McGill University is committed to creating and sustaining a safe environment through proactive, visible, accessible and effective approaches that seek to prevent and respond to Sexual Violence. The University further recognizes the singular importance of striving toward an equitable environment in which all Members of the University Community feel respected, safe and free from
violence, especially Sexual Violence.
The University does not tolerate Sexual Violence in any form. It acknowledges that attention to Sexual Violence is particularly important in university campus settings, and that the University has a role to play in preventing and responding to Sexual Violence. It further acknowledges that, while Sexual Violence impacts all members of society, Sexual Violence and its consequences may disproportionately affect members of social groups who experience intersecting forms of systemic discrimination or barriers (on grounds, for example, of gender, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, race, religion, Indigenous identity, ethnicity, disability or class).
As the number of faculty members whose position lies outside the tenure system continues to rise at American universities, college deans, department chairs and program directors must consider how to support the careers of these colleagues. The differences that commonly exist between the opportunities available to tenure-system faculty and those offered to other academics can be a recurring source of friction. That not only erodes unit cohesion and climate, but it may also impede efforts to retain valued long-term employees who are not in the tenure system.
Since the configurations and names of these people and positions vary widely across disciplines and institutions, I will denote them collectively as “academic staff.” At Michigan State University, we have several categories of faculty members who work outside the tenure system -- including outside professionals in business, law, medicine or media who teach an occasional career-oriented course in their specialty; instructors with full teaching loads and short-term contracts; and individuals with a mix of teaching, advising or other duties who have long-term appointments. As a dean, I have seen that as my college hires more faculty members outside the tenure system, identifying ways to support such academic staff professionally is an increasingly common topic of conversation. And as an associate provost, as well, charged with advancing the careers of all MSU faculty and academic staff, I am finding support for academics outside the tenure system to be an area of institutional concern.
It is 2018 and we still have a crisis with the faculty. For 30 years critics have proclaimed the tenure-track and adjunct models of faculty broken.
Tenure-track models overemphasize a very narrow definition of research and do not encourage or provide accountability for quality teaching or improvement of teaching. For example, studies demonstrate that only 25 percent of faculty are excellent at both research and teaching. Furthermore, the tenure track can commit institutions to wages beyond retirement and to fields of study where enrollments may no longer exist.
Few academics will be surprised to hear that more evidence has come out showing that student evaluations of teaching are often biased.
The latest study, released this year by the American Political Science Association, found that the "language students use in evaluations regarding male professors is significantly different than language used in evaluating female professors." The study also showed that "a male instructor administering an identical online course as a female instructor receives higher ordinal scores in teaching evaluations, even when questions are not instructor-specific."
Canadian universities have traditionally enjoyed high levels of autonomy from governments, relative to their counterparts in other parts of the world. As recently as the 1990s, a couple of studies (Richardson and Fielden, 1997; Anderson and Johnson, 1998) concluded that the level of government intervention in Canadian universities was lowest or amongst the lowest of the
many countries studied.
Abstract
Since the 1980s, research on employment conditions in post-secondary institutions has focused on the growth of contingent academic workers, or what the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO) has labelled “nonfull-time instructors” (Field, Jones, Stephenson, & Khoyetsyan, 2014). Very little attention, however, has been paid to administrative, physical plant, and other operational staff employed within universities and colleges. Using data from a study of University of Regina students and employees, academic and support staff, this paper confronts the broader conditions of labour around the ivory tower. Employment at a post-secondary institution is analyzed through the lens of living wage research advanced by the Canadian Centre of Policy Alternatives (CCPA) (Ivanova & Klein, 2015). The study reframes the notion of a living wage in a post-secondary institution to include work-life balance, job security, and the realities of dignity and respect in the university workplace.
Stupid.
This word was spoken triumphantly and repeatedly as self-speak by a talented pre-service, k-12 special education teacher during my course Library Resources for Children. Until I heard her say it several times through the semester, I hadn’t seen how one word can hold an entire teaching philosophy. I hadn’t considered how the power of that word multiplies when it takes
the form of self-speak. I hadn’t realized how much it scared me to think that that word might follow her into a k-12 classroom.
When I learned that my own teaching philosophy existed on the pinhead of a single word whenever I’ve thought it at myself, I needed to send this email to that amazing up-and-coming teacher:
Montréal, le 2 février 2018 — Dans le cadre des consultations prébudgétaires 2018-2019 tenues par le ministre des Finances du Québec, M. Carlos Leitão, auxquelles elle a participé ce matin, la Fédération des cégeps a rappelé le rôle stratégique du réseau collégial public dans la société québécoise depuis 50 ans et souligné que, face aux défis actuels et futurs en matière de qualification de la main-d’oeuvre et de réponse aux changements technologiques
notamment, le gouvernement doit financer les cégeps de manière suffisante et prévisible. Ce financement à la hausse devrait être accordé dans le but de mieux servir les étudiants, d’accroître la diplomation au collégial, de former des citoyens responsables, de dynamiser la vitalité régionale et de stimuler l’innovation et la productivité.
Cheerful and helpful workers are beloved by their bosses, and just about everyone else, really. Enthusiastic optimists make for great colleagues, rarely cause problems, and can always be counted on.
But they may not necessarily make the best employees, says Adam Grant, the organizational psychologist and Wharton professor.
Speaking in Chicago at the annual conference of the Society for Human Resource Management, Grant said he separates workers along two axes: givers and takers, and agreeable and disagreeable. Givers share of themselves and make their colleagues better, while takers are selfish and focused only on their own interests. The agreeable/disagreeable spectrum is what it sounds like: some workers are friendly, some are grouchy.
