Scholarship on technological change in academe suggests that the adoption of instructional technologies will erode professional control. Researchers have documented the pervasiveness of new technologies, but neither demonstrate how technological change is experienced by faculty nor collect data that permit assessment of consequences for professional control. Drawing on a sample of interviews with forty-two professors at three research-intensive universities, this research makes two contributions to existing research. First, in contrast to existing depictions of technological change in higher education, the findings (...) reveals that academics perceive instructional technologies to have limited value in enhancing education and that technology use is rarely motivated by pedagogical innovation. Second, the study suggests that a relationship between technological change and “unbundling” of the academic role may be overstated. These data indicate that technological change threatens professional autonomy through exclusion from decision-making processes, increased workloads, and delimited teaching and research roles. (shrink)

American universities are increasingly proactive in dealing with conflict of interest problems of their faculty. Changing social norms, publicized scandals, and more have made both university administrators and faculty extra alert to the dangers of faculty infidelity to their roles as teachers and scholars. Personal interests — both financial and non-financial — appear increasingly to pressure faculty to behave inappropriately. Most faculty members resist those pressures. Yet, enough conduct that either is, or appears to be, improper has occurred to (...) prompt the adoption by universities of an ever-more complex regulatory regime. This regime no longer relies primarily upon threats of after-the-fact punishment for gross deviations from professorial norms. Instead, universities have also enacted a wide array of in-advance restrictions. These include required disclosures by faculty members of certain private interests, prohibitions of specific faculty behavior, and specified instances in which faculty members must temporarily withdraw from their professorial roles in light of their private interests. This article draws especially upon the author’s experience at the University of California to illustrate the new system of regulation. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Frühmittelalterliche Studien Jahrgang: 48 Heft: 1 Seiten: 389-412.

One of the most controversial episodes in early medieval hagiography was the legend of the Roman Emperor Trajan, who escaped hell by the intercession and the prayers of Pope Gregory. Was there a way out of hell? How could this legend be interpreted without disrupting core ideas of Western scholastic theology like the eternity of damnation? This paper takes this example and provides a diachronic overview of the gradual emergence of this new capacity for understanding hagiography from the early Middle (...) Ages to the Early Modern Period. It draws special attention to a group of lesser-known Early Modern theologians like Alonso Salmeron, Alonson Chacón, Caesar Baronius or Alexandre Noël, whose contributions to the debate over the fate of Trajan’s soul are illustrative of a process of negotiation wherein innovative scholarly methods were interwoven with an overarching drive to purify theology. The result was a situation in which a problematic authority that could not be demolished by way of rational arguments based on its own internal logic could at least be brought down by undermining the value and legitimacy of its genre. (shrink)

Was there a chant of swans? Greek and Latin poets had established the idea of the swan singing in the moment of its death as a part of their self- representation, while ancient zoologists argued for the reality of the phenomenon. How did medieval and early modern natural scientists and philosophers deal with the cantus cygnorum? Following his classical sources, a scholar like Albertus Magnus defended the singing swan in his zoology. The discussion was still alive when the Italian anatomist (...) Ulysses Aldrovandi in the late 16th century discovered the swan’s enlarged windpipe and interpreted it as the final demonstration of the chant’s reality. (shrink)

Medieval literature inherited from the Latin pastoral tradition exemplified by Virgil and others the motif of an ideal landscape, a paradise of shepherds. The Arcadia of classical tradition, inhabited by nymphs, satyrs and the heathen gods, became for the medieval mind a garden of love, where Amor held council (as developed by the French allegorists, for example), or a philosophical paradise, where man was recreated and restored. At the same time, medieval historians and theologians found themselves confronted by a different (...) kind of pagan paradise, namely the famous fairy hill of Romano-Celtic origin, which was inhabited not by fictional, but by real creatures such as elves and fairies. The Church Fathers condemned the fairy hill as a demonic illusion and the fairies as diabolical phantasms. This article will demonstrate that the literary description of the fairy hill in Latin tradition was strongly influenced by the idea of bucolic landscape, although it changed its character significantly: what once had been a literary model, now became a metaphysical reality and a concrete alternative to the contemporary world. (shrink)

Stretching from Late Antiquity to the 18th century and including figures such as Leibniz as well as his Jesuit contemporaries, this book offers a survey of the extensive discussion devoted to the language of angels, one of the most lively and long lasting controversies in Medieval and Early Modern philosophy of language.

