This summer’s college president departure season is off to a swift start that has largely been marked by little
forewarning from colleges before exits are announced.
Many boards of trustees would consider it best practice to have a quick parting of ways with little surrounding
drama. But it doesn’t always go so smoothly in higher education -- it didn’t last summer -- making the pace and tone
of presidential partings so far this year stand out. Also noteworthy is that many recently announced transitions have
involved leaders who are relatively young or who are early in their tenures.
The president of Washington College on Maryland’s Eastern Shore resigned just a week after word leaked that all
was not well between her and the institution’s board. That president, former Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation
chair Sheila Bair, was two years into a five-year contract. She cited her family when she departed, but the college
did not go into depth on reasons for her resignation.
Demographics, globalization and technological change are transforming Canada's labour market. Workers are looking for jobs, businesses can't seem to find the skilled people they need and the game-changing disruptive tech – from artificial intelligence to machine learning – is still at an early stage. As baby boomers leave the labour force and technology becomes more sophisticated, the skills challenges will only intensify.
The changing nature of work will create additional challenges for young Canadians who are already experiencing suboptimal labour market outcomes. Precarious youth employment is on the rise, as jobs for young people are increasingly contractual or temporary. Work in the "gig" economy is increasing, too, and will likely continue in the decades to come.
Meetings among colleagues are commonplace in every organization. Academe is no exception. We have meetings for our specific schools, departments and units, not to mention the additional task forces, subcommittees, working groups, teams, ad-hoc groups, councils or advisory panels -- with each designed to help us serve the institution.
In the world of college composition, we spend a lot of time talking about how to teach writing — with as many opinions on that as there are instructors — but very little time talking about why we teach it.
Many professors take a philosophical approach, asserting that the purpose of teaching writing is to enrich students’ lives, promote self-exploration, or encourage political activism. Certainly all of those can be byproducts of a college writing course, but I would argue that none qualifies as its main purpose. The reason institutions offer — and often require — first-year composition is quite simple: so students learn how to communicate their expertise.
Women and Leadership around the World is a compelling body of international research that provides a comprehensive vision of the triumphs, journeys, and challenges encountered by women in various contexts across the planet. This third volume in a new series explores issues pertaining to women's leadership from four regions of the world including the Middle East, Europe, North America, and Asia Pacific. This title is published under the rubric Women and Leadership: Research, Theory, and Practice.
I joined the University of Virginia in 1982 as an assistant professor of business and reveled in the thrill of teaching and writing. As I advanced up the tenure-promotion ladder, I assumed various responsibilities to strengthen the institution: chair of this program and that committee and executive director of an institute.
In 2005, the president of my university called to ask if I would serve as the dean of the business school for a year. He’d been conducting a search and hadn’t been able to fill the slot in time for the start of the next academic year. He just needed a placeholder for a short while until he could close the sale with one of a number of candidates.
If we believe in the active-learning classroom — that the only way to bring about real learning is to engage students in ways that help them revise and broaden their thinking — then student participation is a non-negotiable part of the equation. Learning does not happen without the student actively taking part.
Oddly, however, given its importance, our own definition of “student participation” is often quite limited. In the scholarship on teaching and learning, that term is almost always defined narrowly as the degree to which students take part in class discussions. And while discussion is obviously an important component of an active-learning classroom, it’s not the only component. There are many other ways in which students participate in class: writing, researching, and contributing to small group activities are just a few. If we want to accurately assess and reward participation in our courses, we need to expand our definition to include more than just the amount of times that students raise their hands.
There’s plenty of good research on study strategies that promote learning. It’s also well-documented that students don’t always use them. As most of us are well aware, procrastination gets in the way of learning. Cramming ends up being mostly a shovelling
exercise—digging up details and dropping them into short term-memory. But there’s also evidence that students don’t know that some strategies do more for learning than others. And guess what? Neither do some faculty.
Student Evaluations of Teaching (SET) have been the most consistently administered tool, and they are still extensively used in higher education institutions to assess teaching effectiveness. The purpose of this study was to explore how SET are used by administrators in the teaching evaluation process at a large, research-intensive Canadian university. A basic qualitative
research design was used in this project, and semi-structured interviews were used to obtain administrators’ experiences. The research question that guided this study was: How are SET (and other tools) used in the evaluation of teaching at this university? Findings showed that although participants mostly utilized a couple of SET statements as indicators of effective teaching,
they were certainly aware of the intrinsic issues concerning these tools, and that they are continually seeking to obtain more evidence if SET results are below their benchmarks.
Colleges can not only help students past their immediate crises, writes Joseph Holtgreive, but also encourage them to unlock capacity that they didn't know existed and ways of tapping into it.
In spring 2018, overall postsecondary enrollments decreased1.3 percent from the previous spring. Figure1 shows the
12-month percentage change (fall-to-fall and spring-to-spring) for each term over the last three years. Enrollments decreased
among four-year for-profit institutions (-6.8 percent), two-year public institutions (-2.0 percent), four-year private nonprofit
institutions (-0.4 percent), and four-year public institutions (-0.2 percent). Taken as a whole, public sector enrollments (twoyear
and four-year combined) declined by 0.9 percent this spring.
Current Term Enrollment Estimates, published every December and May by the National Student Clearinghouse Research
Center, include national enrollment estimates by institutional sector, state, enrollment intensity, age group, and gender.
