The Academic Vocation

1992 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark R. Schwehn
Keyword(s):  
Research University ◽  
The United States ◽  
Faculty Members ◽  
University Education ◽  
Knowledge And Skills ◽  
College And University ◽  
Teaching History ◽  
The One ◽  
The University ◽  
Number Of Classes

In this chapter, I shall try to advance our thinking about college and university education in the United States through a critical study of contemporary conceptions of the academic vocation. Current reflection upon the state of higher learning in America makes this task at once more urgent and more difficult than it has ever been since the rise of the modern research university. Consider, for example, former Harvard President Derek Bok’s 1986–87 report to the Harvard Board of Overseers. On the one hand, Bok repeatedly insists that universities are obliged to help students learn how to lead ethical, fulfilling lives. On the other hand, he admits that faculty are ill-equipped to help the university discharge this obligation. “Professors,” Bok writes, “. . . are trained to transmit knowledge and skills within their chosen discipline, not to help students become more mature, morally perceptive human beings.” Notice Bok’s assumptions. Teaching history or chemistry or mathematics or literature has little or nothing to do with forming students’ characters. Faculty members must therefore be exhorted, cajoled, or otherwise maneuvered to undertake this latter endeavor in addition to teaching their chosen disciplines. The pursuit of knowledge and the cultivation of virtue are, for Bok at least, utterly discrete activities. To complicate matters still further, the Harvard faculty, together with most faculty members at other modern research universities, would very probably resist the notion that their principal vocational obligation is, as Bok suggested, to transmit the knowledge and skills of their disciplines. They believe that their calling primarily involves making or advancing knowledge, not transmitting it. How else could we explain the familiar academic lament “Because this is a terribly busy semester for me, I do not have any time to do my own work”? Among all occupational groups other than the professoriate, such a complaint, voiced under conditions of intensive labor, is inconceivable. Among university faculty members, it is expected. Never mind the number of classes taught, courses prepared, papers graded, and committees convened.

scholarly journals The Lived Experiences of Chinese International Students Preparing for the University-To-Work Transition: A Phenomenological Qualitative Study

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Lertora ◽  
Jeffrey Sullivan
Keyword(s):  
International Students ◽  
Qualitative Study ◽  
Mental Health Professionals ◽  
The United States ◽  
Research Literature ◽  
Chinese International Students ◽  
University Campuses ◽  
College And University ◽  
Work Transition ◽  
The University

Chinese international students have been the largest growing number of international students on U.S. college and university campuses for the last ten years. However, there is minimal research literature that pertains to Chinese international students’ experiences on U.S. campuses and currently no research literature that reflects the entirety of their experience studying in the U.S. The purpose of this phenomenological qualitative study was to give a voice to Chinese international students who are preparing for the university-to-work transition to better understand their experiences as international students in the United States, specifically the types of transitional stressors they experienced and how they coped with these stressors. Five major themes and the essence of the participants emerged from the data analysis and are presented, discussed, and implication for campus based mental health professionals are provided.

scholarly journals Hagnýting menntunar meðal háskólamenntaðs starfsfólks einkarekinna fyrirtækja og opinberra stofnana

2017 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 151
Author(s):  
Ingi Rúnar Eðvarðsson ◽  
Guðmundur Kristján Óskarsson ◽  
Jason Már Bergsteinsson
Keyword(s):  
Social Science Research ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Target Population ◽  
University Education ◽  
Private Companies ◽  
Public Companies ◽  
National Population Register ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The One ◽  
The University

The aim of the article is to examine whether there is a difference in the utilization of education among university educated employees in private companies on the one hand and public institutions on the other. The target population of the research was based on a random sample drawn from the National Population Register by the National Survey of the Social Science Research Institute of the University of Iceland from 9 March to 9 April 2016. The survey included 2,001 individuals, aged 18 or above, from all over the country. A total of 1,210 persons responded to the survey. This research only involved those participants in the sample who had completed a university education and were salaried employees in Iceland. After data cleansing, 374 participants remained, 178 males and 196 females. The initial results of the research indicated that 20.3% of participants were over-educated for their jobs. The majority of females work in public companies, while the majority of males work in private companies. Individuals with under-education are most likely to be found within public companies, at the same time as over-educated individuals are most likely to be found in private companies (the difference lies in the under- and over-education of females). Those working in public companies come primarily from educational and health sicences, while engineers and natural sicentists work primarily at private companies. Incomes are higher in private companies.