Name der Zeitschrift: Frühmittelalterliche Studien Jahrgang: 49 Heft: 1 Seiten: 275-298.

Name der Zeitschrift: Frühmittelalterliche Studien Jahrgang: 46 Heft: 1 Seiten: 437-484.

Investment in agricultural extension, as well as its design and practice, are usually based on the assumption that agricultural science generates technology (“applied science“), which extension experts transfer to “users“. This model negates local knowledge and creativity, ignores farmers' self-confidence and social energy as important sources of change, and, in its most linear expression, does not pay attention to information from and about farmers as a condition for anticipating utilization.In practice, farmers rely on knowledge developed by farmers, reinvent ideas brought (...) from outside and actively integrate them into complex farming decisions. Effective extension seems based on checks and balances that match intervention power with farmers' countervailing power, and mobilize farmers' creativity and participation in technology development and exchange.Alternative models for informing extension investment, design, and practice stress adult learning and its facilitation. The farmer is seen as an expert and farm development as driven by farmers' energy and communication. The article is a case study of a rare large scale attempt to use such an alternative model. It suggests that a shift to knowledgeintensive sustainable practices requires a learning process based on participation and empowerment. (shrink)

Studying knowledge utilization and related processes calls for a conceptual framework. We look at the actors that engage in these processes in a specific field of human activity, and the interfaces and linkages between them, as a Knowledge and Information System (KIS). Although this KIS perspective originates from agriculture it also can be applied to other knowledge domains. Evidence gathered shows that for a KIS to be effective the actors (e.g., researchers, extensionalists, and clients) must act synergically. This inspired us (...) to look for basic KIS principles that indicate opportunities for intervention. This article provides a brief state-of-the-art overview, presents some insights gained to date; and states the main issues for the use of information technology in knowledge management. (shrink)

The multiple commons is an important context in a world facing the eco-challenge. The platform for land use negotiation is a perspective concerning the good governance of the multiple commons. Platforms are devices or procedures for social learning and negotiation about effective collective action. They create collective decision making capacity at eco-system levels at which critical ecological services need to be managed. Taking platforms seriously as an option for designing a more sustainable society assumes a belief in the human capacity (...) to engage in collective action. Unfortunately, human thinking about humans is dominated by perspectives that emphasize either technical solutions to given human ends, or perspectives that emphasize the selfish nature of human ends. This article focuses especially on the latter: the strategic narratives that have become dominant as society increasingly becomes designed on economic principles. The paper seeks to explain the dominance of strategic narratives and provides social science evidence for alternative perspectives. It concludes with cornerstones for an alternative narrative. (shrink)

This paper examines some implications of predicted demographic changes in Canadian universities that may make them unable to replace retiring faculty members in numbers permitting academic business as usual. If the predictions prove correct, it will be desirable to reinterpret received verities about the relationship between professor/student ratios and effective education, the dual roles of teaching and research, and democratic governance in communities of higher education. Possibilities for restructuring inquiry and instruction in ways consistent with the responsibilities of educators (...) are all too briefly explored. A revised division of instructional labour is suggested, along with changes in the conduct of research and academic administration that would free professors to focus on the tasks for which they have the greatest expertise. (shrink)

Professors are increasingly encouraged to adopt multiple role relationships with their students. Regardless of professor intent, these relationships carry risks. Left unexamined is whether student–faculty social multiple relationships impact student in-class behaviors. Provocatively, our exploratory study provides empirical support suggesting that when undergraduate students perceive that their professors engage in the multiple faculty–student relationships of friendships, drinking relationships, and sexual partnerships, students report they are more likely to engage in uncivil behaviors in the professor’s classroom. Accordingly, our study provides a (...) backdrop against which to think more substantively about the professorial role and the boundaries that accompany it. (shrink)

