University teachers funded to engage in educational development projects have been found to become increasingly engaged in the scholarship of teaching and learning. However, research also points to obstacles such as departmental culture, lack of support from management, and unhelpful administrative processes. In this study, I interview university…

Increased sustainable access to undergraduate research opportunities, particularly for historically underrepresented populations, involves transforming departmental and institutional cultures, which is time-consuming and expensive. Competing university interests and tightening budgets necessitate finding effective and affordable ways to implement…

Departmental research administrators offer a wide range of support services to research communities, university central offices, and fellow research administrators in other departments and institutions around the world. It is important for department-level research administration offices to function as a unit to provide centralized services that…

When going through an internal reorganization, how do you kick-start new collaborations in a healthy manner? "Revolutionary City: A Portal to the Nation's Founding" digital project provided the newly reorganized American Philosophical Society's (APS) Library and Museum the means to do just that. Leveraging the resources of a grant, two…

Sections PDF (924 KB) TOOLS SHARE Abstract Graduate physiology programs strive to provide students with in-depth expertise in a particular academic discipline, often facilitating this process in the form of a departmental seminar course. Within the Department of Physiology and Biophysics at the University of California Irvine (UCI), students are…

We provide a case study of how Carnegie Foundation grants to the University of Alberta (Western Canada) during the Great Depression impacted the university's community engagement practices. Previously unutilized archival sources contribute to a historical survey of the university's Department of Extension as Carnegie philanthropy enabled the…

Coauthorship has intensified as a mode of production across the twentieth century and into the twenty-first in a large number of fields. Yet sole authorship remains a publishing mode in some fields. Publishing is not only an individual behavior but is also nestled in organizations. To that end, incentives to sole -- or co-author work may vary…

Background: The continuation of teacher preparation activities after a 3-year Physics Teacher Education Coalition (PhysTEC) grant is used as a case study to examine multi-faceted aspects of sustainable change in higher education. Since teacher preparation is outside typical physics departmental activities, success is highly dependent on finding a…

The purpose of this study was to continue the trend of identifying the course offerings of National Communication Association (NCA) department members started by Wardrope (1999). A curricular profile of U.S. communication departments. "Communication Education," "48"(3), 256-258. https://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2102/10.1080/03634529909379173 and…

Research about organizational improvement has come from several disciplines--business management, organizational sociology, communications, and education. Across these fields, much of the research involves case studies of effective organizations (e.g., Collins, 2001; Johnson, 1996). Review of these case studies suggests several commonalities among…

The Czech higher educational system has transformed over the past three decades from a state-centred model evolving via strong academic autonomy to the current system, which is characterised by academic freedom but also heightened pressure to produce measurable research output. The purpose of this study was to explore how Czech academic middle…

Graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) are responsible for the instruction of many statistics courses offered at the university level, yet little is known about these students' preparation for teaching, their beliefs about how introductory statistics should be taught, or the pedagogical practices of the courses they teach. An online survey to examine…

Early career researchers are faced with the expectation of their scientific communities to conduct independent research, which is reflected in the development of independent new research lines. This change must take place under conditions that vary between national career systems. Case studies for a chair system (Germany) and two tenure systems,…

The academy is widely reported to be going through a period of transformation: not just changes to what is taught, but threats to tenure and internal funding, perhaps balanced by new possibilities for external funding and interdisciplinary projects. This article discusses a recently conducted survey of US and Canadian Philosophy departments, in an…

Far from allowing a governance of universities by the invisible hand of market forces, research performance assessments do not just measure differences in research quality, but yield themselves visible symptoms in terms of a stratification and standardization of disciplines. The article illustrates this with a case study of UK history departments…