What Administrators Do

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Ginsberg
Keyword(s):  
Planning Process ◽  
Fund Raising ◽  
University Administrators ◽  
Senior Managers ◽  
University Campuses ◽  
College And University ◽  
For Profit ◽  
Actual Contribution ◽  
The One ◽  
The University

The Number of administrators and staffers on university campuses has increased so rapidly in recent years that often there is simply not enough work to keep all of them busy. I have spent time in university administrative suites and in the corridors of public agencies. In both settings I am always struck by the fact that so many well-paid individuals have so little to do. To fill their time, administrators engage in a number of make-work activities. They attend meetings and conferences, they organize and attend administrative and staff retreats, and they participate in the strategic planning processes that have become commonplace on many campuses. While these activities are time consuming, their actual contribution to the core research and teaching missions of the university is questionable. Little would be lost if all pending administrative retreats and conferences, as well as four of every five staff meetings (these could be selected at random), were canceled tomorrow. And, as to the ubiquitous campus planning exercises, as we shall see below, the planning process functions mainly to enhance the power of senior managers. The actual plans produced after the investment of thousands of hours of staff time are usually filed away and quickly forgotten. There is, to be sure, one realm in which administrators as-a-class have proven extraordinarily adept. This is the general domain of fund-raising. College and university administrators have built a massive fund-raising apparatus that, every year, collects hundreds of millions of dollars in gifts and bequests mainly, though not exclusively, from alumni whose sense of nostalgia or obligation make them easy marks for fund-raisers’ finely-honed tactics. Even during the depths of the recession in 2009, schools were able to raise money. On the one hand, the donors who give selflessly to their schools deserve to be commended for their beneficence. At the same time, it should still be noted that, as is so often the case in the not-for-profit world, university administrators appropriate much of this money to support—what else?— more administration.

scholarly journals Patron-Driven Acquisition of E-Books Satisfies Users’ Needs While Also Building the Library’s Collection

2013 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giovanna Badia
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Research University ◽  
Standardized Test ◽  
The United States ◽  
User Preferences ◽  
Complete Collection ◽  
Research Areas ◽  
Academic Publications ◽  
Library Catalogue ◽  
The University

Objective – To present the initial results of an academic library’s one-year pilot with patron-driven acquisition of e-books, which was undertaken “to observe how user preferences and the availability of e-books interacted with [the library’s] traditional selection program” (p. 469). Design – Case study. Setting – The University of Iowa, a major urban research university in the United States. Subjects – Original selection of 19,000 e-book titles from ebrary at the beginning of the pilot in October 2009. To curb spending during the pilot, the number of e-book titles available for purchase was reduced to 12,000 titles at the end of December 2009, and increased to nearly 13,000 titles in April 2010. Methods – These e-book titles were loaded into the library’s catalogue. The goal was for the University of Iowa’s faculty, staff, and students to search the library catalogue, discover these e-book titles, and purchase these books unknowingly by accessing them. The tenth click by a user on any of the pages of an e-book caused the title to be automatically purchased for the library (i.e., ebrary charged the library for the e-book). Main Results – From October 2009 to September 2010, the library acquired 850 e-books for almost $90,000 through patron-driven acquisition. The average amount spent per week was $1,848 and the average cost per book was $106. Researchers found that 80% of the e-books purchased by library patrons were used between 2 to 10 times in a 1-year period. E-books were purchased in all subject areas, but titles in medicine (133 titles purchased, 16%), sociology (72 titles purchased, 8%), economics (58 titles purchased, 7%), and education (54 titles purchased, 6%) were the most popular. Two of the top three most heavily used titles were standardized test preparation workbooks. In addition, 166 of the e-books purchased had print duplicates in the library, and the total number of times the print copies circulated dropped 70% after the e-versions of these books were obtained. The authors also examined usage data for their subscription to ebrary’s Academic Complete collection from September 2009 to July 2010, which consisted of 47,367 e-books. Together with the 12,947 book titles loaded into the catalogue for the patron-acquisition pilot, there were a grand total of 60,314 ebrary e-book titles in the library catalogue that were accessible to the Iowa University community. The study revealed that 15% of these titles were used during this 11-month period, and the used titles were consulted 3 or more times. The authors sorted the user sessions by publisher and found that patrons used e-books from a wide variety of publishing houses, of which numerous university presses together constituted the majority of uses. The five most heavily used e-books were in the fields of medicine, followed by economics, sociology, English-American literature, and education. Conclusion – The authors’ experience has shown that patron-driven acquisition “can be a useful and effective tool for meeting user needs and building the local collection” (p. 490). Incomplete coverage of academic publications makes patron-driven acquisition only one tool among others, such as selection by liaison librarians, which may be employed for collection development. According to the authors, patron-driven acquisition “does a good job of satisfying the sometimes unrecognized demand for interdisciplinary materials often overlooked through traditional selection methods,” (p. 491) and alerts librarians to new research areas.

