Senior Academic Administrators Research Articles

A case study of Northern Cyprus: The voice of senior academic administrators on education

The purpose of the study reported on here was to introduce the perceptions of senior academic administrators in the Northern Cyprus Ministry of Education on the structure of the current education system as a whole. In order to carry out this case study, the views of 14 senior academic administrators were obtained through semi-structured interviews. There is no doubt that in qualitative research semi-structured interviewing is a flexible and powerful tool to capture the voices and the ways in which people make meaning of their experiences (Kvale, 2007). As Yin (2009:18) states: “An empirical inquiry about contemporary phenomena (e.g., ‘case’), set within its own real-world context – especially when the boundaries between phenomenon and context are not clearly evident.” Therefore, by reflecting on the current education system in Northern Cyprus as a case, we tried to show the real context of the education system itself. The data collected from the semi-structured interviews were analysed through content analysis. According to the findings of this research study, the current education system must be reconstructed considering the curriculum, strategies in teaching and learning approaches, developing of collaborative and student-centred classrooms, applying active learning strategies and voicing the voices of the senior academic administrators during the decision-making process.

Whiteness, Power and the Politics of Demographics in the Governance of the Canadian Academy

AbstractThe predominance of Whiteness, and the corresponding lack of representation of people who are both racialized and minoritized, in the governance of universities is a political issue. We present the results from an intersectional diversity audit of central and senior academic administrators at five Canadian universities: Simon Fraser University, University of British Columbia, University of Toronto, University of Victoria and York University. Our findings indicate that racialized men and women are hitting ceilings in the middle administrative ranks. Conversely, we find a notable overrepresentation of White men and women in the senior administrative ranks. Our analysis suggests that White women, unlike racialized women and men, no longer face serious barriers to representation within these senior ranks. These findings raise concerns about processes of racialization that may impede career progress for some but accelerate it for others. They raise concerns about the politics of who lifts whom into the echelons of academic decision making, which in turn has implications for justice, knowledge and social meanings of competency.

The role of the library in scholarly publishing: The University of Manchester experience

The emergence of networked digital methods of scholarly dissemination has transformed the role of the academic library in the context of the research life cycle. It now plays an important role in the dissemination of research outputs (e.g. through repository management and gold open access publication processing) as well as more traditional acquisition and collection management. The University of Manchester Library and Manchester University Press have developed a strategic relationship to consider how they can work in partnership to support new approaches to scholarly publishing. They have delivered two projects to understand researcher and student needs and to develop tools and services to meet these needs. This work has found that the creation of new journal titles is costly and provides significant resourcing challenges and that support for student journals in particular is mixed amongst senior academic administrators. Research has suggested that there is more value to the University in the provision of training in scholarly publishing than in the creation of new in-house journal titles. Where such titles are created, careful consideration of sustainable business models is vital.

The Ontology of Scholar-Administrators: Empirical Inferences from Five Senior Administrators Who Published

The purpose of this study was to fill a gap in existing literature on scholar-administrators and understand the lived experience of scholar-administrators who published. Using an interpretative phenomenological approach to extract themes from detailed case studies of five senior academic administrators who have published, the researchers’ empirical inferences from the five detailed case histories reveal the challenges and rewards of producing scholarship as a scholar-administrator. Their findings show that the administrators were more connected to the people within and outside the university, their own field of practice, and with the university. The impact of scholarship on scholar-administrators goes beyond publications. Continuation of being a scholar-practitioner has significant impact on networking scope of administrators keeping the educational entities they lead abreast of environmental trends to adapt to. Future research should replicate our study to increase the generalizability of its findings.

Administrator Interest is Perceived to Encourage Faculty and Librarian Involvement in Open Access Activities

A Review of:
 Reinsfelder, T.L., & Anderson, J.A. (2013). Observations and perceptions of academic administrator influence on open access initiatives. Journal of Academic Librarianship, 39(6): 481-487. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2013.08.014 
 
 Abstract
 
 Objective – To better understand the roles and influence of senior-level academic administrators, such as provosts, on open access (OA) activities at the institutional level, including whether librarians perform these activities regardless of administrative interest.
 
 Design – Web-based survey questionnaire combined with multiple regression analysis.
 
 Settings – The research was conducted online using surveys emailed to potential participants at not-for-profit public and private academic institutions in the United States with a FTE of greater than 1000.
 
 Subjects – Academic library directors at selected colleges and universities. 
 
