There is a need to reevaluate traditional career trajectories within higher education to accommodate the significant presence and important contributions of visitors, instructors, teaching assistants, adjuncts, and lecturers (VITAL) faculty particularly at the mid-career stage. The study, conducted at the University of Denver, where full-time…

Top football programs around the country are leading a trend of building exclusive player-only villages to enhance the togetherness of the team. Although coaches love this idea, little thought has been given to the larger student development and isolation issues this trend creates for students on a team. Further segregating them from the rest of…

Higher education is responding to the climate emergency through disaster preparedness, climate research, and carbon-neutral pledges, but the sector is failing to prepare students for likely disruptions and changes in their future careers and lives. While curriculum on climate science and information about "green" jobs are important…

The skills gap--the gap between postsecondary education's production of educated graduates and what employers say they need--has become a top economic priority. Surveys report increasing dissatisfaction among students and employers. Students are upset because fewer than 20 percent of graduating seniors have job offers before graduation. And…

The number of United States professors aged 65 years and older is growing. This older professor presents the stories of four teaching experiences which belong to the larger story of faculty longevity during the past five decades and its subsequent conflicts with retirement. The first was in the 1960s, when she was a new professor, not much older…

China now tops the list of countries with the largest annual number of scientific publications. At the same time, China also leads the list of countries with the highest proportion of scientific publication retractions. The rise in this academic misconduct in China has given Chinese researchers a bad reputation and likely led to lower manuscript…

Casual observers of academic environments might conclude that women's problems in higher education have been resolved. Colleges enroll more women than men on an overall basis. There is gender parity in entry-level faculty hires, and the number of women in senior administrative positions continues to rise. A closer look however at the work, lives,…

Internships are popular among many undergraduates, partly because they provide job experience and make it easier to get hired after graduation. Studies have found that employers place more weight on experience, including internships, than on academic credentials when evaluating a recent graduate for employment. In this article the authors report…

The number of recipients in the United States with postdoctoral research appointments in American universities is greater now than ever before (NSF, 2010). According to data from the 2010 National Science Foundation's "Survey of Graduate Students and Postdoctorates in Science and Engineering" (GSS, 2010), academic institutions in the…

This study focuses on aspects of the Changing Academic Profession survey of 2007-08 that describe the place of faculty in their institutions. The authors examine the following aspects of institutional life: (1) the faculty role in institutional governance; (2) who evaluates their teaching and research; (3) the locus of their loyalties as between…

Although associate professors comprise only about 20 percent of all full-time instructional faculty in degree-granting institutions, the rank is important because it is the primary pipeline from which institutional leaders emerge. In this article, the authors describe the results of a campus-wide needs assessment at the University of North…

In the literature of faculty development, mentoring is usually mentioned as a vital contribution to a successful academic career, particularly for women and faculty of color. Mentoring has traditionally been defined as a top-down, one-to-one relationship in which an experienced faculty member guides and supports the career development of a new or…

Mid-career faculty comprise the largest component of the academic workforce. But what do people really know about them? What do they experience? What are their needs? In contrast to the large and growing body of empirical research on their early-career colleagues, the research on them is far from robust, offering relatively few suggestions for how…

The author explored questions about personal meaning in professors' careers and in their scholarly subjects through a three-year study of 40 recently tenured university professors at four U.S. universities--faculty who spanned a wide diversity of fields: arts and humanities, sciences, social sciences, and applied and professional fields. The…

Non-tenure-track (NTT) research faculty are perhaps the most under-recognized group of academic professionals on the campuses today, despite their increasingly important role within the expanding academic research enterprise. The American Association for the Advancement of Science reports that the amount of federal spending on R&D has more than…