The relationship between doctoral students and faculty members has been identified as a key component of a successful graduate school experience. In this article, we consider the challenges inherent in designing and implementing a formal doctoral student mentoring program. By bringing together students, peer mentors, and faculty mentors, the…

Dissertation committees are complex social arenas that underscore expertise, image, and peer relationships--all of which affect professional identity and advancement. This study presents a sampling of how early career women faculty members learn about and negotiate their participation on dissertation committees. Research questions focused on…

Institutional policies and policy systems are vital to the well-being of institutions of higher education. While many institutions dedicate time and resources to the development of key policies, the establishment of a well-designed and well-functioning policy system is often neglected. We refer to the discrepancy between the importance of…

In this article we describe a curricular strategy that improves the full range of skillsets critical to capstone success. Improved Capstone (ICap) was developed and implemented across the thermo-fluids topical area in the undergraduate Mechanical Engineering Technology Program at the University of Hartford. ICap experiential courses sequentially…

In this article, we discuss the necessary components for successfully creating and implementing a chief diversity officer (CDO) position within a four-year public institution. We explore information about critical stages of the process such as the creation of the position, the recruitment process, and compatibility with the institution's mission.…

Ten faculty members with experience teaching online were interviewed about their motivation for teaching online and the effect of teaching online on their teaching and research productivity. They represented nine different states and 13 different fields, and all were tenured or tenure-track at master's or doctoral institutions. All ten mentioned…

This study examined the perceptions and concerns of current academic department chairs as they consider the transition to full responsibilities as a faculty member after the completion of a term in this leadership role. Currently, little research has focused on the dynamics of this transition process. Findings indicated that most department chairs…

In this article we introduce a "head and heart" approach to community-engaged scholarship. Through the literatures of Aboriginal scholarship and engaged scholarship we reflect on a community-university research and program development project undertaken in response to health and education concerns of Aboriginal people in Canada. We suggest that…

Recent discussions of practices in higher education have tended toward muck-raking and self-styled exposure of cynical self-indulgence by faculty and administrators at the expense of students and their families, as usually occurs during periods of economic duress, rather than toward analytical studies designed to foster understanding This article…

The Internationalising the Student Experience Project was devised and piloted as a teaching innovation to improve the intercultural awareness of instructors and, subsequently, that of their domestic and international students. In this article we claim that instructor preparation in the use of the Alliance Building and Cultural Mapping tools of the…

The shifting demographics of faculty ranks, expansion of faculty work, and the expectations of accountability and revenue production place new demands on today's faculty. Collaborating with other faculty members is one option for easing workload demands and reinvigorating faculty members in the conduct of their teaching and research. In this…

While researchers have begun to examine the experiences of working class students in undergraduate education more closely, we know less about the experiences of working class students in graduate school. Through a nationwide survey of graduate students enrolled in Ph.D. programs in Sociology, we examined the extent to which working class students…

Compiling a referenced article for publication in a peer-reviewed journal is traditionally the most respected means of contributing to a body of knowledge. However, we argue that publication of evidence-based information via new media--especially blogging--can also be a valid form of academic scholarship. Blogs allow for rapid sharing of research…

The learning and engagement activity we describe was designed to demystify the research culture of the Health Faculty for first year students, and there are implications for practice in other fields. It is founded on the idea of research-based learning, which in its pure form is a respected pedagogical approach but problematic for large cohort…

Using data from the 2006 cohort of the Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education, we examined the relationships between three approaches to measuring student learning outcomes (direct-assessment learning gains, self-reported gains, and college grades) and student persistence from the first to second year. Results from a series of logistic…