 Methods – Using directory information from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) and filtering institutions according to not-for-profit status, size, and special focus, a survey sample of 1135 colleges and universities was obtained. Library websites were used to acquire contact information for library directors. In summer 2012 the 43-item survey questionnaire was distributed to respondents online using Qualtrics. The four primary variables were each comprised of multiple questionnaire items and validated using factor analysis, and the data was explored using multiple regression.
 
 Main Results – The survey received 298 respondents for a 26% response rate, though the number of incomplete responses is not stated. Among four stakeholder groups (faculty, publishers, librarians, and senior academic administrators), library directors perceived librarians as having the greatest influence in regards to the adoption of open access (mean = .7056), followed by faculty (.3792), administrators (.1881), and publishers as having a negative impact (–.3684). A positive correlative relationship was determined between Administrator Attention to Open Access—a key variable operationalized by combining eight questionnaire items—and the variables Librarian Commitment to Open Access, Faculty Commitment to Open Access, and Faculty Proclivity Toward Open Access, with the latter especially the case at lower levels of administrator support. Regarding institution size, library directors perceived a higher likelihood of faculty adherence and librarian commitment to OA at large institutions (over 20,000). A given institution’s public or private status and geographic region were not significant predictors of faculty or librarian commitment or adherence to open access.
 
 Conclusions – The study finds that academic library directors perceive librarians to have the strongest influence upon adoption of open access, and senior academic administrator attention to open access is positively linked to the OA activities of faculty and librarians. Larger institutions are considered to have greater commitment to OA, potentially due to differing missions according to institution type. The authors recommend that open access advocates consider administrator roles and target administrator support when seeking to increase participation in OA.

PULSE Vision & Change Rubrics

PULSE Vision & Change Rubrics

Academic and Managerial Skills of Academic Deans: A self‐assessment perspective

Brazilian higher education institutions face a complex and challenging environment as the national market in education is becoming more competitive. International investment, a decrease in the population of potential students, and the proliferation of innumerable small institutions add to this complexity. Organizations are becoming flatter and the key managers within them are deans. Although deans are required to act as managerial experts, they are usually selected from the teaching body of the institution. In this paper, a group of deans from a large private institution gave their self‐assessment of their academic and managerial skills. The results revealed that they tend to have a high perception of their managerial skills, even though they have no previous managerial experience or formal training. This underlines that senior academic administrators cannot simply assume that deans, by the nature of their work environment, are proficient in managerial skills; neither that they can easily identify inadequ...

Introducing entrepreneurship teaching at select german universities

In the recent past, universities in the western world have been expected to play a greater role in the national economic welfare of their countries in addition to their traditional role of education and research. In 1997, following the examples of national governments in Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom, the German government launched an entrepreneurship initiative at universities. Two of its goals were entrepreneurial teaching and culture. I decided to explore how universities participated in, implemented and evaluated the public initiative to introduce entrepreneurship into German universities. During interviews with senior academic administrators at 22 tertiary institutions, I collected data on leadership, organisational re-design and development, recipients of change, and academic and administrative cultures. Similar to Clark (1998, 2004) and Gjerding et al. (2006), introducing entrepreneurship into university culture requires support both from the top and the bottom, especially the faculty. Academic decision makers behave entrepreneurially to external opportunities for financial and/or branding reasons but they respect their colleagues’ decisions whether to join. The traditional inter/intra faculty model needs to include external stakeholders for entrepreneurial teaching initiatives. German universities have been successfully using this model for external research programmes without changing their core purpose: teaching and research.

Academic administrators' attitudes towards interprofessional education in Canadian schools of health professional education

Interprofessional education is an approach to educating and training students and practitioners from different health professions to work in a collaborative manner in providing client and/or patient-centred care. The introduction and successful implementation of this educational approach is dependent on a variety of factors, including the attitudes of students, faculty, senior academic administrators (e.g., deans and directors) and practitioners. The purpose of this study was to examine attitudes towards interprofessional teamwork and interprofessional education amongst academic administrators of post-secondary health professional education programs in Canada. A web-based questionnaire in English and French was distributed via e-mail messaging during January 2004 to academic administrators in Canada representing medicine, nursing, pharmacy, social work, occupational therapy and physiotherapy post-secondary educational programs. Responses were sought on attitudes towards interprofessional teamwork and interprofessional education, as well as opinions regarding barriers to interprofessional education and subject areas that lend themselves to interprofessional education. In general, academic administrators responding to the survey hold overall positive attitudes towards interprofessional teamwork and interprofessional education practices, and the results indicate there were no significant differences between professions in relation to these attitudinal perspectives. The main barriers to interprofessional education were problems with scheduling/calendar, rigid curriculum, turf battles and lack of perceived value. The main pre-clinical subject areas which respondents believed would lend themselves to interprofessional education included community health/prevention, ethics, communications, critical appraisal, and epidemiology. The results of this study suggest that a favourable perception of both interprofessional teamwork and interprofessional education exists amongst academic administrators of Canadian health professional education programs. If this is the case, the post-secondary system in Canada is primed for the introduction of interprofessional education initiatives which support the development of client and patient-centred collaborative practice competencies.

