Bias among faculty search committees has been considered a significant barrier to diversifying the professoriate. Given the traditional faculty hierarchy in academia, junior faculty search chairs may not have the positional power to challenge authority when confronted with bias or prejudice. Yet, search chairs are expected to ensure equitable…

The governing boards of Australian public universities, known as Senates or Councils, are bodies with broad legislated powers. The composition of these bodies is crucial to ensuring sound strategic management of universities and maintaining academic standards. The key aspect of Council processes in Western Australian (WA) that this article seeks…

Background: The lack of racial diversity in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines is perhaps one of the most challenging issues in the United States higher education system. The issue is not only concerning diverse students, but also diverse faculty members. One important contributing factor is the faculty hiring…

Student ratings of instruction (SRI) are commonly used to evaluate courses and teaching in higher education. Much debate about their validity in evaluating teaching exists, which is due to concerns of bias by factors unrelated to teaching quality (Spooren et al., 2013). Our objective was to identify peer-reviewed original research published in…

Research on shared information bias has shown that group members involved in a decision-making task tend to undervalue information that a single member shares with the group, especially when that information conflicts with their prior conclusions. The group activity in this article is intended to heighten awareness of this shared information bias…

Researchers investigating the decline of potential applicants for principalships have demonstrated that teachers perceive there to be a significant problem in current selection procedures. This article reports an investigation in two Australian states into principal selection. Drawing on a corpus of interviews, two case studies and administrative…