Education Commons^™

In Our Own Words: Institutional Betrayals, Reshmi Dutt-Ballerstadt

Faculty Publications

When Dr. Reshmi Dutt-Ballerstadt, professor of English at Linfield College, asked a large group of underrepresented faculty members why they left their higher education institutions, they told her the real reasons for their departures — those that climate surveys don't capture.

This essay originally appeared as part of Conditionally Accepted, a career advice blog for Inside Higher Ed providing news, information, personal stories, and resources for scholars who are, at best, conditionally accepted in academe. Conditionally Accepted is an anti-racist, pro-feminist, pro-queer, anti-transphobic, anti-fatphobic, anti-ableist, anti-ageist, anti-classist, and anti-xenophobic online community.

Supporting Safety Culture In Academia: Giving A Voice To Faculty, Emily K. Faulconer, Chelsea A. Lenoble

Publications

In the words of Sir Winston Churchill, “The difference between mere management and true leadership is communication.” Department leaders have a vital role to play at all institutional levels when it comes to achieving an optimal safety culture that promotes safety voice behavior.

At the university level, this role is to help the university develop a solid foundation that will support a strong safety culture. At this level, it can be a challenge to mobilize and sustain the necessary resources to effectively develop and communicate a clear, consistent message that is aligned with implicit and explicit reward structures.

Nurturing Faculty Buy-In For Top-Down Mandates, Emily K. Faulconer

Publications

Higher education is a bureaucracy. As such, colleges and universities require strong leaders but they also must have committed faculty members. Shared governance and transparency - arguably empty buzz words – have definitions that will vary based on who you ask. Despite the minefield, these terms are relevant when discussing change within academia.

Scribblescholar Was Here: Confessional Notes Of A Vandal Academic, Clay Shields

Theses and Dissertations--English

As a (former) vandal-punk in the academy, I often fear succumbing to Ivory Tower Stockholm syndrome. The identities I perform, vandal-punk and scholar, ideologically clash to the point that they often feel irreconcilable. By codemeshing the high-low discourses associated with these adopted cultures, I attempt to disrupt any hierarchal privileging of either, instead searching for a way to live with and harness both.

Digital Content Delivery In Higher Education: Expanded Mechanisms For Subordinating The Professoriate And Academic Precariat, Wilhelm Peekhaus

Wilhelm Peekhaus

This paper suggests that the latest digital mechanisms for delivering higher education course content are yet another step in subordinating academic labor. The two main digital delivery mechanisms discussed in the paper are MOOCs and flexible option degrees. The paper advances the argument that, despite a relatively privileged position vis-à-vis other workers, academic cognitive laborers are caught up within and subject to some of the constraining and exploitative practices of capitalist accumulation processes. This capture within capitalist circuits of accumulation threatens to increase in velocity and scale through digital delivery mechanisms such as MOOCs and flexible option programs/degrees.

Labor Pains In The Academy, Lisa M. Tillmann Ph.D.

Faculty Publications

This piece offers autoethnographic reflections on crossroads to which many academics come: whether to seek (or postpone or avoid) parenthood and when. The author deeply explores the personal (her own trajectories from daughter and sister to potential mother and from graduate student to full professor) in order to reflect on structural constraints associated with graduate education, the academic job market, and institutional policies and politics.

Writing For Their Lives, John Strassburger

Publications

This is the second in a series of occasional papers about the challenges confronting students and what Ursinus is doing to help them enter adult life.