Organizational Socialization in Higher Education

A fact is like a sack which won't stand up when it is empty. In order that it may stand up, one has to put into it the reason and sentiment which caused it to exist. Luigi Pirandello Six Characters in Search of an Author Socialization is a concept that is much discussed but frequently misunderstood. On the one hand, the research literature is replete with taken-for-granted definitions of socialization; on the other, institutional administrators often eschew discussions of socialization as a waste of time in comparison to their attempts to solve the myriad problems currently faced by colleges and universities. In this article I advance an alternative view of socialization and highlight the importance of utilizing this view for restructuring college and university life. More specifically, I take issue with many of the common assumptions we share about organizational socialization. In so doing, I suggest that socialization is of fundamental importance with regard to many of the most pressing issues that confront academic administrators and faculty. The national conversations that begun, for example, about the nature of faculty roles in academic and public life inevitably relate to socialization and culture. In particular, I focus on socialization processes that involve tenure track faculty in four-year colleges and universities. This article is anchored in a two-year study of promotion and tenure based on interviews of over three hundred individuals - junior faculty, department chairs, tenure review committee chairs, and senior academic administrators. To be sure, the specific tenure processes vary dramatically from institution to institution; nevertheless, these processes are similar enough across institutional types to enable us to propose a schema for how we might think about organizational socialization and how we might develop policies that contribute to the successful socialization of faculty into the academy. As a beginning point, we need to consider the nature of the organizational culture in which individuals are socialized. Obviously, a culture whose values and goals are outdated or inconsistent with the world of the twenty-first century is not necessarily a culture for which we want to socialize new recruits. Accordingly, I first critique previous concepts of socialization as they relate to culture and then offer data that delineate an alternative way we might think about how faculty become socialized. I compare and contrast what I call modern and postmodern versions of culture and socialization and conclude with suggestions for improving the socialization practices of colleges and universities. Studying Socialization Background Organizational researchers, writes John Van Maanen, have over-studied relatively harsh and intensive socialization and understudied socialization of the more benign and supportive sort (1984, p. 238). Dramatic, celebratory rituals, such as Founder's Day, or graduation, or initiation rites of fraternities, afford us one window of understanding how individuals change from one social status to another or how they become incorporated or invested in an institution or discipline. In this regard the organizational literature is full of examples, from army cadets who arise at dawn and conduct drills and marches that demonstrate loyalty to the academy and their unit to various social groups, such as university marching bands and college honor societies, where the members perform hazing rituals on recruits that bond individuals to the group. Admittedly, such highly visible events surely play some role in organizational socialization, and our concentration on such examples has been helpful in rethinking actual events. Hazing, for example, is no longer officially condoned on college campuses, because whatever bonding might taken place was outweighed by the physical and emotional trauma that often occurred to recruits. However, when we concentrate on such dramatic actions, we overlook the more implicit and processual activities that circumscribe how individuals become socialized to an organization. …

Deans Rank Indicators of Effectiveness for Schools of Library and Information Studies

This article identifies indicators of effectiveness that deans of schools with American Library Association (ALA) accredited programs believe are essential, important, or not important to know about a school of library and information studies (LIS) in order to evaluate it. A previous article by the same authors focused on views that members of four constituent groups of LIS schools hold about the same indicators. Comparing deans with the constituent groups, there is 77 percent agreement between deans and members of ALA's Committee on Accreditation (COA) over which indicators of effectiveness belong in each of the three designated categories. There is less agreement between deans and senior academic administrators (70 percent), alumni (57 percent), and employers (44 percent). Overall, deans focus heavily on administrative, faculty, and resource issues.