Under higher education’s contemporary consumer model, students are treated as customers and professors are encouraged to increase student engagement through more personal out-of-class interactions, often in social settings. In the course of this more personal student-faculty involvement, students inevitably encounter or learn of their professors’ occasional inappropriate or unethical behavior. In the present study, we investigated the impact of 145 American undergraduate Business students’ perceptions of their professors’ inappropriate out-of-class behavior on student beliefs and in-class behavior. Results indicate that student (...) perceptions of professors engaging in inappropriate out-of-class behavior were associated with students viewing these professors as lower in ethical character and reporting a stronger likelihood of attending these professors’ classes under the influence of alcohol and illicit drugs, swearing and using vulgarity in these professors’ class discussions, and showing disregard for these professors’ rules, time, and effort. These relationships held even when student grade satisfaction and professor in-class behavior were accounted for. Our results suggest professors’ behavior outside the classroom may impact students’ behavior inside the classroom, re-igniting dialogue regarding the professorial role and the boundaries on oversight of that role. We offer suggestions as to how higher education may address these concerns without infringing upon professors’ personal freedoms. (shrink)

In Faculty Misconduct in Collegiate Teaching, higher education researchers John Braxton and Alan Bayer address issues of impropriety and misconduct in the teaching role at the postsecondary level. Braxton and Bayer define and examine norms of teaching behavior: what they are, how they come to exist, and how transgressions are detected and addressed. Do faculty members across various collegiate settings, for example, share views about appropriate and inappropriate teaching behaviors, as they share expectations regarding actions related to research? And what (...) mechanisms are utilized to correct inappropriate behavior on the part of college and university teachers? The authors' work is based on survey results obtained from faculty members at research universities, liberal arts colleges, and two-year community, junior, and technical colleges. Braxton and Bayer's focus is on undergraduate teaching in four disciplines: biology, history, mathematics, and psychology. In their analyses, the authors examine how individual, disciplinary, and institutional differences influence professorial behavior. In contrast to the more explicitly understood and enforced rules of conduct in research, the authors find that teaching norms are informally defined and observed. They argue that a formal code of ethics for undergraduate teaching would serve the dual purpose of improving undergraduate education and elevating the status of college teaching. A groundbreaking study of contemporary academe, Faculty Misconduct in Collegiate Teaching is required reading for all university and college instructors and administrators. (shrink)

In their insatiable thirst for funding, contemporary universities eagerly cast themselves as important agents of economic well-being. While the particular contexts and forms for this agency may be novel, such a role is not. Historians have long identified the significance of academic institutions to economic development at a number of levels. At the national level, the importance of the Technische Hochschulen and the Land Grant colleges to German and American leadership in the Second Industrial Revolution is well known while the (...) significance of its system of higher education to a putative British industrial decline is more controversial. At the sub-national level, taking the example of Ontario, Canada, McKillop observes that “an adjustment of universities to the conditions and requirements of industrial life was an essential ingredient in economic competition and development,” with no university “untouched by the province’s industrial revolution and the secular gospel of research.” At the municipal level, in their study of three US cities, Kargon and Knowles have seen local institutions of higher education “reacting quickly and creatively to unpredictable demands for expertise.” It is this function of universities, or rather of their professoriates, as sources of local expertise which forms the focus of this paper. (shrink)

