This article presents three recent American Association of University Professors (AAUP) cases that involved the dismissal of a senior non-tenure-track member of the faculty. The most recent case resulted in the investigating committee's report on Nicholls State University, a regional public institution in Louisiana. Preceding Nicholls was an…

Boston University (BU) has had a history of contentious relations between administrators and faculty. John Silber, who ran the university from the early 1970s through the late 1990s, gave faculty little say in university governance, and an "us versus them" atmosphere soon developed. In 2004, however, major changes in the board of…

If one reads the paper or listens to the news, professional disposition are almost becoming critical job skills in the world of work. Similarly, faculty dispositions, defined in this article as "attitudes, values, and beliefs demonstrated through both verbal and non-verbal behaviors as educators interact with students, families, colleagues, and…

This monograph complements volume 36, issue number 4 of ASHE Higher Education Report: "Understanding the New Majority of Non-Tenure-Track Faculty," and focuses on theories applied to study non-tenure-track faculty and philosophical and practical tensions represented in the literature. The chapter "Theories Used to Study and…

New public management (NPM) approaches have informed policy in the public sector in advanced countries in the last decade. Some authors suggest that the main objective of NPM at the organisational level is to change the traditional way professionals are regulated. This study examines the impact of NPM on the working conditions of Portuguese higher…

This article talks about the issues on gender and contingent labor in the field of composition. The authors contend that the composition programs are feminized, devalued, and heavily populated by contingent faculty. The feminization of the field of composition in particular makes the work--and the potential solidarity between those on and off the…

There are two worlds that exist in the academe: a world where the tenure system remains strong and a world dominated by the absence of tenure. In this article, the author cites the differences between these two worlds. In a world where tenure remains strong, academic departments benefit from a stable, dedicated workforce composed of tenured and…

New faculty members are traditionally indoctrinated into a system that demands that they write incessantly and successfully publish their manuscripts. Yet they typically are not offered help in navigating the publishing process. For junior faculty members who have little experience with scholarly writing beyond their doctoral dissertations, these…

This article describes the experiences, perceptions, and available support systems of untenured faculty from a south eastern United States public university system in their progress toward tenure. Survey results were used to develop a model support system for new faculty. Data were collected from an online survey sent to 191 tenure-track faculty…

The work of colleges and universities is carried out each day by committed, talented faculty members. The faculty's intellectual capital, taken collectively, is every institution's principal asset. Today, as higher-education institutions are faced with new challenges that only seem to grow more difficult the importance of all faculty members in…

This study uses a mixed methods approach to examine how business school deans alter the appointment status and salary structure of their faculty. In addition to analyzing interviews with deans, we examined faculty-level data for more than 200 business colleges between the 1997-1998 and 2005-2006 academic years. We find that business deans are…

In this article, the authors provide a description of the academic climate in New Mexico. Like many other places in the world today, New Mexico is trying to find an identity in an environment that the authors label "increasingly privatized, corporatized, and militarized." New Mexico's higher education salaries are lower than those in…

The tenure system is a tenure of one's own making. It can be flexible, supple, and responsive to the diverse needs and life situations of faculty members, or it can be rigid and uncompromising. The tenure years need not be a time of high anxiety, but for that to happen, institutions will need to make structural changes in the tenure system. In…

In this article, the author talks about the tenure process of being a professor which can be gloomy for assistant professors as they share a common culture of the joyless quest for promotion and tenure. Life as an assistant professor has its bleak moments; however, the downbeat cosmology is, in the end, dysfunctional and hurts more than it…

Various factors are making faculty leadership challenging including the rise in part-time and non-tenure-track faculty, the increasing pressure to publish and teach more courses and adopt new technologies and pedagogies, increasing standards for tenure and promotion, ascension of academic capitalism, and heavy service roles for women and people of…