Early-career faculty have the daunting task of navigating the intersection of teaching, research, and service. Early-career faculty development can play a crucial role in supporting the professional development of tenure-seeking faculty. While these programs may introduce and support new faculty to the expectations of their academic roles, limited…

Work produced by community-engaged scholars often spans many genres from exhibitions to toolkits. Yet, our institutional structures often preassign value to deliverables produced from our community partnerships that align with academic genres, like the journal article or monograph. These structures can produce tension for the community scholar…

While 'broker' appears in academic development literature, the broker role is underexplored in it relative to other disciplines and its potential significance for academic developers (ADs). Synthesizing management and academic development literature, this conceptual article explains how ADs can foster trust as brokers. It delineates the broker…

An innovative take on the controversial question of teaching excellence in Higher Education (HE). After critiquing the very idea of 'measuring' teaching excellence, Hayes and Garnett offer a critical approach to re-conceptualising and measuring teaching excellence and the controversies surrounding current teaching excellence rankings in the UK and…

I reflect on the significance of trust in Academic Development (AD) and outline strategies for cultivating it with other academics. Within many higher education institutions, the inherent uncertainty of the AD role necessitates intentional trust-building efforts. In this regard, conversations have been encouraged as trust-building tools. However,…

This article reviews and responds to recent (re)turns to and reconceptualizations of contract grading in the teaching of writing. I reflect on my own experience using contract grading in a variety of pedagogical contexts, and how this experience complicates scholarship on contract grading (now rebranded as labor-based grading and engagement-based…

Support for faculty writers across disciplines has become widespread. It is becoming an important part of graduate education, too, as faculty want to share that writing is an essential professional skill that one learns (and relearns) throughout their careers. Most writing support emphasizes productivity--it is the problem to be solved and the…

This paper considers the process of "professional becoming" for an academic developer as a complex transition towards epistemological plurality. This is a necessary step to appreciate and support the lived experiences of teachers across the spectrum of academic disciplines. Viewed through an ecological lens, the complexity of the…

In this article, we explore the question of how membership, hierarchy, rules, monitoring, and sanctions are used at German professorships to organize research. Using these five criteria of an organization from Ahrne and Brunsson (Organization, 18(1):83-104, 2011) as a theoretical pattern, we shed light on the meso-level of universities in the…

Making progress on the 'grand challenge' issues facing society demands productive collaboration among academics and stakeholders both within and across disciplines and sectors. To facilitate such collaborations, higher education institutions convene a range of organizational structures intended to promote productive interactions. These structures…

Higher education is facing an existential crisis. Students and staff are surveilled with cameras and facial recognition software. Police zip-tie and arrest students during protests. As universities across the United States become epicenters of ideological warfare, "Policing Higher Education" contextualizes these skirmishes within a…

Many universities focus on improving pedagogy through training sessions related to technology and assessment. However, what is missing is an emphasis on the humanistic side of teaching, specifically emphasizing empathy in the classroom. This essay makes an argument for faculty to employ empathy in their teaching. Empathy is a learned behavior that…

This paper examines the shifting landscape of higher education in Turkey, highlighting a disconcerting trend of politically motivated appointments, coined as "parasailing." Departing from traditional merit-based norms, this practice of appointing professors without necessary approvals disrupts the academic environment, prompting concerns…

This article assesses the basis of trust in academic development as it relates to the current standing of academic development as a profession against established, distinguishing criteria of professions. These are: (1) possession of an inwardly-defined, esoteric, and specialized body of knowledge and skills; (2) collective autonomy over the…

This paper defines a university teacher's 'duty to explain' as a way of developing student autonomy. This builds on the idea that in other professions, such as medicine or law, there is a duty of care towards the client to explain the full facts and risks to a patient or client. The university teacher has a similar duty towards the student to…