We investigate interpersonal difficulties that student teachers and cooperating teachers may experience during the teaching internship by exploring the tension between one high school mathematics student teacher and his cooperating teacher. We identified seven causes of this tension, which included different ideas about what mathematics should be…

The European Students' Union (ESU), in partnership with the Romanian Agency for Quality Assurance in Higher Education (ARACIS), the National Unions of Students Scotland--student participation in quality Scotland (NUS, Sparqs) and freier zussamenschluss von studentInnenschaften (fzs), and with support of the European Commission (DG EAC), launched…

This is the final publication of the QUEST for Quality for Students (QUEST) project, run by the European Students' Union. The QUEST project has managed to analyse students' views on the quality of higher education to identify areas in which students can become increasingly involved in quality assurance and enhancement processes. This publication…

In the past decade or so, the practice of faculty governance has become increasingly vexed by the proliferation of special-interest research and teaching centers sponsored by outside benefactors who expect to be involved in the content and management of programs they pay for. University administrations, strapped for resources and hungry for fame,…

"Academe"'s readers know the importance of academic freedom and the history of the (American Association of University Professors) AAUP's defense and promotion of academic freedom for faculty. Librarians have an analogous set of interlocking policies concerning their ethics and related issues. The author has always been proud that the American…

The American Association of University Professors is back on track after the financial and organizational derailments it endured over the past three years. That was the message the group's leadership reiterated throughout the business portion of the association's 95th annual meeting in June 2009. The overall meeting was attended by about 230…

In this article, the author looks back at the academic profession in the 20th century, as it was shaped by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, by key higher education associations situated at One Dupont Circle in Washington D.C. ("Dupont Circle" became the collective name for these associations), and by the American…

This report concerns the corruption of the University of California by activist politics, a condition which, as it shall show, sharply lowers the quality of academic teaching, analysis, and research, resulting in the troubling deficiencies found in the studies to which the authors have referred. This report shall show that this is an inevitable…

With faculty balking at the price of academic journals, can other digital publishing options get traction? University libraries are no strangers to one of the most popular online alternatives, the open-access archive. These archives enable scholars to upload work--including drafts of articles that are published later in subscription journals--so…

"FACTC Focus" is a publication of Faculty Association of Community and Technical Colleges (FACTC) with the purpose of presenting diverse views on faculty issues. Included in this issue are: (1) Courage and Expression (Phil Venditti); (2) Don't Stifle: Teach (Sarah Zale); (3) Academic Freedom: An Elegant Idea (Bill Autry); (4) Teaching Tolerance…

In this article, the author stresses the danger of losing the concept of education in favour of lower notions of instruction and training. By "training" he means a process that suggests the acquisition of skills and the enhancing of performance capacities. By "instruction" he means learning facts and new information--the results of retention. Too…

Critical thinking and academic freedom are enduring tenets of the liberal ethos of higher education. However, whereas the former is normally considered as a learning process for students, the latter tends to be understood as a licence for the professoriate. If understood as rights and responsibilities pertaining to teachers and learners alike, the…

This paper suggests that when a course is planned within one culture for delivery to members of another culture, appropriate quality control of assessment becomes an issue of major proportions. Based on their experience of presenting an Aid Agency-funded Masters course in a developing country in the Pacific, the authors describe the processes to…

This article examines the emergence of private universities in Meiji Japan (1868-1912). It begins by discussing the interrelationships of modernity projects with the emergence of state universities, and with the new state civil servants. Second, it reviews the processes through which forerunners of private universities emerged, considering…

The critical features of a strategy to promote improved teaching and learning are explored in this article from a socio-cultural perspective in a research-intensive institution. The paper presents theoretical underpinnings and implications as well as an empirical case study of such a strategy and its seemingly successful results. The strategy…