This study describes characteristics of academic inbreeding in the Brazilian higher education system. Results show the rate of inbreeding significantly differs among distinct types of institutions, fields of knowledge, states and university ranking tiers. According to this study, inbreeding is most likely to be found in established elite research…

The United States has become increasingly diverse, but the American professoriate has not kept pace. Nationwide, nearly three quarters of all college faculty are White. That figure is even higher in rural institutions, where minority faculty comprise only 15% of the total. This is problematic because research has shown that students of all races…

Sessional academics undertake a large proportion of teaching and marking and are essential for current university structures and student success. Employment of sessional academics has primarily been driven by cost savings and flexibility in hiring practices for employers, in addition to managing academic staffing shortages. Despite the increase in…

In modern higher education, nurturing successful interdisciplinary collaboration is both an institutional priority and a grand organizational and cultural challenge. Recent scholarship describes the many and varied challenges inherent in the enactment of interdisciplinarity; it also explores how these challenges can be mitigated to spur successful…

Background/purpose: This study investigates the selection process of preservice mathematics and science teachers in Morocco, aiming to assess the perspectives of candidates on the fairness and efficacy of the process. The primary purpose of the study is to explore the challenges and concerns surrounding the criteria used for teacher recruitment.…

Latinx students constitute the fastest and largest growing segment of the population in California community colleges (CCCs), with roughly 45% of students identified as Latinx. Yet Latinx representation among faculty and administrators lags behind, with very modest gains in representation in the faculty and academic administrator ranks (Bates et…

Both higher education and P-12 faculty play a critical role in the preparation of new teachers, yet they have traditionally operated in silos. This book, designed to be read and applied immediately, will help teacher preparation programs and schools work together to best prepare preservice teachers. This is accomplished by clearly describing the…

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…

Recent policy developments in England, particularly since 2021, have resulted in increased regulation and marketisation of Initial Teacher Training (ITT)/Initial Teacher Education (ITE). Although the origins of these developments go back much further than 2021, the current context in which ITE operates in England is, arguably, both challenging and…

Meeting the needs of dual-career academic couples has become an important part of university efforts to foster family-friendly workplaces. Many universities have developed formal or informal approaches to addressing dual-career issues, but variation across institutions has made it difficult to detect wider patterns or probe their implications. In…

Start-up packages are a tool for a successful transition to an academic career. This institutional case study examined the faculty experience with start-up packages at one public university in the Southeastern United States, including gender differences, content, negotiation, and perceived outcomes. A mixed-method research design was utilized to…

Professorships in Italy are assigned following public competitions. However, favouritism affects faculty hiring. Researchers lacking clientelistic support remain excluded from academia and are obliged to seek employment abroad or at non-university institutions, or to abandon their career. Do non-recruited researchers have better or worse…

This brief discusses equity-minded faculty practices and provides resources to support equity-minded faculty hiring. It focuses on the four hiring practices that have been proven to contribute in a positive way to faculty diversity, including: (1) developing equity-minded hiring criteria; (2) equity-themed cluster hiring; (3) equity-minded…

Academic inbreeding is a recruitment practice for universities of hiring their own graduates as future academicians. Despite its benefits, it may have damaging effects on the academy. From this point of view, this qualitative research investigated whether academic inbreeding brings benefits to universities or poses risks. It was also purposed to…

Academic inbreeding is a deeply ingrained practice which needs to be understood by reference to the medieval guilds. Drawing on the guild concept and associated benefits of forms of capital, a distinction is drawn between 'guild-route' academics who have followed a privileged, linear path into academe and their 'non-guild' counterparts who tend to…