Many colleges and universities now require faculty search committees to use rubrics when evaluating faculty job candidates, as proponents believe these "decision-support tools" can reduce the impact of bias in candidate evaluation. That is, rubrics are intended to ensure that candidates are evaluated more fairly, which is then thought to…

This study examined how a professional development initiative on racial equity facilitated the expansion of faculty members' agency to use a critical race-consciousness lens to disrupt White supremacy in faculty hiring policy and practice. I analyzed interview data from faculty members who participated in a 10-month professional development…

Legitimacy has been used to understand institutional and faculty behaviors within higher education contexts. Faculty members frequently apply the concept of professional legitimacy to their work, such as publishing and teaching. Few studies have considered how legitimacy is enacted when advising undergraduate students about graduate education.…

Faculty members are entrusted with great power to decide who deserves space within the academic profession. Given that the profession's central mission is knowledge production, such decisions inevitably concern epistemic matters, and specifically, what constitutes legitimate knowledge. From this perspective, faculty hiring is not only a matter of…

I use the intersectionality framework to understand how processes of tenure and promotion operate as a system that systematically advantages members of some groups while systematically disadvantaging members of other groups. Empirically, I examine how gender, race, ethnicity, and nativity combine to structure the institution of tenure and…

Studies have shown that Latina faculty have negative racialized and gendered experiences while teaching at their institutions. An emerging body of research shows that these experiences also occur at Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs). The purpose of this study was to explore the experiences of Latina faculty at one small, private, four-year…

Faculty job satisfaction is critical to the success of students and institutions of higher education. Satisfaction of faculty has often been tied to the autonomy of faculty to complete their work with many faculty viewing themselves as independent contractors whose roles and identities are separate from the institution's, but the implications of…

While interdisciplinarity has been promoted in universities for decades, research suggests that untenured faculty struggle to receive recognition for their interdisciplinary research. Informed by the microfoundations of institutional theory and discursive legitimation, we examine how members of academic departments participate in the legitimation…

Utilizing the concepts of time and academic capitalism in the neoliberal university, this qualitative study examined 12 tenured faculty members' sensemaking of productivity from their sabbatical leaves from one research university in the United States. The commodification of time and outputs from the sabbatical in remunerative terms as well as…

States have adopted a variety of policies to encourage universities to expand research production, with the hope of supporting economic growth and competitiveness. This paper considers whether a state-level initiative succeeded in influencing university-based research outputs among regional public universities. We test whether the Texas Research…

Despite the racial, ethnic, linguistic, geographic, and cultural heterogeneity of LatinXs, extant educational research positions them as a monoracial, and oftentimes monolithic, group. Most research on LatinXs primarily focuses on mestizX-identified individuals. Inadvertently, the presence and experiences AfroLatinXs have largely been…

The decades between tenure and retirement constitute the longest yet least understood period of a faculty member's career. Previous research depicts the midcareer as fraught with reduced job and career satisfaction, lowered productivity, and even stagnation. However, we suggest a reframing of this period. Drawing on data from surveys and…

In this article we examine the ways in which institutional stratification and academic labor segmentation contribute to shaping faculty collaborative activities. We draw on interviews from science and engineering faculty at two institutions in the United States to highlight how collaboration, as an essential form of academic labor, is shaped by…

As universities face unprecedented pressure to diversify, campus communities must reckon with the fact that nearly one-third of underrepresented and racially minoritized (URM) faculty are in an academic couple. Despite the prevalence of URM academic couples, research rarely captures their perspectives, which could shed light on their experiences…

Little is known about the ways in which faculty members understand their role and responsibility in addressing sexual violence and how they engage in sexual violence education efforts. This qualitative study of 10 faculty members gives insight into how faculty members engage in efforts to address sexual violence. Their experiences demonstrate how…