While much has been written about the impact of metrics in higher education, less is known about the variety of response orientations that individual academics may adopt in reaction to the increasing metricization of academia. Taking the English higher education sector as a case study, this research surveyed the views of academics from Education…

There is a lack of objective evaluative standards for academic work. While this has been recognized in studies of how gatekeepers pass judgment on the works of others, little is known about how scholars deal with the uncertainty about how their work will be evaluated by gatekeepers. Building upon 35 interviews with early career academics in…

Evaluating the teaching performance of lecturers in higher education is important for both the Universities and the faculty themselves. Having information about teaching performance is essential to bring about change in student learning and assessment, to incentivize lecturers, to appraise lecturers and to make important administrative decisions.…

Drawing on recent research involving approximately 6000 higher education staff, this paper examines the impact of the Teaching Excellence and Student Outcomes Framework (TEF) on their professional lives since its launch in 2016. Our findings raise fundamental concerns, methodologically and conceptually, about the fitness for the purpose of the TEF…

Research demonstrates a similar set of features in Black women faculty's teaching that are theorized to increase student learning yet also reveals negative colleague and student reactions to that teaching. Given this context, this article asks if standard university student course evaluation forms are a good practice for examining their teaching.…

For the past several decades, researchers have identified problems with the validity and reliability of student opinion of teaching survey (teaching survey) results, leading many researchers and faculty members to conclude that conducting comprehensive, meaningful assessment of teaching requires using multiple measures to collect and triangulate…

The reward systems typically found in colleges and universities often serve as a barrier rather than a catalyst for improving teaching. As such, an increasing number of university faculty members are using their own classrooms as a site of inquiry and reflective practice (e.g. self-study) to concurrently advance their own research and teaching.…

University teachers and students are evaluated regularly on their performance, and when evaluations are lower than expected, the feedback may be threatening to the individual, potentially causing deviant behaviors including un-collegiality and poor performance. In this paper, we use the self-threat model of procedural justice to examine faculty…

The study aims to investigate the internally driven factors that should contribute to quality in the teaching process in order to inform the current measures of teacher performance in higher education. Previous studies reported ambivalent views and reactions towards measures of quality which raised the presumption that quality processes were not…

This study of the University of Texas (UT) at Austin surveys the most influential policies enacted on campus in the name of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). This report compiles and examines the university's DEI plans, its progress updates, and all of the publicly accessible DEI plans and updates published by the university's various…

Continuous increase of global reliance on sessional staff in higher education has not been accompanied by the development of strategies to enhance quality learning and teaching or understanding the experiences of these staff. This has resulted in a general discontent among this category of academics. The growing importance of building respectful…

In 2012, Olin College initiated an effort to improve its faculty reappointment and promotion (R&P) system in response to a lack of alignment between faculty activities, the institutional mission, and the traditional assessment criteria defined in the faculty manual. Olin engaged in a six-step use-oriented design process that guided the…

Honesty is widely understood as an ethical imperative in science and scholarship. This article examines the operation of this ethic in an area crucial to academe but which has not received sufficient attention: faculty review of candidates seeking appointment to academic rank--in hiring and promotion--in U.S. higher education organizations.…

Institutions of learning hire faculty to teach and carry out certain contractual duties. The onus rests on the institution to retain those who are effectively carrying out the job for which they were appointed and to replace those who are not meeting up with the required assignments. The problem now becomes that of choosing the most appropriate…

Purpose: The number of international faculty members in universities is increasing worldwide, and Japan is no exception. However, despite this quantitative expansion, these faculty remain peripheral. Though recent studies have identified various challenges faced by international faculty, they have focused on international faculty's individual…