In this essay, Simon Marginson focuses on self-determining academic freedom in universities, and especially the conditions and drivers of the radical-creative imagination that is manifest in sudden intellectual breaks in knowledge. Marginson's objective is to establish foundations in political philosophy for a sociological study of the effects of…

College seniors participated in an ethnographic interview study about their academic motivations. It was found that grades and graduation are 2 primary distal target goals that motivate their academic efforts during the senior year. A variety of proximal factors were also reported to affect the seniors' motivation. These factors can be divided…

This paper addresses the relationships between leadership theory, practice and development, drawing on both the higher education and wider leadership literature. It explores why challenges and problems exist within the contested field of leadership theory and why gaps remain between theory and practice after more than a century of research--and…

This paper adds to earlier reviews by the author of the changing roles and identities of contemporary professional staff in UK higher education, and builds on a categorisation of professional staff identities as having "bounded", "cross-boundary" and "unbounded" characteristics. Drawing on a study of 54 professional…

Accounts of emotion and affect have gained popularity in studies of learning. This article draws on qualitative research with a group of non-traditional students entering an elite university in the UK to illustrate how being and becoming a university student is an intrinsically emotional process. It argues that feelings of loss and dislocation are…

The purpose of this study was to compare the retention factors between first-generation college students and second- and third-generation college students in the postsecondary educational setting. This study examined the differences in the preselected retention factors: faculty-student interaction, college mentor, academic support, residential…

Although there is considerable research on student adjustment to college, to date no research has been conducted on the urban students' adjustment to a rural college environment. Through the use of focus groups that met three times during the semester, five females and five males from New York City discussed and shared their experience of…

The purpose of this study was to explore the ways instructors' subject matter beliefs regarding mathematics shape their courses in a community college environment. Data were collected and analysed from instructors' philosophical definitions of mathematics and observations of teaching episodes using a constructivist grounded theory research design.…

As postsecondary education is promoted as necessary for participating in the 21st century knowledge economy, academics, policymakers, and the public have voiced concerns about the quality and coherence of undergraduate education (AAC & U, 2007; Barr and Tagg, 1995; U.S. Department of Education, 2006). Critics point to the size, scope, and multiple…

The Great Books hold a special place in scholarly and academic lore in America. Study of the Great Books and liberal education in general were the foundation of a college education since the colonial times, but yielded to electives and other academic trends during the early portion of the twentieth century. By the 1930s, several men sought to…

Vision 2015 is an initiative to improve the area and quality of life for people living within the Northern Kentucky region. A key aspect to Northern Kentucky's future is in reaching by 2015 the Educational Excellence goal of having all children enter kindergarten with the skills necessary to succeed. This paper focuses on the first phase of the…

In a crisis-plagued world looking to higher education for knowledge, wisdom, and solutions, higher education itself is stumbling. Its transformational thinking has frozen up like an overstressed computer program; and we need, in effect, to "push the reset button." In 1953, the renowned and controversial president of the University of Chicago,…

This study was designed to assess whether changes in stakeholders' perceptions about the value generated by an institution might influence the nature of their engagement with it. Quantitative and qualitative analysis of research data revealed a positive correlation between stakeholders who believed an institution generated social or economic value…

This paper discusses research examining the attitudes and behaviours of researching women in academia and considers the effect of these factors on successful researching outcomes. The results of this exploratory research highlight in particular, a number of interesting environmental influencers which contribute to enhancing successful work…

Why has the large income gap between blacks and whites persisted for decades after the passage of civil rights legislation? More specifically, why do African Americans remain substantially underrepresented in the highest-paying professions, such as science, engineering, information technology, and finance? A sophisticated study of racial…