In 2020, some higher education leaders successfully navigated the unprecedented challenges the year presented and emerged as resilient agents of change in their academic communities. Freeman A. Hrabowski III was one of many leaders who followed the science during the pandemic and followed his heart in the fight for racial justice, even though the…

Engagement in knowledge exchange (KE) with external actors has become widely accepted as an integral mission of universities. However, research and teaching performance remain more important for career progression, while engagement activities are more weakly institutionalized. This raises the question of why academics participate in knowledge…

Urban community colleges have been studied primarily from a case study perspective, often highlighted by doctoral students conducting research at their institutions. Little of this scholarship, however, has been translated into the base of literature, as less than 5% of the citations in the largest search engines are focused on urban community…

Mentoring of some sort is always part of the socialization process as new faculty members join the life and mission of a university. One type of mentoring is informal in nature. Newer members of a community pick up on the ways of an institution through "water cooler" conversations, casual interactions with colleagues, and even the…

Land-grant institutions (LGIs) are tasked with providing accessible education to the common man and improving their quality of life. This study examined faculty members' interpretations of the land-grant mission and opinions about its future. The theory of branding guided this study. Faculty members are the primary deliverers university missions.…

Universities attend to multiple demands, making it challenging to identify their particular academic project, which can be defined as how the university understands its key purposes and develops its organisation and activities in service of such. While the three pillars of higher education -- teaching, research, and service -- are cited as being…

Faculty are critical players to advance institutional mission in higher education (Clark, 1972). Hiring faculty who have an affinity for mission and who understand and support Catholicism in the spirit of an institution's founding charism can be a significant challenge for academic leaders and for the longevity of institutional mission in Catholic…

This paper argues that the infiltration of market forces and neoliberal policies into higher education has significantly undermined the core teaching mission of universities, leading to a devaluation of teaching, an overemphasis on research productivity, and a reliance on contingent faculty that ultimately compromises the quality of education and…

Teachings that undergird Catholic universities hold seemingly contradictory messages about affirming the dignity of LGBTQ+ people and adherence to some Catholic teachings. LGBTQ+ trainings that cultivate allyship are intended to increase individual awareness/analysis, develop skills to support students, and align with aspects of the institutional…

In Chile, higher education is characterised by a constellation of features that make 'public' a multiplicitous idea. In the present study, academics in two public universities are seen to hold strong views in favour of public universities playing public roles and they identify several public goods that they value. These academics also hold…

How do universities encourage academics to buy into a shared vision while often setting punitive targets in teaching and research? This article explores possible antecedents of a university's shared vision and its relationships with academics' research and teaching performance in the era of managerialism. This cross-country study of two large…

The purpose of this study was to develop a grounded theory of the process of mission-based leadership development over the career lifecycle of faculty, staff, and administration in Catholic higher education. Using constructivist grounded theory, interviews were conducted at three Catholic higher education institutions with professionals at various…

In "Garcetti v. Ceballos" (2006), the Supreme Court of the United States held that public employees are not protected by the First Amendment when they speak pursuant to their official duties. The dissenting justices raised the question of how this precedent might be inappropriately applied to faculty at public colleges and universities.…

This article addresses the following research question: does the "entrepreneurial orientation" of a university influence the "entrepreneurial propensity" of its academics? To answer this question, the authors conducted a two-phase study. First, based on a literature review of the entrepreneurial university and Nelles and…

Cooperative Extension has a long-standing history of placing individuals in communities to lead community-wide change. These individuals are employees of the nation's land-grant universities, with significant roles and responsibilities working between and among institutions and their communities. They often must maintain dual identities and roles,…