This qualitative case study was part of a larger, multi-year National Science Foundation funded project that centered upon a networked improvement community (NIC) of nine institutions seeking to improve racial climate in STEM graduate programs. We were particularly interested in the role of STEM graduate students at two NIC institutions in…

Creative Writing programmes in universities now offer both an education for and employment to literary writers. This papers asks how literary writers apprehend their relatively recently institutionalised position, as university staff and students. The concept of 'patronage', it is argued, offers a useful way into reflecting upon such academic…

The question of renaming graduate psychology programs to psychological science is a timely and contentious issue. To better understand why some programs, but not others, are changing names, we surveyed chairpersons (Study 1) and faculty (Study 2) within graduate psychology and psychological science programs. Within psychology programs, a name…

The authors present findings from a recently completed census survey of all mathematics departments in the United States that offer a graduate degree in mathematics. The authors report the viewpoints of departments about characteristics shown to support students' success as well as the extent to which these characteristics are being implemented in…

In 1954, Hugh Stretton took charge of a threadbare history department at the University of Adelaide. By the end of his tenure as department chair in 1966, staff numbers had increased fivefold and the department was recognised as one of the best of its kind in Australia. Stretton wanted his department to "teach history interestingly",…

This symposium brings together a range of scholars to consider what economic forces have driven the development of independent writing programs, and how such programs are susceptible to economic conditions and pressures, perhaps even more so than neighboring disciplines in the humanities. It includes: (1) "Documents of Dissent: Hairston's…

Higher education institutions are increasingly recognizing the importance of organizational change as they face complex challenges. Leadership learning has been identified as an important way of supporting change management. We describe a leadership learning arrangement that arose in the context of two of the authors needing to learn how to become…

For this study of social work degree programs, data were drawn from the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE) website, the Group for the Advancement of Doctoral Education (GASE) website, and the websites of 841 U.S. social work programs, including the 763 programs accredited (or in candidacy for accreditation) by CSWE when these data were…

In this article, Brian Coppola begins with the single key concept of Boyer, in "Scholarship Reconsidered." The statement appears as follows: "We believe the time has come to move beyond the tired old "teaching versus research" debate and give the familiar and honorable term "scholarship" a broader, more capacious…

The E[superscript 2]Coach project from the Department of Physics at the University of Michigan (UM) addresses the challenge of providing individual student support in high-enrollment introductory science courses. This web application employs tailored communications technology, course experiences, student data, and analytics to deliver customized…

While there are just a limited number of situation analysis studies, there is almost no situation analysis study referring to the physical conditions of an ELT Department. With this in mind, in this paper, the physical state of an ELT department in one of the oldest and rooted universities of Turkey was tried to be analyzed. The picture drawn by…

In 1991, the APSA Task Force on Political Science recommended elements of a curricular structure that would best promote student learning. The report stated that there should be a capstone experience at the end of the senior year and that the capstone should require students to integrate their whole learning experience in the major. This article…

The PULSE Vision & Change Rubrics, version 1.0, assess life sciences departments' progress toward implementation of the principles of the "Vision and Change report." This paper reports on the development of the rubrics, their validation, and their reliability in measuring departmental change aligned with the "Vision and…

Economics departments are faced with growing demands to document what their graduates have learned on completion of the undergraduate major. The results of a national survey of economics department chairs in the United States reveal that nearly two-thirds of the departments have a formal assessment plan. There is substantial agreement on the most…

Many psychology departments do not have industrial-organizational (IO) or human factors (HF) faculty members. As such, potential IO and HF graduate students may miss career opportunities because faculty advisors are unfamiliar with the disciplines and their graduate programs. To assist advisors, this article highlights the content of IO and HF…