Enrollment estimates are adjusted for Clearinghouse data coverage rates by institutional sector, state, and year. As of
spring 2018, postsecondary institutions actively submitting enrollment data to the Clearinghouse account for 97 percent of
enrollments at U.S. Title IV, degree-granting institutions. Most institutions submit enrollment data to the Clearinghouse several
times per term, resulting in highly current data. Moreover, since the Clearinghouse collects data at the student level, it is
possible to report an unduplicated headcount, which avoids double-counting students who are simultaneously enrolled at
multiple institutions
One of us, Karen Gross, recently wrote an article about how co-presidencies could improve higher education, and it received no shortage of concern and criticism. To be clear, the article didn’t suggest that this type of governance was the ultimate solution for all that ails our educational institutions and their governance. It did not even hint at the idea that copresidencies are optimal or ever workable for many colleges and universities.
College and university leaders have been consumed since last summer with trying to understand public attitudes about them, as surveys and studies -- like this and this and this and this -- have delivered evidence of growing skepticism and doubts about the value of what consumers and society get from higher education.
Gallup injected yet more data into the mix Friday, with a new survey that both reinforces the idea that higher education has seriously alienated white male Americans without a degree and underscores that people think very differently about the topic depending on the words you use.
Zac Wendler needed a new syllabus. An assistant professor of English, literature, and world literatures at Ferris State University, he was tired of the same routine at the beginning of every semester: He would hand out his syllabus — five or so pages of text — and students would glance at it and wait for him to walk them through it. Then for the rest of the semester, they would ask him questions that could be easily answered if they had read the syllabus.
Does that sound familiar? It rang a bell for me. As I listened to Wendler’s presentation at this year's Conference on College Composition and Communication in Portland, Ore., I thought about my own syllabus. It has swelled to 11 pages of single-spaced text, even after I changed the departmental policies section to a nine-point font.
In 2005, a study found that 10 percent of graduate and professional students at the University of California at Berkeley had contemplated suicide. More than half reported feeling depressed a lot of the time. While concerns about undergraduates' mental health were already growing then and have only increased since, the finding about graduate students surprised and alarmed many experts. And because of Berkeley's prominence in educating future Ph.D.s and professors, the study was widely circulated.
Ten years later, the graduate student government at Berkeley is releasing a new study. It too finds a high percentage of graduate students showing signs of depression.
In fall 2015, Ontario appointed five members to The Premier’s Highly Skilled Workforce Expert Panel (Panel) – Chair, Sean Conway, and members Dr. Carol Campbell, Robert Hardt, Alison Loat, and Pradeep Sood (see Appendix E:
Expert Panel Member Biographies). Panel members were selected based on their professional experience, knowledge of the business climate, and relationships with a cross-section of stakeholder groups, and on their understanding of employers, the education and public sectors, and issues related to the labour market.
I don’t want to feel out of place (pauses, searching for the “right” words). I don’t want to have my difference hinder me. But, help me if anything. So, I want to express myself so they can understand me—so, that I can communicate.
But, in Jamaica, when I was a little kid, you always heard crazy little things when you’re a kid (laughs). And, you’re like: “Oh, they act like this, and they do this. They’re so silly: They spell color without the u.” And they didn’t necessarily seem to make it a bad thing to be that way, but it was understood that we were different.
And, I liked being different. I liked being Jamaican.
In this paper we use co-constructed autoethnographic methods to explore the tensions that animate the meaning of “disclosure” in university and college environments. Drawing insight from our embodied experiences as graduate students and university/college course instructors, our collaborative counter-narratives examine the ordinary ways that disclosure is made meaningful and material as a relationship and a form of embodied labour. Our dialogue illustrates the layered nature of disclosure—for example, self-disclosing as a disabled student in order to access academic spaces but not self-disclosing to teach as an instructor. Katie uses phenomenological disability studies to analyze disclosure at the intersection of disability
and pregnancy as body-mediated moments (Draper, 2002). Nancy uses Hochschild’s (1983) notion of “emotional labour” to explore how socio-spatial processes of disclosure can be an embodied form of “extra work” (e.g., managing perceptions of stigmatized identities).
The ability to reach a variety of audiences in diverse environments has made distance learning a major form of education
and training in the 21st century. Though traditionally encountered in the educational and business communities, distance learning has proven an important resource for a variety of other constituencies. Terrorist groups have exploited the digital domain as a means of recruitment, propaganda and training, and other related activities, including the use of distance learning as a strategic resource and force multiplier. The distance learning strategies and tactics of jihadists are reviewed as we explore the dark side of distance learning.
In Canada, only 44% of members of academic governance bodies at universities feel that their boards are effective decision-making bodies (Jones, Shanahan, & Goyan, 2004). In this study, we examined the views of senators at a British Columbia university regarding their senate’s effectiveness in decisionmaking, including structures, processes, and leadership, and their suggestions for potential changes. Eight interviews were conducted with current or recent former senators in May 2012; each interview lasted 30 to 60 minutes. At the time of the interviews, fewer than half of the senators stated that the senate was effective, with concerns concentrated in the areas of committees, participation of faculty and students, and level of debate. This research has implications for enhancing the effectiveness, legitimacy, and credibility of institutional academic governance structures and processes, particularly in the Canadian context.