The N ational Assembly held in the Frankfurt Paulskirche in 1848, which opened w ith high hopes for the unification o f Germ any on parliam entary constitutional principles, was left to die a year later, in the telling phrase o f D onoso Cortes, ‘like a street w om an in the gu tter’. In the period o f reaction that followed, during w hich the Paulskirche convention came to be described as the ‘parliam ent o f pro­ fessors’, (...) one o f its m em bers, Georg G ottfried Gervinus, was accused, in a trial for high treason, o f attem pting to prove the historical inevitability o f the supersession o f monarchical forms by republican forms. This was Gervinus’s second experience as a professorial m artyr. In 1837 he had been one o f the professors at the U niversity o f G ottingen, the ‘Gottingen Seven’, w ho protested the revocation o f the H anoverian constitution. For this he had been banished and given three days to leave the kingdom. The lesson he, and m any other liberal thinkers, learned from these experiences was that the Germ an middle classes were incapable o f perform ing the historical role assigned to them; they lacked the political will to establish a republican order. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 30.1 (2006) 289-298 [Access article in PDF] Theory Is Dead— Like a Zombie Brian Boyd University of Auckland Theory's Empire: An Anthology of Dissent, edited by Daphne Patai and Will H. Corral; ix & 725 pp. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. $72.50 cloth, $29.50 paper. Looking for an Argument: Critical Encounters with the New Approaches to the Criticism of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, by Richard (...) Levin; 309 pp. Teaneck, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003. $49.50. Are we "after Theory"? And if so, then where are we? Seven years after Post-Theory (1996) came Reading After Theory (2002) and then After Theory (2003).1 Students inducted into the mysteries of Theory by an aging professoriate can no longer feel the zeal their teachers themselves have mostly long since lost. Theory's own leaders point out its failings.2 Like Queen Anne, Theory is surely dead. Or is it?In 1982 Jonathan Culler argued that post-structuralist literary theory should be called just Theory and that Theorists should play the "central role" in intellectual life (TE, pp. 26, 215). What now sounds hubristic seemed heady in the expansionist days of Theory's empire. But less than two decades later it could be pointed out in print that "everyone knows that if you want to locate the laughingstock on your local campus these days, your best bet is to stop by the English department" (TE, p. 315).So was theory dead by this point, five years after the start of the Bad Writing Contest and three years after the Sokal hoax? Not at all. The year of the "laughingstock" remark, David Scott Kastan's Shakespeare After [End Page 289] Theory (1999) claimed that we are "after theory" "not because theory's claims have been shown to be intellectually bankrupt but because its claims have been accepted as both useful and productive." A reviewer could demur: "As formulated the claim may be overstated—it sometimes seems that Shakespeare studies is insufficiently theorized."3But that was seven years ago. Surely things are different now, ten years after the Sokal hoax? Yes and no. After Reading After Theory and After Theory, a literature professor at the top of his field, Louis Menand, can (1) bemoan the sickness of the humanities and (2) deplore the culture of conformity in their Theorized students, and at the same time still (3) offer thanks that Theory "rescued" literature departments from "the literary" and (4) urge that despite their unhealthy state the Theorized humanities should resolve not "to retrench" but "to colonize."4So again, are we after Theory or not, and where are we, if we are? Are reports of the death of Theory exaggerated? Or is Theory dead in a special way, one of the Undead, a zombie or a vampire?There have been many blows driven through the heart of Theory in the last thirty years, but if Theory is at least dying now it is not because of blows from outside but only from its own terminal internal tedium. It has "always already" been immune to criticism because it refused to listen to critical arguments, treating them as so much unfriendly fire, proof of the enemy's perfidy, all the more reason to close ranks.I described Menand as at the top of his field because he belongs to the Harvard English Department, is a star essayist for the New Yorker and a Pulitzer Prize winner, and was speaking to the 2004 MLA convention. There he wished some young Turks would stand up to challenge his generation, and tell them "You got it all wrong." But critics have been doing this cogently for decades. His generation has paid only enough heed to dismiss such criticism as proof that reactionary forces needed to be resolutely resisted.And the potential young Turks are simply too scared to speak up. Among all the many indictments of Theory collected in Theory's Empire, one of the most chilling indices of the betrayal of intellectual freedom and honesty in the Theorized humanities comes from a junior faculty... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Knowing Better: Sex, Cultural Criticism, and the Pedagogical Imperative in the 1990sRichard Burt (bio) and Jeffrey Wallen (bio)Teacher Petting“A distinguished professor and her graduate student French-kissed in front of a semicircle of gaping students. Were they furthering ‘an exploration of the erotics of the relation between teacher and student’ as the professor says—or was it part of a pattern of sexual harassment as the student later charged?” So ran (...) the copy on an envelope advertising in 1994 an “extraordinary one-time offer $9.95 trial subscription” to Lingua Franca in 1994. 