What the War is Doing to Us

1943 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-25
Author(s):  
Edwin E. Witte
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
War Economy ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The One ◽  
The University ◽  
First World

There is by this time quite a literature on the war economy. With the one exception of the recent symposium by Professor Steiner and his associates, most of whom are connected with the University of Indiana, all of the longer treatises on the subject discuss the war economy in abstract terms or on the basis of the experience of the First World War. These treatises served a useful purpose and were the only books on the economies of war which could be written at the time; but they now seem unreal, because this war differs so greatly from the prior struggle. The University of Indiana book, dealing as it does with concrete problems of present war, is up-to-the-minute and excellently done in all respects. It does not attempt, however, to do what I am venturing: a brief, overall picture of what the war has been doing to the United States.

scholarly journals The operation of an Emergency Medical Department in a county hospital from a logistic point of view

2014 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 109-113
Author(s):  
Gábor Markó ◽  
József Gál
Keyword(s):  
Emergency Department ◽  
Emergency Service ◽  
Service System ◽  
The United States ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Medical Department ◽  
Emergency Medical ◽  
The One ◽  
Medical Attendance ◽  
The University

The purpose of this article is to give an overview of the actual emergency medical attendance through an exemplary hospital in Hungary, highlighting its possible imperfections which could perhaps be improved through further structural developments. In order to be expressive, the article follows through the journey of two nominal patients who turned up in the emergency department of the hospital. The importance of this topic is expressed by the fitful judgment of the emergency attendance. Emergency service had already existed in the United States, only later then did the one-entrance service system start to develop Hungary. In some places this system has been working well for decades, but for instance at the University of Szeged – due to the uncertain judgment of the system – the construction is just being finalized, right at the time when such studies are published that question the reason of existence of the emergency departments – at least in their actual form.

scholarly journals Free Speech on Campus by Erwin Chemerinsky and Howard Gillman

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 32
Author(s):  
Rosanne Cordell
Keyword(s):  
Free Speech ◽  
The United States ◽  
College Campuses ◽  
Constitutional Rights ◽  
University Campuses ◽  
College And University ◽  
Societal Needs ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
The University ◽  
College And University Campuses

Free speech on college and university campuses in the United States is a complex topic with competing and conflicting rights, governing body responsibilities, goals, legal precedents, popular views, and purposes. To untangle all of this requires both attention to fine legal points and a broad view of societal needs. Chemerinsky and Gillman have the expertise and experience to bring both these characteristics to bear on discussions of this topic, but they do much more: they outline specific policies that can and should be followed by universities and colleges in seeking to provide the best of higher education. Chemerinsky (The Conservative Assault on the Constitution, The Case Against the Supreme Court, Closing the Courthouse Door: How Your Constitutional Rights Became Unenforceable) and Gillman (American Constitutionalism: Structures of Government, The Votes that Counted: How the Court Decided the 2000 Presidential Election) have distinguished positions at the University of California, Irvine, School of Law and taught an undergraduate seminar on Free Speech on College Campuses in 2016. Their combined voices bring a clarity and, surprisingly, brevity to this topic that are rare.

scholarly journals Science, Business, and Policy: A long-term reflection on multidisciplinary work-based learning in a master’s track for societal integration of Science

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-164
Author(s):  
Saskia Grooters ◽  
Emma Zaal ◽  
Menno Gerkema
Keyword(s):  
Research University ◽  
Bologna Process ◽  
Academic Learning ◽  
Project Approach ◽  
Educational Method ◽  
Academic Level ◽  
One Year ◽  
The One ◽  
The University ◽  
The Bologna Process