It had happened before, sitting at the computer, working on a syllabus, again, fluctuating between excitement about a new course and a vague sense that life itself was being sucked out of me one sterile byte at a time. I was fighting boredom. And this was supposed to interest students? I tried to imagine it igniting their curiosity, but instead I saw them staring at it with the
enthusiasm saved for the fine print on a life insurance policy. But they must read it. It is their life insurance policy for a future full of knowledge and wisdom! It defines how we’re going to relate! As I sat there writing my syllabus I had a vision of the Ferris Bueller video of the professor droning on and on while asking for input: “Anyone? Anyone?” That was not where I wanted to go. I had to stop and rethink what I was doing.
Student evaluations of teaching, or SET, aren’t short on critics. Many professors and other experts say they’re unreliable -- they may hurt female and minority professors, for example. One recent metastudy also suggested that past analyses linking student achievement to strong evaluation scores are flawed, a mere “artifact of small-samplesized studies and publication bias.”
Now one of the authors of that metastudy is back for more, with a new analysis suggesting that SET ratings vary by course subject, with professors of math-related fields bearing the brunt of the effect.
Stemming from a series of discussions at recent women's academic conferences in the U.S. and abroad, Women Interrupting, Disrupting, and Revolutionizing Education Policy and Practice is born of the frustration many scholars have expressed over the stagnation of the study of women in educational leadership. Whitney Sherman Newcomb and Katherine Cumings Mansfield
have brought together the works of a broad range of feminist scholarsseasoned and newer academics and studentsto address the questions: in what ways is feminism in the field of educational leadership stalled? What can we do to move ahead?
The mental health and well-being of Ontarians is a shared responsibility that requires collective action.
In any given year, one in five Canadians experiences a mental health challenge or illness, and by 40 years
of age, half of Canadians will have, or will have had, a mental illness.
This prevalence means that, at some point or another, mental illness will impact us all.
Postsecondary students are particularly vulnerable. The onset of most mental illness and substance dependency typically occurs during adolescence and early adulthood, which coincides with the very age when the majority of students are first encountering the pressures associated with postsecondary education.
Some scholars have questioned academe’s reliance on letters of recommendation, saying they’re onerous for the professors writing them or speak more about connections to “big-name” scholars than substance, or both.
A recent study explores another concern about letters of recommendation: whether they’re biased against the women they’re supposed to help. The short answer is yes.
Many proponents of online education have speculated that the digital learning environment might be a meritocracy, where students are judged not on their race or gender, but on the comments they post.
A study being released today by the Center for Education Policy Analysis at Stanford University, however, finds that bias appears to be strong in online course discussions.
The study found that instructors are 94 percent more likely to respond to discussion forum posts by white male students than by other students. The authors write that they believe their work is the first to demonstrate with a large pool that the sort of bias that concerns many educators in face-to-face instruction is also present in online education.
At a conference in Ottawa, academics, policymakers, students and community leaders addressed the role universities can play in reconciling Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples.
What role can and should universities play in reconciliation efforts between Canadian institutions and Indigenous communities? What’s working well and what needs to change? These questions were central to a two-day symposium of university administrators, students, policymakers and community organizers called Converge 2017, hosted by Universities Canada in Ottawa last week.
Engaging with students – both inside and outside the classroom – who are continually linked in to social media and online devices presents a range of opportunities, challenges and pitfalls.
To some of my students’ displeasure, I have my office hours on Friday afternoons. I prepare for this ancient tradition of face-to-face, pen-and-paper pedagogy by tidying my office, purging unwanted scraps of paper, removing half empty coffee cups, and sometimes even plugging in an air freshener. Then I sit in my swivel chair, arms crossed, and wait for the barrage of undergraduate students to arrive with their genetics questions.
MINNEAPOLIS -- As the former president of two small liberal arts colleges and Pennsylvania’s independent college group, Brian C. Mitchell believes “with all my heart” in the traditional case for American higher education: that it helps produce full and productive members of an engaged citizenry.
“It’s a noble argument, the right argument,” he told an audience at the annual meeting of the National Association of College and University Business Officers. But “it just doesn’t matter given the environment,” he said. “It just doesn’t resonate.”
It’s not that Mitchell thinks there isn’t a good case to be made for higher education. And the former president of Washington & Jefferson College and Bucknell University doesn’t accept the idea that colleges and universities collectively face a “doomsday scenario,” as some prognosticators tend to predict.
As dean, I travelled to San Francisco a few years ago with most of my college’s faculty members and doctoral students for a national conference in our field. I didn’t rent a car, because everything on the agenda — leadership meetings and donor visits — was within walking distance of our hotel. Then a major donor from a faraway suburb called and wanted to meet near his home.
Unfortunately, the local rental dealerships were sold out of standard vehicles, but — "good news" — a luxury convertible was available for the same price. I pondered for a moment and declined. Why? I was worried about the optics. That is: how it would look if people from my campus saw me driving away from the hotel like some movie star, thereby confirming prejudices about rich, privileged deans.
Was I being silly, even paranoid?
This article is concerned with the differences in REB policy and application processes across Canada as they impact multi-jurisdictional, higher education research projects that collect data at universities themselves. Despite the guiding principles
of the Tri-Council Policy Statement 2 (TCPS2) there is significant variation among the practices of Research Ethics Boards
(REBs) at Canada’s universities, particularly when they respond to requests from researchers outside their own institution.
The data for this paper were gathered through a review of research ethics applications at 69 universities across Canada. The
findings suggest REBs use a range of different application systems and require different revisions and types of oversight for
researchers who are not employed at their institution. This paper recommends further harmonization between REBs across
the country and national-level dialogue on TCPS2 interpretations.
Keywords: research ethics, university ethics, higher education, social science research, harmonization