The conferment of tenure at a United States university provides substantial job security to its recipients. Tenure is designed to allow a professor the ability to explore new and risky research questions without fear of losing their position due to lack of publications. At the same time, this policy creates an incentive system with an ambiguous…

What do university students understand about faculty work? Undergraduate (mostly first-year) students (N = 317) at a research university gave definitions of tenure, estimated how much time faculty spend teaching, and rated fictional faculty members. Most students could define tenure but could not describe how it is earned or its role in academic…

Faculty (N = 205) at regional public universities (RPUs) in the United States were surveyed for self-reports of their primary academic identity (teacher, researcher) and qualitative descriptions of struggles related to their academic identity. Well-being and job satisfaction were examined as outcome measures of identity struggles. Participants…

Full-time teaching-focused faculty at research universities may hold alternative titles such as Assistant Teaching Professor, Instructor, or Lecturer. We manipulated the title of a fictitious faculty target to investigate how such titles are perceived. Student and lay respondents (N = 317) respected and liked all targets, and their ratings did not…

An increasingly globalised world means that higher education institutions are employing a diverse set of academic staff from across the world, and a better understanding of these scholars and their work roles is important for effective teaching, learning, and institutional management. Using the most recent data available from the "National…

The Changing Academic Profession (CAP) international survey was designed in part to consider the effects of globalization on the work context and activities of academics in 19 countries or regions around the world. This paper draws from a subset of these data to explore the extent to which academics are globally connected in their research and…

Researchers conducted a national survey of administrators at doctorate-granting universities to determine the current status of institutional policies and practices related to the organization and governance of online courses, faculty incentives to develop and teach online, and course ownership. Survey results document a wide variation in policies…

The mission of higher education and the activities of faculty are often described in terms of teaching, research, and service. Additionally, tenure has been the standard model for employment in American college and universities since 1940. The traditional model of faculty earning tenure through high standards of teaching, research, and service is…

This study was conducted to develop a demographic profile of full-time educational leadership clinical faculty, to identify their professional responsibilities, and to compare their job satisfaction and perceptions of the educational leadership field with those of tenure-line faculty. Utilizing an online questionnaire, 140 clinical faculty and 755…

Describes a study that was conducted to examine the influence of institutional type, as defined by the Carnegie Classification, on tenure and promotion criteria at academic libraries. Highlights include faculty status; academic degree required; job performance; service; research and publication; teaching; and similarities of criteria for…

Data on over 4,000 full-time, tenure-track faculty in 4-year colleges and universities were analyzed for the relative importance of teaching, research, administration, and service in determining basic salary. Results showed dominance of the research-oriented salary structure regardless of institution type, professed mission, or discipline.…

A survey of 494 faculty in 4 disciplines at 4 Ontario universities found that quantity rather than nature of academic work was stressful. Teaching was the least stressful of work functions and research the most, particularly in the humanities. Hours spent on the job and tasks with a time constraint were significant sources of stress, as was rank…

The contracts at four-year colleges with a 10-year history of collective bargaining from 1975 to 1985 were analyzed to determine whether the contracts negotiated in 1975 differed from those negotiated in 1985 in the following areas: appointment, promotion, tenure, termination for cause, retrenchment, class size, number of preparations, schedule of…

Results of a Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching national survey concerning the extent and reasons for college faculty's dissatisfaction with the teaching profession, working conditions, institutional climate and governance, and prospects for the future of the profession are reported. (MSE)

This report compares findings from faculty surveys conducted as part of the 1987-88 National Survey of Postsecondary Faculty, which is limited to faculty and staff with instructional responsibilities, and the 1992-93 National Study of Postsecondary Faculty, which includes instructional as well as noninstructional faculty. In particular, the report…