This research addresses two important developments in the academic field: First, universities are transforming into organisational actors, gaining more responsibilities and capacities for strategic action, and second, competition has reached a new level. An important driver of competition and universities' development towards strategic actorhood…

Purpose: This article aims to address the response from the higher education (HE) sector in the United Kingdom (UK) to the full-scale war in Ukraine which started in 2022. Design/methodology/approach: Relying on theoretical ideas of neoliberalism and the collection and thematic analysis of relevant official communications from six UK universities,…

Having a sense of belonging can promote persistence in the STEM fields, but less is known about what it means to develop that sense of belonging. To investigate this phenomenon, we conducted semi-structured interviews with a cohort of STEM students (n = 10) nearing graduation at an urban university regarding their sense of belonging and…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to explore the experiences that contributed to the development of a systems thinking paradigm in instructors in a college of agriculture. Design/Methodology/Approach: A phenomenology design was used to understand the lived experiences of eleven instructors. Findings: Three themes emerged regarding how they…

Provision of medication abortion in student health centers is safe and effective, but no public universities in Washington state provide such services. We estimate demand for medication abortion and describe barriers to care among students at four-year public universities in Washington. Using publicly available data, we estimated that students at…

The phenomenon of academic endogamy, wherein faculty members obtain all their degrees from and remain at the same institution, has been observed to potentially impact research productivity and international engagement. As prior literature indicates, this trend raises concerns about potential insularity and reduced academic output. However,…

Organization Change Networks (OCNs) are increasing in use as a lever for fostering systemic change in higher education. OCNs are inter-organizational networks composed of institutional members that seek to advance targeted goals such as improving STEM education. This study presents findings from a six-year study of six STEM education-focused…

This study examines the historical role preparation experiences of professional staff and academics in a managerialised university field. Semi-structured interviews were used to identify the impact of these experiences on the individual's ability to 'play the game' of the managerialised university field. The Bourdieusian concepts of habitus, doxa…

Promoting interdisciplinary development is an inevitable requirement for the advancement of science and education, as well as an internal need for disciplinary growth and a necessary choice for building world-class universities. In this paper, high-quality academic outputs from China's first-class comprehensive universities are used as a data…

While campus food pantries are growing increasingly popular as an intervention aimed at improving student retention, little work has examined what it takes to start and maintain these resources on the ground. We leverage data from 17 interviews with pantry leaders, and social media posts and internal documents, to describe the creation and…

Higher education is plagued by concerns about the return on investment of a four-year degree, low rates of degree completion, and the mental and emotional health of students. A factor in all these concerns is the frustrating reality that, at far too many of the nation's 2,000 four-year colleges, the work of teaching and mentoring is only a…

Background/purpose: Adapting sustainability practices has become imperative in all fields of life, including the education sector. Therefore, various strategies have been developed and promoted to encourage different institutions to incorporate sustainability policies, enabling them to transform effectively. This approach is considered effective…

This study aims to elucidate how joint programmes can be used in the transfer and translation of Western policy to the local level in the context of China's efforts to build first-class higher education as a rising power. Although the Sino-French joint programme being studied was intended to be a wholesale adaptation of French engineering…

Universities have long served as centers for scientific inquiry, yet they are increasingly burdened by bureaucratic oversight mechanisms that, rather than facilitating research, often obstruct it. One of the most contentious manifestations of this trend is the expansion of research ethics boards (REBs). Originally designed to protect research…

Background/purpose: This study aimed to know the degree of scientific research contribution in achieving sustainable development from the faculty members' perspectives in Jordanian universities. The study sample consisted of 458 faculty members from Jordanian universities who were selected using the convenience sampling method. Material/Method:…