A Faculty Encouragement Scale (FES) was created to measure students' perception of faculty encouragement (challenge-focused and potential-focused encouragement) in college. This paper reports the psychometric properties of scores from the FES using a sample of 237 first-year engineering undergraduate students in a suburban public university.…

Google Scholar and academic library discovery systems are both popular resources among academic users for finding scholarly information. By conducting an online survey with 975 users from more than 20 public research universities across the United States, this study comparatively investigates how and why academic users use these two resources.…

We use data from 2015-2016 to document faculty representation and wage gaps by race-ethnicity and gender in six fields at selective public universities. Consistent with widely available information, Black, Hispanic, and female professors are underrepresented and White and Asian professors are overrepresented in our data. Disadvantaged minority and…

In 2002, during yet another budget crisis produced in large measure by the state's tax-cutting mania, Massachusetts proposed a massive cut in the university's budget. Through an early retirement incentive, the state wanted to reduce the faculty by 10 percent. No one was prepared to fight back. Despite UMass Amherst's long history of activism, and…

In the first decade of the 21st century, the nation, the states, and colleges and universities began to grapple with the challenges of globalization, changing demography, the implications of the digital era, and of a less expansive public sector. Although not a transformative period for higher education, the decade saw significant innovations in…

As the age of the population continues to increase, faculty retirement issues are becoming more central to campus-level planning and management. Academic planners and senior administrators recognize that there are positive, negative, and unintended consequences associated with various retirement programs and policies, whether they are early…

This proceedings document discusses academic leadership in uncertain times, the need for a cooperative model of collective bargaining to provide administration and faculty the flexibility required to respond to changing times, who should bargain for whom and for what, readiness of the next generation to lead, and retirement issues for college…

This report presents results of a questionnaire survey intended to establish a profile of Blacks and Hispanics holding faculty positions in Massachusetts colleges and universities. The survey was sent to 86 community and two-year colleges, liberal arts colleges, comprehensive institutions and doctoral-granting institutions (72 responded), of which…

"Chronicle of Higher Education" presents an abundant source of news and information for college and university faculty members and administrators. This July 2, 2004 issue of "Chronicle of Higher Education" includes the following articles: (1) "The Provost as Gatekeeper: A Former Provost Offers Advice on Managing the…