Responding to mission creep: faculty members as cosmopolitan agents

Abstract

Across the field of U.S. higher education, regional teaching and comprehensive universities are striving for national research status. This tendency has most often been explored at the organizational level, but in this paper, the views and actions of faculty members are the unit of analysis. Based on qualitative data, I put forward a three pronged frame-work that organizes overarching faculty responses to one university's transition. I focus most specifically on one faculty response, which I call operationalizing in order to show how faculty members take agency in a moment of complex change that illuminates tensions between faculty, university leaders and the field of higher education, more generally. Contributing to the literature on faculty agency, mission creep/striving and change in higher education, I unpack specific ideas and practices that faculty used as they took agency over their careers.

Faculty Agency: Departmental Contexts that Matter in Faculty Careers

“…The ability to achieve goals will be particularly beneficial when faculty share similar professional values, goals, and work ideals as those of the institution and department. For example, Gonzales (2012) found in her study of organizational change at an institution that certain faculty operationalized the new institutional goals and exerted agency to achieve them.…”

“…Likewise, would other organizational factors that were not included in this study have an impact on agency? Of particular interest are organizational factors that have previously been found to be important to faculty professional lives but not addressed in this study, such as discriminatory climates (Winkler, 2000), leadership styles (Bess & Dee, 2012), reward structures that emphasize unconventional forms of scholarship (Schuster & Finkelstein, 2006), or institutional supports for scholarly learning (Neumann, Terosky, & Schell, 2006 Gonzales, 2012) and the outcomes of agency enacted as resistance to organizational goals (Elder, 1994;Heinz, 1996). Secondly, the incredibly strong effect of agency perspective on behavior warrants further study-exactly how does agency perspective translate into action?…”

“…The conceptual framework is guided by the O'Meara, Campbell, and Terosky Alkire, 2005;Bandura, 1982;Clausen, 1991;Elder, 1994;Emirbayer & Mische, 1998;Gonzales, 2012;Marshall, 2005). O'Meara, Campbell, and Terosky (2011) The O'Meara, Campbell, and Terosky (2011) framework also posits that agency is goal specific, but can be toward any personal goal.…”

Faculty Members’ Scholarly Learning Across Institutional Types

“…Engagement in the scholarship of discovery in research universities provides a clear path to gaining legitimacy in the professoriate. The work of (Gonzales, , ; Gonzales & Terosky, ) has revealed that in order to earn distinction and legitimacy in the academy, particularly in research universities, faculty members must be active scholars by way of research‐related activities given that is the expectation (Henderson, ; Terosky, ). However, scholars have also found such realities in liberal arts institutions where teaching and student development are critical as connected to institutional mission (Melguizo & Strober, ).…”

Generational perceptions of promotion and tenure expectations by faculty in a striving university: A quest for legitimacy?

“…The faculty reward system, according to Tuckman (), plays a role in determining how faculty allocate their time. For example, what is valued by the institution and the given unit changes as striving behaviours take hold, giving more credence and value to those activities and products that will garner prestige; generally peer‐reviewed publications in top academic journals (Gonzales, ). As promotion and tenure criteria generally encompass review and evaluation of teaching, research and service at research‐focused institutions—with the greatest emphasis placed on scholarship production (Blackburn & Lawrence, )—it is not surprising that striving institutions exhibit a stronger emphasis on research and publication in their faculty evaluation (Gardner & Veliz, ).…”