causal nature of the editorial board/productivity relationship.

Prior research has investigated status effects using broad categories as predictors, whereas this research uses interval values representing research‐based assessments of institution status rankings. Additionally, this research creates and tests a comprehensive causal model of research productivity antecedents.

The institution of tenure has elicited debate and controversy since its introduction in higher education. Proponents argue the need for tenure based on academic freedom and efficient university governance. Critics argue that it represents inefficiency in the higher education labor market and protects less productive faculty members. The use of tenure in academic libraries has been no less controversial, with only 40−60% of academic libraries supporting tenure track positions for academic librarians. This dichotomy in the labor market for academic librarians represents a natural experiment and allows for the testing of the presence of a compensating wage differential for tenure.

This study examines 10 years’ worth of cross-sectional data drawn from member libraries of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL). Models examine both the institutional characteristics of tenure-granting ARL academic libraries and the impact of tenure on starting salaries. Issues related to both a union wage premium and a compensating wage differential due to tenure are explored. The results of this research suggest that tenure, while serving other functions within an academic library setting, does not have the predicted impact on starting salaries.

This study is based on a survey of library personnel working in different academic libraries in Orissa. It determines the type of status these library professionals prefer, the criteria for evaluating their performance for promotion and salary, whether they prefer to be evaluated like teachers, and the input of faculty members in library matters. The study shows that 80 per cent of the professionals interviewed preferred academic status rather than faculty status. This means they prefer to establish their own ranking system rather than be equated with teachers. All university librarians, however, prefer to be assessed for promotion through an expert selection committee, as is the case for teachers.

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.

Institutions of higher education face challenges of fiscal responsibility and their value proposition for students and other stakeholders they serve. Strategies used in business sectors, such as merger and acquisition, are being increasingly adopted by higher education governing boards, especially for public institutions and systems. The purpose of this paper is to guide policy decisions related to university mergers.

This paper focuses on the interplay between the pre-merger status of the institution, the individual faculty member's sense of belonging, and their commitment to the organization on levels of job-related stress, which has well-established negative impacts on individual and organizational performance. Using survey data collected at the same time post-merger from two different universities within the same state system, we explore regression models to identify similarities and differences between the faculty responses in terms of the impact of the merger on faculty stress.

Differences are found between the two universities in terms of faculty stress with faculty of one low status institution pre-merger having significantly higher stress post-merger. A case is presented for differences in stress based on a part on differences in how the mergers were managed at the system and university levels.

This research is instructive for higher education policy makers and university administrators as the institution of higher education continues this type of transformation.

This paper examines the impact of mergers on a university's single-most important asset, faculty. Comparative and timely faculty survey results from two related universities early post-merger provide valuable insights for leaders in higher education.

This study investigates the relationship between employment status (full time (FT)/part time (PT)), organizational culture and institutional effectiveness in higher education. The purpose of this paper is to answer the question, “Does the growing population of PT faculty preclude effective cultures from developing and, accordingly, adversely affect institutional effectiveness?”

The study surveyed 159 PT faculty and 65 FT faculty from seven schools of an online, proprietary university. The instrument, consisting of the Organizational Culture Survey Instrument and demographic questions, was distributed and data collected utilizing an online survey application. Statistical analysis methods including descriptive statistics, analysis of variance and correlation analysis were used to analyze the data.

The study found no significant differences between perceptions of organizational culture or institutional effectiveness FT and PT faculty. Inter-school differences in perceptions were identified. Further research in this area is warranted to investigate discipline as a cause for the inter-school differences.

The study included respondents from only one online university. Therefore, additional studies involving traditional, ground based and hybrid institutions are required to establish generalizability. Additionally, self-assessments of institutional effectiveness were used. Future studies should consider quantitative research models for the measurement of institutional effectiveness.

The study indicates that PT faculty are not less committed to the institution than their FT counterparts. This strengthens the case for using PT faculty, particularly in an online environment.

This study investigates the relationship between organizational culture and institutional effectiveness in higher education from the faculty perspective. This has not been done before.

This paper seeks to examine a librarian‐faculty divide in authors' OA contributions with regard to article self‐archiving and OA consumptions with regard to citation counts.

This paper measures the OA availabilities and citations of scholarly articles from 20 top‐ranked LIS journals published in 2006. A logistic regression analysis is taken to make the comparisons.

It finds that there is no correlation between the numbers of OA articles and the professional status of the authors. However, librarian authors differ from faculty authors in the citation and self‐citation rates of their articles. There are also differences between these two groups of authors in co‐authorship and the numbers of article pages and references.

This study takes a new approach to compare the publications of librarians and faculty in library and information science for their open access availability and citations. The findings may help OA advocates and administrators to make appropriate policy changes.

This study investigated how behavioral and emotional forms of engagement are associated with faculty support and student-faculty interactions among engineering students.

Quantitative research methods were used to analyze survey data from 781 undergraduates in seven large undergraduate engineering courses. Linear hierarchical regression models were used to evaluate the relationships between demographics (gender, race/ethnicity, family education, US status and transfer status) and student engagement and between faculty behaviors and engagement.

Faculty support was consistently, significantly and positively linked to all forms of student engagement, while student-faculty interactions were significantly and positively linked to effort and positive emotional engagement and negatively linked to attention and (an absence of) negative emotional engagement. Gender, race/ethnicity, international student status and transfer status significantly predicted at least one form of engagement.

Although this was a single institution study and cross-sectional, the findings suggest that faculty support and student-faculty interactions, while important for engagement, have different effects on different types of students. Faculty and teacher professional development efforts should raise awareness of these differences in order to enhance diversity and inclusion in engineering courses and curricula at all levels.

The analysis of behavioral and emotional forms of engagement represents more of a motivational lens on engagement in contrast to the traditional focus on time-on-task or time spent in fruitful educational practices, as is the norm with much of the engagement literature in higher education.