The justification for studying faculty research productivity is that it affects individual advancement and reputation within academe, as well as departmental and institutional prestige (Creamer 1998, iii). Publication records are an important factor in faculty performance evaluations, research grant awards, and promotion and salary decisions. The…

This commentary presents an Australian perspective on Balkin and Mello's "Facilitating and Creating Synergies between Teaching and Research: The Role of the Academic Administrator." It addresses one particularly important aspect of the separation of teaching and research in business schools; namely, the increasing dominance of…

The focus of this article is the tenure review process in Canadian universities, a rigorous and high-stakes evaluation of junior academics that serves as a prime exemplar of "disciplining academics", our project's title. In-depth interviews in seven Ontario universities with 30 knowledgeable informants such as senior managers and faculty…

Most position descriptions for college and university faculty include benchmarks that indicate assumptions about collegiality. Criticism about this practice has been voiced for years. But case law in the United States has upheld the use of collegiality as a factor in decisions regarding faculty employment, tenure, and promotion. Indeed, several…

Academic developers are often positioned as intermediaries who wield value-neutral tools--languages, models, and techniques--in service of decidedly non-neutral institutional goals. We challenge the value of perpetuating the ideal of the neutrality of academic developers and their tools by examining the ways in which our resources and approaches…

This study investigated the status of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), the amount and types of pedagogical scholarship, and the merit accorded SoTL within academic units for purposes of faculty assessment (i.e. hiring, promotion, and tenure decisions) at a research/doctoral granting institution. Responding to an electronic survey…

Along with the "massification" of higher education in China since the late 1990s, the issue of quality and excellence appeared at the top of China's higher education agenda. Since faculty evaluation of teaching is one of the major approaches adopted by China's higher education sector to pursue quality and excellence, it is valuable to…

We examine the validity of peer observation of classroom instruction for purposes of faculty evaluation. Using both a multi-section course sample and a sample of different courses across a university's School of Business and Economics we find that the results of annual classroom observations of faculty teaching are significantly and positively…

Twenty-five years ago, American sociologist Robert Neelly Bellah (Bellah, et al., 1986: 303) critiqued the growing isolation of intellectuals within universities and called for a return to "social science as public philosophy." Little seems to have changed. My thirty-seven year experience at the University of Alberta suggests that…

Case study analyses allow students to demonstrate proficiency in executing authentic tasks in marketing and management, facilitating faculty evaluation of higher order learning outcomes. Effective and consistent assessment of case analyses depends in large part on the development of sound rubrics. The authors explored the process of rubric…

The authors design the innovation and learning perspective of the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) of "Ubuntu and client service charter nexus." This article borrows and advances the research carried out by Khomba, Vermaak and Gouws (2011). The point of departure is on praxis of ubuntu/unhu as a holistic approach in the re-modelling of the BSC…

Web-based student evaluations of clinical faculty were collected over an 8-year period. There were 19,881 medical student evaluations over the 8-year period for all clinical clerkships, representing a total of 952 faculty. Students used a 5-point Likert scale to rate the teaching effectiveness of faculty. Criterion-based methods and standard…

Quality and accountability mandates require institutions to monitor online instruction in a uniform and complete manner. In many institutions, instructor training is sparse and faculty evaluation occurs only through end-of-course student evaluations that may or may not yield adequate information on how the instructor performs online. Consequently,…

"The Excellent Online Instructor" is a guide for new and seasoned faculty who teach online, those responsible for training and developing online instructors, and administrators who must evaluate online faculty performance. This comprehensive resource describes the qualities of and explains how one can become an excellent online instructor. Written…

This article examines a little-studied review genre of academe: letters written for faculty retention, promotion, and tenure (RPT). Given their centrally evaluative nature, these documents have potential to illuminate academic community values, particularly those related to faculty work. Of specific interest in this study is the evaluative…