An Leadership PowerPoint Presentation
Transgender and gender-nonbinary students share what keeps them from feeling safe and thriving on campus.
The federal law known as Title IX is meant to protect students from discrimination based on their gender identity. But many gay, lesbian, and transgender students say they face an array of challenges and safety issues on their campuses. The Chronicle interviewed more than a dozen of them to hear more about what keeps them from thriving in college.
When Ontario began to expand its higher education system in the mid-1960s, it made an important choice: to provide public funding to universities on the basis of a formula. Many jurisdictions, in Canada and beyond, do not use such formulae in their higher education systems. But there are clear advantages to such an arrangement. A funding formula supports the distribution of funding in a predictable, equitable way, that can be easily understood by those who study and work within our
universities.
Nevertheless, no formula can remain functional forever, especially as the world changes and our expectations of universities shift. For this reason, OCUFA welcomes the University Funding Formula Review, initiated by the Government of Ontario in early 2015. We particularly welcome the opportunity to provide feedback into this process on behalf of the province’s professors and
academic librarians.
The university funding formula is deeply important to the success and vitality of Ontario’s universities. It cannot therefore be treated as a laboratory to play with the latest fads in university finance. A measured and responsible approach to reforming the university funding formula should retain its greatest strengths, while correcting its flaws. The Government of Ontario, as the
steward of the university sector, has the important task of working with the sector to identify these weaknesses and strengths, and rejecting harmful policy proposals masquerading as innovations.
An expat explains how a temporary leave to study in the U.K. turned into a life abroad – and what the government could do to bring him back.
Growing up in small-town Ontario, I always had a nagging feeling that Canadians who moved abroad were traitors. They had shunned our country for monetary gain, or sunshine or fame. But I’ve become one of those people – part of the nation’s brain drain – and I can assure you that it was entirely accidental.
Like me, every year hundreds of Canadians head abroad to do PhDs or postdocs, intent on gathering international experience, and every year a few of them don’t come back. In my case, I was drawn to the U.K. to do a PhD in history and, two years after finishing, I am still there, now working as an academic historian. I’d like to share how that happens and what Canada might do to prevent it from happening again and again.
I did not go abroad to get a “better” education. This is what the British think draws international
students, but this is a patronizing assumption and not a reflection of reality for most. For me, the
move was part quest for adventure and
part practical desire to get my PhD completed quickly so that I could get on with a career.
Reflecting on what’s at play with the Ontario college faculty strike, as Yogi Berra once noted, it’s “déjà vu all over again.”
I was a college president in 1984 when college faculty voted overwhelmingly for a strike because they felt they were treated as lemmings, victims of top-down management styles that eschewed proper faculty involvement in decisionmaking, especially when it came to instructional delivery and workloads.
This clearly defined the majority of colleges at the time. Faculty was right to strike. Each strike has an idiosyncratic ethos — core factors that vary from obvious to vague. In 1984, the issues were clear.
In 1987, not so. The faculty hit the bricks with only a 51.25 per cent strike vote. It remains unclear to this day, why the union leaders at the time took their brothers and sisters to the picket line with an unprecedented low strike mandate and no apparent issues at stake. Was it runaway megalomania? Was there an unrelated personal agenda? Who knows? But the result was a disaster for faculty who were led down a prickly garden path and dealt a financial blow by an arbitrator.
The Survey of Earned Doctorates, the data source for this report, is an annual census of individuals who receive research doctoral degrees from accredited U.S. academic institutions. The survey is sponsored by six federal agencies: the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation (NSF), U.S. Department of Agriculture, and U.S. Department of Education. These data are reported in several publications from NSF’s National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics. The most comprehensive and widely cited publication is this report, Doctorate Recipients from U.S. Universities.
As a PhD, you can think of research as one of your many useful skills, but it is not necessarily your primary identity.
One of the brow-furrowing moments for me when I read articles on doctoral education or participate in panels is when the idea that “PhDs are researchers” comes up. It’s common for commenters to refer to PhDs in this way.
This is often an intentional move, one that pushes the conversation forward from the limiting notion as PhD as protoprofessors.
In that way, it’s a welcome intervention. The idea is to help doctoral graduates see how their skills and experiences have broader relevance and value. In the U.K. and Europe, “early-career researcher” and “early-stage researcher,” respectively, are used to refer to individuals currently undergoing doctoral studies and/or within the first few years of obtaining the degree. If you think of a PhD as a “research degree” this of course makes perfect sense.
If thinking of yourself as a researcher frees up your imagination and helps you move toward a fulfilling career, then by all means embrace the term. But if it leaves you as cold as it does me, I’m giving you permission to jettison it.
Professionalism, elucidates the philanthropic dimension of the contemporary faculty career. In this volume, scholars address the notion that in addition to teaching, research, and service, contributing to the public good by way of philanthropy is inherent in the fabric of the academic professorial career and as such, they advocate for its recognition as a dimension of faculty work.
When people first think of professorial philanthropy, they may conjure images of faculty engaging in activities such as community service. Shaker takes a different stance, focusing on the element of the faculty role that serves the public good in its broadest form. Therefore, to illustrate this paradigm shift, Shaker reflects on her graduate advisor’s philanthropic actions from which she benefited, including mentorship sessions, motivational meetings, one-on-one writing time, access to
personal office space, introduction to personal contacts, and gifted books. Employing her personal experience as a springboard, Shaker argues that the faculty profession is “grounded in a responsibility to contribute to the public good. The expectation to meet society’s needs for an educated citizenry and societal requirements to advance and disseminate knowledge lend a philanthropic component to the act of being a faculty member” (p. 11). Thus, Shaker asserts that the faculty profession is anchored in the responsibility to growing demands of research productivity and increased pressure for student accountability, calls to both preserve and recognize the importance of faculty philanthropy.
