Institutional reliance on tenure-line faculty reached a historic low after the Great Recession in 2009, remaining at approximately a third of all faculty through 2022. Postsecondary institutions have steadily increased their reliance on full-time adjunct faculty over the last two decades. Part-time adjuncts, meanwhile, were hired in great numbers…

The employee-organisation relationship between academics and universities is a critical issue in higher education (HE) human resource management. Previous studies have mainly investigated the segmentation between full-time and part-time academics, or academics working in different countries. However, few studies have explored academics'…

Despite efforts to attract Black women in the professoriate, higher education has historically excluded marginalized populations, specifically Black women. This qualitative case study investigated the problem of insufficient representation of tenured Black women in the academy at Historically White Colleges and Universities (HWCUs). Additionally,…

Non-tenure-track (NTT) faculty--typically contingent faculty hired on fixed-term contracts--know that budgets tightened during the pandemic likely mean fewer jobs, with little or no hope of professional advancement. Cost-conscious administrators often resist extending benefits to such instructors or look to trim those already in place, leaving…

Despite institutional claims to value increased racial diversity in higher education, Black women in faculty roles perpetually navigate oppressive cultures across all institutional types. The ability to build and foster mutually beneficial interracial mentoring relationships is vitally important to move beyond performative diversity and build…

The pursuit of tenure in higher education is arguably the dominant focus of tenure track faculty throughout the United States' higher education environment, if not a world-wide phenomenon. By applying Vroom's Expectancy theory of motivation, this study intends to investigate the relationship between research productivity and motivation to conduct…

For several decades, there has been increasing criticism, first of the tenure track system and now at the rise in adjunct and non-tenure track faculty. Few believe the professoriate is organized in ways to meet institutional missions, deliver educational quality, or meet the goals of student success. The critiques suggest that tenure-track models…

This study retrospectively examines the emergence and development of a new class of full-time non-tenure track employees in a large land grant research university in the U.S., which created the employment category in 1980. We employ cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) to explore how this class of employees became institutionalized within…

Using data collected from peer reviews for Open Textbook Library titles, this paper explores questions about rating the quality of open textbooks. The five research questions addressed the relationship between textbook and reviewer characteristics and ratings. Although reviewers gave textbooks high ratings generally, reviewers identified…

This study details the experiences of new faculty in tenure-track positions without prior experience in academia beyond the post-doctoral level. Semi-structured, qualitative interviews were conducted using phenomenological methodology with six faculty members meeting the criteria at a mid-sized, public institution in the southeastern United States…

The tension between the rigour and the relevance of higher education research remains an important and hotly contested topic among scholars, administrators, practitioners and policymakers. This debate is most evident in professional programmes in which scholars are challenged to pursue new knowledge independent of its immediate relevance to…

Drawing on forty-eight interviews with individuals who participated on the academic job market in rhetoric and composition between 2010 and 2015, this essay shows how conceptualizing the academic job search as an intimate endeavor can offer insights for understanding the rhetorical production of affective binds within institutional contexts. This…

This article contributes a Canadian perspective to a growing body of international research investigating teacher education, specifically as a category of academic work exemplified in employment advertisements. By investigating how Canadian employment advertisements in teacher education are constructed as mediating artefacts in the relationship…

In April 2013, "NEJHE" launched its "New Directions for Higher Education" series to examine emerging issues, trends and ideas that have an impact on higher education policies, programs, and practices. In this installment, DiSalvio interviews Adrianna Kezar, professor of higher education at the University of Southern California…

The study reviewed here examined whether taking a course with a tenure track professor versus a non-tenure track professor for first-term freshman-level courses (e.g., introductory economics) had an impact on students' future enrollment and performance in classes in the same subject. Data from 15,662 students who entered Northwestern University,…