This study explores an understudied yet critically important role in higher education: the academic department chair. Building on research related to the gendered organization of faculty life and using a national sample of department leaders per the COACHE "Faculty Job Satisfaction Survey" (n = 1,173), we use descriptive discriminant…

This Presidential Address considers what it means to be a higher education scholar and member of a scholarly community. By taking a longitudinal look at my career, I identify the neoliberal notions that align scholarly identity and worth with productivity and prestige. I confront systems and structures that minoritize scholars in myriad ways…

Scholars of color remain underrepresented in policymaking contexts, and the absence of their expertise in policy processes can have significant consequences for society. In this study, we examine motivations for and perceived barriers to engagement in public policymaking among faculty of color. Using an institutional logics framework and…

Institutions of higher education in the United States, and the faculty members that comprise them, are regularly accused of being overly liberal. These criticisms have material impacts on higher education as a field, as investment and public higher education policy is increasingly tied to partisan perceptions of higher education. This study offers…

Scholars have analyzed debates about controversial faculty speech inside and outside of the classroom, but none have paid close attention to the facet of academic freedom related to professors' decisions about daily teaching methods. This omission, along with obstacles to enacting pedagogical norms, has caused the scholarly community to overlook…

This article explores introduced tenure bans, meaning state-level legislation proposing eliminating tenure protections within all or part of a public higher education system. We describe such bills 2012-2022 and explore state-level political, economic, social, and higher education conditions associated with introducing a tenure ban. Tenure bans…

Inequities in faculty representation and support have long been documented, though a potentially key contributor to these inequities--negotiation behavior--remains underexplored. We leverage descriptive analyses and hierarchical linear modeling with a sample of over 30,000 faculty to explore gender- and race-based differences across negotiating…

This study examines unionization efforts among contingent faculty members, who now account for the majority of the academic workforce. Drawing on data from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and other sources, this article uses an event history analysis to identify factors associated with efforts to establish a contingent faculty union at…

This qualitative study is an examination of how 20 tenure-seeking Women of Color and White women academics at a public research-intensive university define collegiality and its perceived role in rank advancement. By engaging culture of hegemonic collegiality, we identified two salient themes: (a) collegiality is defined through weapon and survival…

Guided by racial capitalism, interest convergence, and positioning theory, we analyzed focus group data from 30 racially minoritized PhD candidates to understand how they experienced and responded to racial com-modification in the academic job market. Although our participants perceived their hireability might be contingent on their performance of…

This study examines the role of deans, department chairs, and diversity officers within the faculty diversity and hiring discourse. Using an embedded case study approach, I conducted semi-structured interviews with 12 administrative and academic leaders across four academic departments to understand their theories of change to advance faculty…

This case study examined how color-evasive racism operated through search committee members' practices in ways that undermined university policy created to centralize racial equity in faculty hiring. Findings show that abstract liberalism, racialized decoupling, and racialized agency impeded the realization of an equitable search process. Faculty…

In this article, I examine the relationship between unionism and academic freedom as revealed by 50 years of reports by the American Association of University Professors' Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. Written following investigations of significant and/or intractable situations, the reports demonstrate the complex interactions…

We investigated the extent to which dual-career academics' job related decisions considered the career of their partner with close attention to the relevance of gender in the process. Analyses using survey data from faculty in seven U.S. universities found that among those recruited to the university first (primary recruits), women who perceived…

In this study, we utilized discourse analysis to examine past ASHE Presidential Addresses. Study findings highlight recurrent themes related to: the way that agency is assigned to various higher education actors (e.g., undergraduate students, faculty members); appropriate research topics and approaches; and higher education as a distinctive field…