The future of higher education is in crisis. Between falling undergraduate enrollment, rising student debt, program elimination, and widespread faculty burnout, families across America are left wondering: Is college worth it? In "The Conversation on Higher Ed," editor Mary Churchill explores the complicated landscape of academic life in…

The decrease in public funding and the subsequent increase in temporary employment in academia are often viewed as crisis symptoms. While the crisis rhetoric may be premature, the turn towards hyper-competitive qualification systems that generate unfixed career advancement models may indeed mark a break from the tenure-oriented career structure.…

Supporting scholars is crucial for promoting academic development in higher education institutions (HEIs). While organisational support for academic careers has been widely researched in various contexts, little attention has been paid to factors influencing Chinese scholars' perspectives on such support, which could significantly impact their…

How have inequalities in job stability evolved in the twenty-first century between demographic groups? I compute expected job tenures, akin to life expectancy in demographic research, for the population as a whole and by subgroups defined by selected ascribed characteristics (sex, race, and ethnicity) over biennial periods from 1996 to 2020.…

This study explores the tenure-track experiences of two junior faculty Black men in higher education, while growing still remains vastly unexplored in higher education. Using an autoethnography approach with a critical race theory lens, the authors explore how race and institutional expectations shape their experiences along the primary components…

This article employs narrative inquiry and counter-storytelling as methodological and analytical tools to unpack the collective experiences of racially minoritized student affairs practitioners and faculty during the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors' narratives underscore factors that impeded their success during the pandemic and the nuances of…

There has been a marked increase in attention to educators' well-being since the pandemic. The majority of this research activity, however, has been focused on the well-being of early childhood teachers while the challenges of early childhood leaders have gone largely undocumented. Using a holistic conceptualization of leader well-being along with…

This article builds on a 2018 study and reports on a survey conducted in 2022 to examine the value of advanced subject degrees in addition to the Master of Library Science for academic librarians. This study explores the impact of advanced subject degrees on scholarly contributions, compensation, teaching roles, and tenure status in academic…

Neoliberalism occupies the walls of academia, seeping into the pulse and pace of faculty work and engendering precarity into academic life and the promotion and tenure process, particularly for Women of Color (WoC) scholars. Building on research on early-career faculty and Faculty of Color and informed by the theoretical concept of liminality, we…

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…

This study focused on Black women faculty experiences of inclusion at predominantly White institutions in the United States. Despite diversity and inclusion initiatives, there has been limited progress in recruiting and retaining Black women faculty. The study used Collins' (1986) Black feminist thought and Shore et al.'s (2011) inclusion…

The objective of this study is to compare the levels of acceptance of occupational technology among police officers and middle school teachers in the Eastern Anatolia region of Turkey. Analyses based on the UTAUT2 model evaluated the impact of demographic variables, including gender, occupation, age, and tenure, on technology acceptance processes.…

The aim of this paper is to discern the difficulties tenure track faculty face as they attempt to balance their new faculty roles amid a transition from PhD student to faculty. Based on the theoretical Lazarus model of stress, this research analyzes the stressful transition of a PhD student to a tenure track professor and the underlying reasons…

Since the publication of the first edition of "Understanding Academic Freedom," the never-ending struggle to defend academic freedom has entered a demonstrably new phase. Legislation determining what can and cannot be taught in schools in Florida, Texas, and other states has intensified governing board activism that impinges on widely…

This article explores how researchers adapt to disruptions that cost them access to their field sites, advancing a uniquely sociological perspective on the dynamics of flexibility and adaptation in qualitative methods. Through interviews with 31 ethnographers whose access was preempted or eliminated, I find that adaptation varied systematically…