This explanatory study employs developmental theory and NSOPF-99 data to illuminate the middle years of faculty life, an ill-defined and largely unexamined portion of the academic career. The study's findings suggest that the middle years of faculty life have distinctive attributes, pose speical challenges, and deserve systematic investigation by scholars. The study lays a foundation for research needed to fill a gap in our knowledge and understanding of the faculty life cycle.
The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of orientation programs on student academic and social learning. Moving beyond previous studies, we examined how participation in orientation programming affected student learning and how the impact of these programs on learning varied by organizational characteristics (i.e., institutional control, size of undergraduate enrollment, sponsoring division, and whether the institution has an office designated for managing orientation programs), student entry characteristics (i.e., gender, race, transfer status), and student experiences (i.e., perceived quality of orientation program in helping student transition and in meeting students' expectations, positive experiences with orientation staff, and perceptions of orientation programs and their efficacy in helping students navigate resources and in providing useful campus-based information). Hierarchical linear analysis was used to analyze these crosslevel effects. Results demonstrated that having a designated office for orientation programs on campus was important for narrowing the academic learning gap between new-first year and transfer students. Implications for researchers and practitioners were discussed.
The higher education literature suggests that alternative leadership styles are replacing the traditionally held definitions of leadership and provide new and different (and possibly superior) ways to understand leadership. This article looks for parallels within the current leadership literature to see if community college administrators use the alternative language or emerging definitions of leadership to self-describe their own leadership or if their self-descriptions fit the more traditional hierarchical ideal of the positional or “hero” leader
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