Higher education's approach to fostering students' innovation potential has focused mostly on developing innovation leadership among a select cadre of students, originally in entrepreneurship and more recently in social sector innovation. But what about the rest of our graduates: what capability do all our graduates need if they're going to engage effectively with innovation in the workplace? Can elements of this capability be adapted to enhance their roles as community members and global citizens as well?
In order to develop the capability for workplace innovation in all our students, we're going to have to begin tackling the challenge in the space where all of them already participate – within our teaching and learning environments.
This CERIC-funded study sought to establish the importance publicly funded universities and colleges place on the provision of career development services and to highlight particularly impressive models of career service provision across the country.
Specifically, CERIC’s interest in conducting this project was two-fold:
1. To understand the landscape of career service models across Canada
2. To examine the level of institutional commitment to the provision of career services to students
Step into any college lecture hall and you are likely to find a sea of students typing away at open, glowing laptops as the professor speaks. But you won’t see that when I’m teaching.
Though I make a few exceptions, I generally ban electronics, including laptops, in my classes and research seminars.
That may seem extreme. After all, with laptops, students can, in some ways, absorb more from lectures than they can with just paper and pen. They can download course readings, look up unfamiliar concepts on the fly and create an accurate, well-organized record of the lecture material. All of that is good.
The scholarly literature on “active learning” is almost shockingly positive. Over and over again, when active-learning
strategies have been studied — particularly when they have been compared to lecturing — they have been found to
increase student learning.
A 2014 meta-analysis of 225 studies measured student performance in STEM courses taught by traditional lectures against courses that used active-learning strategies. Using a cautious methodology to avoid biases, the study found a marked difference between the two categories. Average marks in the active-learning courses were a half-grade higher (i.e., a B rather than a B-) compared with those taught by lecture. Moreover, students in lecture courses were one and a half times more likely to fail than their counterparts who engaged in active learning. Considering how many studies were looked at, those were remarkably consistent results.
When Michael Maccoby wrote this article, which was first published in early 2000, the business world was still under the spell of the Internet and its revolutionary promise. It was a time, Maccoby wrote, that called for larger-than-life leaders who could see the big picture and paint a compelling portrait of a dramatically different future. And that, he argued, was one reason we saw the emergence of the superstar CEOs—the grandiose, actively self-promoting, and genuinely narcissistic leaders who dominated the covers of business magazines at that time. Skilled orators and creative strategists, narcissists have vision and a great ability to attract and inspire followers.
The times have changed, and we’ve learned a lot about the dangers of overreliance on big personalities, but that doesn’t mean narcissism can’t be a useful leadership trait. There’s certainly a dark side to narcissism—narcissists, Freud told us, are
emotionally isolated and highly distrustful. They’re usually poor listeners and lack empathy. Perceived threats can trigger rage. The challenge today—as Maccoby understood it to be four years ago—is to take advantage of their strengths while
tempering their weaknesses.
National training packages have become the mandated framework for course delivery in Australia’s vocational education and training sector. Each training package contains: qualifications that can be issued, industry-derive d competencies , and assessment guidelines but do not contain an endorsed curriculum component or learning outcomes. All public and private vocational education and training providers must use training packages, or industryendorsed competencies in cases where they do not exist, if they are to receive public funding for their programs. This article describes the operation of Australia’s national training packages and considers some of their strengths and weaknesses, many of which may be shared by similar
systems elsewhere. Argues that training packages may result in poorer student learning outcomes, and that they may threaten the end of effective credit transfer between the vocational education and training and higher education sectors. Suggests that national training packages are not a good model for other countries and that Australia’s current vocational education and training policy needs to be reviewed.
Dark economic times have come to the province. The Premier, under pressure from business groups, appoints a prominent citizen to review the government‟s finances. His report proposes dramatic cuts to most social programs and the public sector, including education. There is no broad -based public consultation involving public servants, teachers, doctors or university faculty.
Universities that set up shop globally should work to uphold principles such as academic freedom, gender equity and freedom of speech -- but they sometimes compromise, scholars argue.
Several of the largest education publishers say they now generate most of their sales and revenue from digital roducts, but both analysts and some in the industry disagree on if the shift represents a transformation for the textbook industry or a forced rebranding.
It is a given in higher education that we are preparing students for the world of work and for life. It is also a given in today’s world that higher education’s product must be of quality and that higher education must be held accountable for student learning. Finally, it is a given, as well, that the expectation is to do more with less, to find efficiencies.
These principles, along with rising tuition costs, have placed higher education under the microscopes of both the legislators and the public. To emerge from this examination, college leaders must monitor student outcomes regularly to determine roadblocks to student success and to determine revisions, improvements, and optimal resource use.
An independent arbitrator will soon hear a case at Queen’s University that raises serious questions about protection of faculty who allege colleagues’ academic misconduct.
The university’s office of the provost has found Professor Morteza Shirkhanzadeh guilty of workplace harassment in a dispute that dates back a decade. As a result, he is banned from entering three university buildings and communicating with certain administrators, professors and the board of trustees.
This report examines community colleges from the perspective of the faculty who deliver their public service – high quality post-secondary education and job training. The report is based on conversations with over 600 faculty at all 24 CAATs,
along with historical research and present-day inquiry into the sector’s financing, management, and operations. The report is focused primarily on perceptions by college faculty that there is a crisis of quality within the college system today.