Disciplines display field-specific ways of valuing research contributions, and these different 'styles of valuation' influence how academic careers are assessed and formed. Yet, differences in how research is evaluated are also prevalent between different levels of assessment: collegial and organizational. Consequently, we employ a multifaceted…

There has been a recent increase in attention toward the proper targets of evaluation in science funding policy. Specifically, some claim that we should 'fund people, not projects' to allow for increased autonomy for researchers. Critics argue that this movement unduly opens room for biases against several marginalized groups of scientists. In…

Across higher education there is a misalignment between the policies and practices of evaluation and the core values for which universities profess to stand. Values of inclusion, transdisciplinarity, and publicly engaged scholarship are routinely undervalued in university practices of evaluation. Shifting attention toward high-impact ends of…

This study is to design and validate an instrument to evaluate the level of development of teaching competences (academic, social, personal, and instrumental) of the university teachers. Exploratory and confirmatory analyses are applied to validate the theoretical model. The results confirm that the "University Teaching Competence Scale"…

The right to teach at university is a distinctive philosophical and legal conundrum but a largely unexplored question. Drawing on Humboltdian principles, the legitimacy of the university teacher stems from their continuing engagement in research rather than possession of academic and teaching qualifications alone. This means that the right to…

Academics have always been endowed with the privilege of autonomy, but the diffusion of evaluation systems based on publication outcomes potentially jeopardizes the benefits deriving from behaviors that address other pillars of higher education. Besides research and teaching, academic citizenship, i.e., the service behaviors carried out within and…

Movement to fully open-access electronic scholarly publication has been hampered by the conflicting interests of universities, private publishers, researchers themselves, and those who fund research. The situation interacts strongly with traditions regarding peer review and the ways in which researchers establish stature within their fields.…

Scholarship addressing public and community engagement in tenure and promotion often invokes Ernest Boyer's landmark 1990 report, "Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate," and goes on to lament the lack of progress made in the three decades that have followed. This review intervenes: We synthesize extant scholarship on…

In this paper we critically examine the research landscape in South Africa. We do this by documenting the progression and transformation of the country's National Research Foundation (NRF)-rated researchers from 2005 to 2015. Results indicate that most NRF-rated researchers in South Africa are white and male but this trend is slowly changing with…

As part of the promotion and tenure process, colleges and universities have primarily evaluated faculty members on three key functional areas: research, teaching, and service. In this article, we examine how the use of collegiality as a possible fourth criterion for faculty evaluation affects faculty power dynamics, how U.S. courts have addressed…

This article examines the similarities and differences in the systems for faculty career advancement in higher education institutions in the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran. The analysis focuses on two specific cases: the University of Tehran and Portland State University. Through this paired comparison, we draw out the similarities…

This article explores what an uneven embrace of community engagement means for faculty as they apply for tenure and promotion. It closely examines how three faculty members (including the author) from different departments framed and discussed their engaged scholarly contributions in the presence or absence of departmental guidelines on engaged…