Housing and residence life (HRL) administrators who lack knowledge about accepted professional behaviors risk violating normative boundaries, likely jeopardizing themselves or their clients (e.g., students, parents, colleagues). The purpose of this survey study was to understand if a normative structure exists for the administrative role…

To protect the welfare of students, staff, and other clients in housing and residence life (HRL), administrators must understand what behaviors are unacceptable. Professionals might make idiosyncratic and unconstrained decisions when there is no conduct code or set of informal rules. Informal rules may become norms comprising normative structures…

Codes of conduct can and should fulfill a critical role in higher education. Codes help overcome some of the challenges inherent in a system predicated on high levels of autonomy and on self-regulation. Codes not only are important indicators of critical topics that are deemed worthy of explicit protection or expectations for behavior; they may…

Four-year colleges and universities that espouse teaching as their primary mission bear a responsibility to safeguard the welfare of their students as clients of teaching. This responsibility takes the form of a moral imperative. Faculty members hold considerable autonomy in the professional choices they make in their teaching. As a consequence,…

The norms of science define appropriate and inappropriate scholarly or research role performance. The four norms described in this study are (1) universalism: research is assessed on its merit, not particularistic criteria; (2) commonality: research must be made public and shared with the research community; (3) disinterestedness: research is…

If one understands the normative structure of a given peer group, one can begin to understand the type of influence that group has on the behavior of its members. Despite the centrality of norms to understanding student peer groups, little or no research has focused on the empirical delineation of normative structures of college students. Thus,…

A survey of 138 chemistry, physics, psychology, and sociology department heads investigated the relationship between the administrator's graduate school department quality and the formality of sanctioning of colleagues for violating each of the four norms of science. The results and implications for professional socialization within disciplines…

A study using national data investigated extension of the social control theory of deviance to deviance from the four Mertonian norms of science among faculty in seven disciplines. Results suggest social control in the academic profession lies primarily in the community of the academic disciplines rather than with personal controls. (Author/MSE)

This study examined the behavioral expectations and norms for college and university faculty particularly whether they varied with respect to the level of commitment to teaching at different institutions and in different disciplines. A cluster sampling design was used to select a random sample of the population of faculty in biology, history,…

A study of 250 new teaching assistants and 122 tenure-track faculty investigated their endorsement of 4 norms defining appropriate and inappropriate teaching behavior: (1) interpersonal disregard; (2) particularistic grading; (3) moral turpitude; and (4) inadequate planning. Both groups accorded the norms similar levels of impropriety. Questions…