Perspectives on the role of the urban university and the development and implementation of team leadership programs are presented. It is suggested that the urban metropolis is a part of the university's mission, and is an extremely complex network of institutional structures, and human resources. The university can respond to urban needs by…

Efforts at Portland State University (PSU) in Oregon illustrate how an institution can clarify its own purposes, evaluate how the environment supports its academic mission, and effectively institute changes that will bring faculty activities and institutional purposes into a more harmonious alignment. In 1990 PSU began a strategic planning process…

Students graduating from early childhood programs at a southeastern urban university in June 1992 and June 1993 completed the Educational Attitudes Inventory and the Teacher Efficacy Scale upon entry to the program, before entry to a practicum experience with kindergarten students, and upon completion of both the practicum experience and a student…

The relationship between student library use and selected student characteristics, including fields of study, academic achievement, and progress toward a degree was investigated at a large, urban, nonresidential university with a full-time-equivalent student population of 15,000. Findings include the following: students with higher grade point…

The trends from 1970-75 in course-by-course grading at a large public urban university are described. A total of 144 undergraduate courses were analyzed to determine if systematic grade inflation was occurring. Multiple linear regressions were fitted to more than 125,000 final course grades by courses. Most course grading patterns showed little…

This paper describes efforts by Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) to develop programs to serve the needs of first-year students, focusing on collaborative efforts across the university system to retain nontraditional and underrepresented students. The School of Liberal Arts Faculty Mentor Program links a first-year seminar…

Factors contributing to the academic persistence of college students and those factors that may be amenable to institutional control were studied in 1980 at Georgia State University. The academic career of 4,481 students was studied for a 5-quarter period at this nonresidential, urban university. Multiple regression and multiple discriminant…

This paper describes how four institutions of higher education, local businesses, and community leaders cooperated to work for change in University Heights (Newark, New Jersey). Initial sections describe the community and the economic and social changes it has seen in recent decades. These sections also review how the four institutions established…

Academic persistence at the University of Alabama in Birmingham (UAB) was studied from fall 1979 through spring 1983. Attention was directed to the school's graduation rate and correlations between sex, race, major, grade point average (GPA) and persistence. Of the 1,043 students who were beginning freshmen in 1979, the study sample consisted of…

The metropolitan university is viewed from the context of individual, group, and university level of social interaction. Metropolitan universities are defined as state-supported public universities located in urban areas and legislatively mandated as teaching institutions. Resources are usually dependent upon the number of full-time equivalent…

An alternative system of course delivery, wholly online computer-managed instruction, was evaluated to estimate its contribution to total full-time-equivalent (FTE) students two years after its implementation at Christopher Newport University (Virginia). CNU ONLINE offers eight online courses and one online degree program. In Spring 1997, nearly…

This study examined how social interaction norms and promotion and tenure norms effected job satisfaction, focusing on how these variables effected on underrepresented faculty at a predominantly white, four-year, public, urban university. Semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with a total of nine faculty (white male, white female, and…

It is hoped that the development of South Mountain Community College will have significant impact on the South Phoenix community (Arizona) which has an urban and minority population characterized by lower educational level, lower income, and higher unemployment than populations in other portions of the county. The community college is expected to…

A program at the University of Akron, Ohio, that focused on teamwork and leadership that is responsive to social change in the urban scene is described, and implications for decision processes are addressed. The university became involved in reviewing, analyzing, and projecting activities and programs relevant to the university's mission through…

Universities assume that entering students possess computer skills and literacy and then expect students to utilize these assumed skills by offering computer-based instruction, requiring research using the World Wide Web, offering online courses, and integrating computer usage into many courses. Universities seldom stop to determine if required…