This paper describes the development of a faculty liaison position created to increase collaboration between Extension and other university units and provides original research assessing the programmatic outcome. An assessment of initial collaborations was done, and a survey was given to university faculty to assess their impressions of Extension…

Programs within the Cooperative Extension Service often develop partnerships with other agencies and organizations to better meet their common goals. While there are many benefits of partnerships, they can be challenging when the partners are unequal or have dissimilar needs. Using a survey and interviews with faculty and administrators at two…

Land-grant institutions (LGIs) are tasked with providing accessible education to the common man and improving their quality of life. This study examined faculty members' interpretations of the land-grant mission and opinions about its future. The theory of branding guided this study. Faculty members are the primary deliverers university missions.…

Preparing pre-service students to teach agricultural mechanics is a difficult task due to the career pathway including a great variety of topics (Byrd et al., 2015). This study examined the trend in requirements in 1862 land-grant universities for number of courses, course credit hours, and course topics related to agricultural mechanics, as well…

Peer observation of teaching (PoT) is a recognized evaluation tool. However, faculty concerns persist regarding bias, beneficial feedback, and lack of peer observer training. While faculty desire to provide quality and equitable reviews, many higher education faculty peers have little expertise in conducting observations and evaluations. This…

Cooperative Extension has a long-standing history of placing individuals in communities to lead community-wide change. These individuals are employees of the nation's land-grant universities, with significant roles and responsibilities working between and among institutions and their communities. They often must maintain dual identities and roles,…

The Data Culture Framework is a high-level guide designed for institutional leaders who want to create and sustain an effective data culture on campus. The Framework offers a set of practices designed to help institutions of higher education create and maintain an effective data-informed community among institutional leaders, faculty, and staff.

Preparing college students with the skills to engage in multidisciplinary problem solving, especially as it relates to the wicked problems of agriculture, has been called for by scholars for nearly two decades (UNFAO, 2006; Boyer, 1998; NRC 1998). Our nation's Land Grants, with the mission to provide practical education, and particularly…

Background: Tests are commonly and heavily used in fundamental engineering courses (FECs) to assess student learning of concepts. With existing literature presenting mixed benefits and disadvantages of testing to students' motivation to learn and documenting widely alternative assessments, the lack of questioning of heavy and common test usage…

The acknowledgements section of a doctoral dissertation provides a rare view into the student-advisor relationship. The gendered differences for how doctoral students acknowledge male and female advisors was examined in 208 dissertations from a U.S. land-grant university. Doctoral students used a greater number and diversity of words when…

Despite extensive scholarly debates on Christian privilege and Secular privilege in American higher education, the voices of international students have often been absent from this discourse. This article is a response to a recent call for diverse perspectives to advance current discussions on white Christian nationalism in American higher…

Administrators are viewed as the leaders in higher education. However, accepting exceptional educators as relational leaders is vital as changes in higher education demand institutions provide value and quality to their stakeholders. Exceptional educators at our land-grant Midwestern university are nominated and awarded the title of Morrill…

Mentoring programs at universities have become common because of the perceived benefit to student persistence and retention. Evaluation of the effectiveness of these programs has not kept pace, primarily due to the following three problematic issues: (1) lack of theoretical guidance, (2) lack of an operational definition of mentoring, and (3) lack…

Land-grant colleges and universities play a crucial role in addressing the complex challenges facing the U.S. agricultural system and global food security. Multidisciplinary collaboration involving a diversity of land-grant institutions has the potential to accelerate scientific progress on those challenges. However, historical and current funding…

Drawing on the narrative inquiry method, a qualitative study of 49 engaged scholar interviews at the University of California, Davis was conducted to understand motivations for practicing engaged scholarship. Notwithstanding the significant contributions to understanding faculty motivations in this field, we argue that previous research details…