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We started our exploration of the notion of excessive teacher/faculty entitlement with the metaphor of digging. In this final chapter, we assemble the major themes that the international scholars in this book unearthed. This comprehensive review helps us take stock of where we started (came from) and to position us where we are at. It also opens up for further consideration where we are going. A plotline emerges for thinking about teacher support in ways that eschew entitled feelings and promotes a beneficial sense of self-esteem, moral value and professional responsibility that needs nurturing as new challenges in the field unfold.

This chapter presents the lived experience of 10 doctoral students and recent graduates from a North American University, who like graduate students elsewhere, have faced upstream battles against excessive faculty entitlement. The six sections of this chapter, each by different authors, explore how entitlement in the University, is experienced from different perspectives. The first four sections explore the deleterious effects of excessive faculty/teacher entitlement which can lead to competitiveness, selfishness and aggression. Section five focuses on student entitlement as experienced by an immigrant graduate teaching assistant, and section six explores how both faculty and student entitlement may be experienced at different stages of the immigrant experience. It is hoped that this chapter will create a platform with which to highlight these topics for ourselves and other doctoral students attending other universities, so that relationships and opportunities may improve for everyone.

The notion of excessive teacher entitlement arose out of concerns with trying to understand and find a language to describe the paradox of faculty/teachers' intransigence in the face of the flexibility required of them to promote the learning and well-being of all in the institutions they serve. Through unique narratives, the authors trace the parallel paths they negotiated in their challenging curricular journeys, which led them to unmute teachers' voices cached in reform stories. The first author, Tara Ratnam, coined the term “excessive teacher entitlement” to characterize the putative deficit view of teachers that is projected onto them and how the concept of the teachers' “best-loved self,” which the second author, Cheryl Craig, developed, embraces teachers' input and complements “excessive teacher entitlement,” albeit from a different direction and perspective. This introduction also provides a bird's-eye view of the diverse ways and contexts in which leading international authors examine excessive teacher entitlement in the 17 chapters that follow.

Excessive entitlement, the enacted belief that one's voice, opinion, or assessment holds more weight than that of others (even those of one's own kind), and how it unavoidably rubs against their sense of their best-loved self, is the focus of this chapter. Some define excessive entitlement as a kind of greed where individuals in academia elevate themselves and lord their perceptions/stances over others. This work is situated in the academy and involves relationships and situations that arose between and among graduate students and professors as well as between and among professors and other professors. Wedged between conflicting agendas, individuals feel pulled from pillar-to-post as they experience differing phenomena and images playing out within themselves, some seriously challenging their images of the best-loved self. This fine-grained scholarship illustrates that although strides have been made around gender, professional backgrounds, ethnicity, and race in society, room for significant improvement still exists, most especially at the micro-levels where aggressions can still take place. This research reveals intertwined hegemonies in academia. Narrative inquiry – a storied method that unpacks stories – deftly skirts research issues by including fictionalization as a fourth analytical tool, joining the conventional tools of broadening, burrowing and storying-restorying. Using these devices situates the inquiry, burrows into stories of experiences, and illuminates shifts taking place. Truth is established through employing multiple research tools over time and gauging the extent to which the intersecting narratives ring true to those outside the research situation.

“Excessive teacher/faculty entitlement” is a nascent idea in teacher education. Ratnam chanced upon this notion of “excessive teacher entitlement” while trying to understand and find a language to characterize the perplexing paradox of teacher intransigence in the face of the adaptability required of them to address the intensifying issues of equity and diversity in this global multicultural world. The concept of the “best loved self” brought in by Craig as a perfect complement to “excessive teacher/faculty entitlement” helped them present the two in a yin-yang relationship. The authors in the five chapters of this section use the language of excessive entitlement to conceptualise and uncover the sources of oppression experienced by them in the situated dynamics of their institutional milieu. Their narratives tell how the naming of the phenomenon provoked them to become conscious of the presence of excessive entitlement in themselves and others accompanied by a liberating push towards realising their best loved self.

This chapter links the emerging work on excessive teacher entitlement (Ratnam et al., 2019) with the ethical principle of inclusive professionalism: the right of all children to attend mainstream schools and therefore to receive accessible and appropriate teaching regardless of their educational needs (Armstrong, 1998). In the professional development process, teachers and educational leaders are confronted with numerous contradictions between prescriptions and facts, between means and ends, between intentions and actions, etc. They face numerous ethical dilemmas, which become more acute when they enter the professional field. The resulting uncertainties can lead to a defensive and inappropriate commitment to their prerogatives and difficulty in adjusting to the great diversity of situations encountered. This work reports on a multi-case study that involved a cross-case analysis of situations (Walton et al., 2022) observed by the researcher in an academic professional context.

The context of this study is Brazil, which has seen more than a decade of expansion in higher education and increased access to public universities. Our investigation deals with the perceptions of novice faculty members or “professors”, as they are addressed in Brazil, on entitled behavior at universities. These professors participants are from institutions located in three different states in Brazil. We wanted to find out how these newcomers to university teaching perceived entitled attitudes in faculty–students and faculty–peer interactions. The chapter includes possible implications for relations in the workplace and discusses the gaps between expectations of the nature of social relationships in the universities among faculty and between faculty and students, on the one hand, and reality, on the other. The research uses narrative as its method of inquiry. This chapter sheds light on an issue that brings discomfort to professors and students. A mutual desire for cooperative and horizontal relations is expressed.

This chapter identifies the broad interdisciplinary ideologies of entitlement in order to situate and understand the potential theoretical informants of excessiveness in teacher entitlement. Although the authors' perspectives and experiences on the theme of entitlement are located in the US educational system, this is accompanied by an awareness of the need to examine the topic internationally since the topic needs to “be reconsidered in terms of contextual variables.”

Psychological and organizational entitlement were the prevalent strains of entitlement that emerged in the reviewed literature and “academic entitlement” specific to the field of education. Therefore, three strands, psychological, organizational and academic, form the thematic categories for this scoping literature review.

Most literature on “academic entitlement” deals with excessive entitlement amongst students. No reference to excessive teacher entitlement was found. However, specific gaps were found in: (1) what qualifies as excessive teacher entitlement, (2) research scholarship on teacher entitlement, and (3) entitlement studies specifically aimed at global reach and applicable to teachers.

The theoretical informants of teacher entitlement identified in this study indicate that the phenomenon goes beyond individual mindset to encompass the mediation of sociocultural and political factors in its construction, thus rendering a simple theory of excessiveness in association with teacher entitlement improbable at this time.

This chapter focuses on issues that arise when certain professors invoke the age-old hierarchy of position their terminal degrees bestow on them and interact in elevated ways with graduate students and sometimes with faculty members as well. Lack of relationship with peers/students, absence of appreciation for others' contributions and resistance to change, coupled with academic positions that allow them to aggrandize themselves (and get away with it) sit at the core of some male behaviors I have experienced. In this work, Lugones' notions of “arrogant perception” and “loving acceptance” are used as the central conceptual lens through which three in situ, betwixt-and-between career experiences are presented, unpacked and traced to their roots. While position, gender and power play out excessively in the three featured scenarios in this work, this does not mean that all males claim and act on the dominant plotline that history has bestowed on them. Neither does it mean that all females reject that plot as well. The shifting positioning of both males and females are sample topics for potential follow-up research.