Higher education scholarship is focused largely on professors who guide students in their learning and students who participate in the educational process. The contributions of professional staff (i.e., those supporting the work of faculty and students) have not been as well understood, particularly those who reside in academic departments. We…

The field of college mental health is changing dramatically, and we are approaching a necessary paradigm shift in how "mental health" is defined and addressed. This paper will outline two primary forces impacting how we think about mental health and how a systems change perspective might help us understand what comes next. We will…

Academic department chairs are key in helping universities achieve student success. To succeed in their decisions and furthering their university's educational mission, department chairs can use institutional data to inform their decision-making. In many cases, however, there are gaps, misalignments, and inefficiencies between department chairs…

Although the history of translation is almost as old as the history of humankind, it was not until the second half of the twentieth century that translation studies were recognized as an independent discipline. Perhaps due to this fact, translation and interpreting programs at the higher education level started to be introduced in Turkey in the…

The purpose of this qualitative study is to explore the leadership experiences of department chairs in for-profit, higher education institutions to identify effective leadership competencies for the role. The study utilized Gigliotti and Ruben's (2019) Two-dimensional Competency Approach for Effective Leadership and Ruben's Leadership Competency…

In this chapter, we extend the conventional expectations of midlevel academic leadership to include emotional labor. To do so, we draw on examples salient to academic department chairs, who are the ultimate example of midlevel leaders: sitting between senior-level leaders and a cadre of disciplinary- and departmentally-based peers. After defining…

As middle managers in higher education, department chairs play a critical role in the university structure while operating in an ambiguous location between faculty and senior administration. This paper will take a closer look at the role of department chair, how chairs are selected and prepared for the position, what the job entails, qualities of…

Leaders in higher education face increasing pressure to ensure their institutions are well-positioned to adapt to our changing world. As part of responding to these demands, a growing number of institutions have established dedicated teams of in-house experts to support this work and the culture change around it, broadly termed academic change or…

In response to the call to increase community engagement on U.S. college campuses, service-learning courses expanded immensely, and a field of community-engaged scholarship emerged. Abundant research exists on the benefits of service-learning to students, but much less research has been conducted on faculty and senior administrator perspectives of…

Through an evaluation of an institution-wide curriculum change process, this paper analyses how strategic policy is variously enacted in departmental communities. Linguistic ethnography of public, institutional and internal policy documents illuminates departments' engagement with the change process. With curriculum change positioned as a…

Program review is a critical process in higher education that helps institutions assess and evaluate the effectiveness of programs and services. Program review provides an opportunity for an institution to identify strengths and weaknesses in its programs and services and to develop strategies for improvement. Through the program review process,…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine higher education institutions' participation in association for the advancement of sustainability in higher education's (AASHE's) Green Athletics category in the sustainability tracking, assessment and rating system (STARS) sustainability report while assessing how well collegiate athletic…

Contribution: The information described in this study provides a starting point for discussing an effective robotics curriculum offered by any engineering university or institute. Background: Robotics is a multidisciplinary field that includes mechanical engineering, electrical and electronic engineering, and computer science. Several universities…

Purpose. The purpose of this adaptation sequential explanatory mixed methods study was to determine the degree of importance that higher education department chairs ascribe to DeVore's (1994) five stress-inducing behaviors of authoritative command, evaluation, norm discrepancy, sanction, and targeting when initiating change in the behaviors of…

Climate studies that measure equity and inclusion among faculty reveal widespread gender and race disparities in higher education. The chilly departmental climate that women and faculty of color experience is typically measured through university-wide surveys. Although inclusion plays out at the department level, research rarely focuses on…