A strong theoretical approach with a specific focus on disciplinary research characterizes the common science master’s education in the Netherlands. However, a work-based learning (WBL) approach may as well be expedient and suitable for science education at master’s level. In this paper, a case study is presented of a WBL-program designed for an academic setting: the one year Science, Business and Policy (SBP) master’s track, offered at the Faculty of Science and Engineering of the University of Groningen. The paper describes the design and curriculum of the track, including its underlying theoretical framework, courses, multidisciplinary projects and work placements. Based on the SBP-track’s design we identified six possible indicators of a successful elaboration of an academic WBL-program: the SBP-track 1) is designed in response to the Bologna process; 2) is offered fully within the curriculum of a master’s program of a research university; 3) requires a sufficient academic level and disciplinary knowledge at entrée; 4) follows an educational project approach; 5) focuses on the integration and implementation of knowledge, and; 6) applies learning objectives that are specifically formulated to match the WBL educational method. A directed content analysis of SBP work placements revealed an increase in the number of SBP-students between 2003 and 2019, with an overrepresentation of life science students, as well as a large variety of real-case problems addressed for both business and policy organisations diverse in sector, size and region. Students’ grades showed a positive correlation between the initial theoretical preparation and the report made during the work placement. In conclusion, the societal interpretation of the Bologna process has been implemented successfully with SBP, by combining academic learning with gaining professional experience using a WBL-approach. Received: 03 December 2020Accepted: 09 April 2021

scholarly journals Changes in Education under the Influence of Digital Technologies: main Problems and Risk of Division

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Kiseleva ◽  
Natalia Kiseleva ◽  
Evgeny Kiselev
Keyword(s):  
Online Education ◽  
Online Courses ◽  
Digital Technologies ◽  
Conveyor Belt ◽  
Educational Process ◽  
University Education ◽  
Personal Contact ◽  
Multimedia Education ◽  
The One ◽  
The University

Digital technologies are rapidly changing the process of education. Online courses have become a common tool of gaining knowledge outside the university. Multimedia education, penetrating traditional educational institutions (schools, colleges, and universities), changes the structure of education and brings new elements to the communications during the educational process. This article considers one level of change in the model of education. On the one hand, there are advantages associated with the democratization of education. At the time of their foundation, universities were the creators of new elites – scientific and educational meanwhile, in the twenty-first century, the process of democratization and the accessibility of university education has been linked to the digitalization. On the other hand, territorial and other restrictions have been lifted. And this is a very controversial process that poses many challenges for students, one of the most noticeable of which is the lack of real contact with the teacher and the transformation of the educational process into an ”educational conveyor belt.” At the same time, personal contact with the teacher is becoming more expensive. The authors have collected studies that examine the dynamics of this emerging stratification of education. Based on the work of the pioneers in the study of digital education, the authors develop their ideas, focusing on the formation of the modern models of education, defined as affordable electronic and elite traditional. Keywords: online courses, online education, MOOC

scholarly journals Heritage language speakers in university education in Japan: Perspectives for an inclusive society.

Elia ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 86-125
Author(s):  
Veri Farina
Keyword(s):  
Educational System ◽  
Heritage Language ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
University Education ◽  
Heritage Speakers ◽  
Heritage Languages ◽  
University Level ◽  
The One ◽  
The University ◽  
Heritage Language Speakers

The educational system in Japan has traditionally been focused on the “one nation, one language” ideology. This has led to the marginalization of indigenous and immigrant languages. As a consequence, heritage speakers are dealing with the loss of their heritage languages. However, there are isolated movements addressing the maintenance of the heritage languages, though they haven’t had a long-lasting effect on the educational system. In an attempt to contribute to reversing this language and identity loss, we based our research on two main points: 1) the belief that creating an informed partnership will help heritage language speakers (HLS) to integrate in the mainstream education space (Cummins, 2014) and 2) confidence in the importance of interconnecting the isolated movements for language maintenance. Would it be possible to achieve it in the Japanese educational context? Can we start scaffolding this new structure of informed partnership from the university level? In order to try to prove this point of view successfully, this article describes the creation at the university level of a class about Heritage languages and speakers in Japan, inspired by the Content and Language Integrated Learning model (CLIL). This class was meant to support and interact with another class called “Spanish for heritage students” that was developed at the same university. The student population is 14, almost half of them with a heritage language or culture. The course duration was one semester. The contents that were selected to reach the class goals are mentioned, as well as some points of view regarding what should be done to shift the Japanese educational system from a homogeneous stance to a multicultural inclusive posture. And in such a short time we could evidence an evolution in students’ critical awareness of the current immigrants’ heritage language and cultural situation in Japan. Working with specific vocabulary, reading from authentic sources, discussing contemporary articles among them, they could give shape to their thoughts in Spanish in order to express their opinions and possible solutions to this important matter.

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