Profiles of Constituent Groups: Indicators of Effectiveness of Schools of Library and Information Studies

This article is the first in a series of reports on the indicators and dimensions of effectiveness that constituents of American Library Association (ALA)-accredited programs of library and information studies (LIS) believe are useful for evaluating the host schools. Members of the four constituent groups were surveyed: senior academic administrators, ALA's Committee on Accreditation (COA), employers of alums, and alums. The distinct nature of each constituent group is profiled by focusing on the preference each gives to the placement of seventy effectiveness indicators. In addition, brief description is given of twenty-four indicators upon which the constituent groups exhibit their greatest agreement.

The Teaching-Research Nexus: Applying a Framework to University Students' Learning Experiences

The question of whether there is a nexus between the teaching and research roles of academics can be an emotive one, but it is one which goes to the heart of academic work. Hence, it is not surprising that commentaries on the teaching-research nexus abound. However, empirical investigations, predominantly survey based, have provided no conclusive evidence for a link between the two roles (Feldman, 1987; Finkelstein, 1984; Friedrich & Michalak, 1983; Jensen, 1988). This paper reports the findings of a study with undergraduate and postgraduate students on their views about their teaching and learning experiences at university and their contact with university research. The aim of the study is to examine the degree to which students are aware of academics' research role and whether the conduct of research, in their view, has any impact on the teaching and learning they experience. This study forms part of a broader investigation on the nature of academic work in Australian universities which examines the perceptions academics hold of their core work roles-teaching, research and scholarship-and the influence of academic and disciplinary cultures in shaping these beliefs. Previous work (Neumann, 1993a, 1993b, 1992) has focused on senior academic administrators-vice-chancellors and their deputies, deans and heads of department-from the humanities, sciences, social sciences and professional areas. These senior academic administrators were from universities with a well-developed research role across a broad range of disciplines. The study takes into account the differing historical backgrounds of the universities and hence other stages are examining the perceptions of senior academic administrators in the newer universities created by the Unified National System, as well as academics from professor to associate lecturer in non-administrative positions. The incorporation of students in the academic spectrum is considered vital to complete the range. The teaching role exists to serve students, and so they are a key source for investigating whether a connection between teaching and research is perceived to exist in the teaching and learning they experience. In previous studies of the teaching-research nexus, investigators have generally focused on surveys of, and to a lesser extent interviews with, academics, in order to correlate work preferences, time usage and perceptions of the reward system (see for example, Adamson, 1980; Bassis & Guskin, 1986; Genn, 1980; Halsey, 1992; Halsey & Trow, 1971; Haneman, 1975; Powell et al., 1983). Student views have been indirectly considered in studies correlating student evaluations of 323

Academic work: Perceptions of senior academic administrators

This article reports on selected findings of the first stage of a qualitative study of academic work in Australian universities. This stage examined the perceptions senior academic administrators from the humanities, sciences, social sciences and professional areas hold of the work roles of academics. The article presents their perceptions of ‘research’ and ‘scholarship’ and the link between the two, as well as the interrelationships between research, scholarship and teaching. The findings show a high level of consensus and coherence in the views presented. The article examines possible reasons for such a unanimity of perception and raises further questions for investigation.

Research and scholarship: Perceptions of senior academic administrators

This paper reports selected findings from the first stage of a study on the research role within academic work in Australian universities. These findings come from the interview component of the study and discuss the perceptions that senior academic administrators hold on ‘research’ and ‘scholarship’. The analysis of the interviews indicates that ‘research’ covers a wide and varied range of activities across the disciplines found in a university and therefore needs to be defined broadly. However, ‘research’ has three major attributes: new knowledge, enquiry and publication of results and views. ‘Scholarship’ was perceived to be part of the research process, providing the context for good research by adding the element of breadth to the depth of ‘research’. In addition, ‘scholarship’ describes the manner of pursuing a serious, sustained line of enquiry as well as the dissemination process.

Perceptions of the teaching-research nexus: a framework for analysis

This paper reports on the perceptions that senior academic administrators hold on the relationship between the research and teaching components of academic work. Semi-structured, in-depth interviews were conducted with senior academic administrators from the humanities, sciences, social sciences and professional areas. The findings indicate a strong belief in a symbiotic nexus between teaching and research. Indeed, the data reveal many important, but often subtle, interconnections between these two components of academic work. A three-level nexus between teaching and research is suggested: the tangible nexus, the intangible nexus and, the global nexus. These findings form part of a wider investigation into the nature of academic work in Australian universities and are proposed as a suitable framework for further research.