1 The enclosed letter relates an anecdote about two complaints against Jane Gallop filed by two female graduate students alleging she had sexually harassed them. Gallop defended having French-kissed a graduate student in a bar in front of other students in the same class by saying it was a pedagogical performance. The letter quotes from a Lingua Franca cover story that came to Gallop’s defense [Talbot].As sex between students and professors has become a topic of new interest in the wake of sexual harassment legislation, as colleges have adopted campus sexual conduct codes or debate doing so, and as debates and incidents involving sex and teaching have attracted widespread media attention, the anecdote has become central. Some critics might want to dismiss the Lingua Franca story as nothing more than titillating tabloid gossip or take it seriously only by regarding it as an effort to combat a right-wing agenda to smear innocent professors who, as feminist or queer, are politically and intellectually well to the left of the mainstream. But the anecdotal interests us precisely because it involves more than just a tabloid scandal in any simple sense. Sex is not merely a way one can slur kinds of criticism one doesn’t like by tarnishing its proponents (for teaching sexual, transgressive material to shock, pervert, or in the extreme case—as in this instance—literally seduce students) though it can sometimes function in this way. For sex comes up in anecdotes told by cultural critics to one another, and when it comes up, it comes up in the same way it does in “tabloid” coverage. The anecdote about sex is never really just about sex, about who did or didn’t (French) kiss, suck, and/or fuck whom: it is rather a story about something in the pedagogical relation that has gone wrong, about a connection that has gone off track. Anecdotes about sex and teaching are really stories about criticism, about pedagogy itself as a form of criticism, and about failed pedagogy as the occasion for self-criticism.Yet if the anecdote is not really about sex, sex is hardly irrelevant to the production of what the anecdote is really about, namely, criticism. Indeed, we want to focus on the question of sex between students and professors because it is precisely sexuality that puts pressure on different, key aspects of the project of cultural criticism and on the present contestation over it within and outside of academia. Campus codes are being introduced [End Page 72] as new pedagogical practices, and new courses are being introduced into the classroom: disruption though impersonation, performative strategies, bringing the personal and the erotic into the classroom, and classes making use of pornography, even hardcore visual pornography, often taught by feminist women. 2 According to leading cultural critics, destabilizing gender roles shows us how gender is constructed, and tells us about power in ways that are politically and performatively effective. 3But there is often a moment when the game breaks down in the classroom. Someone gets offended, and given the way that for some sexual harassment extends from unwanted sexual advances or trading grades for sexual favors to classroom materials (both written and visual), offense can easily move into complaint, legal action, media attention, and of course administrative and professorial panic. The usual rationale for transgressive pedagogy is that this disruption will be successful, not just anarchic: it will be successful in that it gets in the way of the replication and reproduction of power (this is the new mission for teaching: to disrupt the transmission and reproduction of patriarchal power structures... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:ProvocationsHerbert Fingarette (bio)Our Other LifeWe live, each of us, two interconnected lives. One we respect and take seriously. The other we dismiss as fantastical, accidental, and wholly unreal. I refer here, of course, to our waking life and our dream life.My concern with the dream life is not the one that has occasional popularity—the dream as the embodiment of rather arcane symbols which decipher into messages about our deep (...) unconscious life. Freud and others who have interpreted dreams in this way may have a point. But in any case it is not the point I want to make here.What is a dream, after all? It is an experience, an experience we live through. Often it has an intensity that surpasses the intensity with which we live our waking experience. Often the experience embodies flights of fantasy and imagination that are both amazing and wholly untypical of our experience in waking life.Whence come these startling, fantastic situations that we live when asleep? There is only one possible answer, the obvious one. They come from us. The dreamer is the creator. If there is amazing novelty, it is the dreamer whose imagination has created this.The dream-life is an often powerful, evocative, imaginative world which we create and in which we live a substantial part of our life. Why do we dismiss it?One obvious reason, perhaps the sole and only necessary reason, is that what happens in the dream is disconnected with the structure and content of our waking life. We view it as "unreal," and refer to waking life as "real" life.Yet a moment's reconsideration reveals that both of these lives are "real," they really happen, we really experience them. The difference lies not in their reality but in the seeming incompatibility of the two. What happens in the dream is not consistently continued when we wake. Moreover the way things happen in a dream is often strikingly different from the way they happen when we're awake. In my dream I am in one place, and then instantaneously in a very distant place. The person I dream is my mother but also my grown daughter, and yet at the next moment my daughter at a childhood age. [End Page 861]I live exciting, fearful, and strange situations in which I am being attacked. Such things have never happened in my waking life. I dream that I'm a professor who realizes he is grossly late for his class, and can't remember what the assignment was or what I am to lecture on. In my waking life I am also a professor, but I've rarely been late for class, and never have forgotten the assignment or the lecture material.Yes, there is at times an obvious connection—my role as professor, the identity of someone as my mother or daughter. But what happens, and the way it happens in one life are dramatically unlike and disconnected with the other life.Why should I dismiss my dream life? It constitutes a goodly portion of my total life. I live it. I feel it, I react emotionally. It reveals an extraordinarily free and intense imagination that I largely fail to use when awake. What if the question were put to one, but without context or prejudgments: Which life would you find more interesting, challenging, exciting—day life or dream life? Try to think about that question in its own terms, without bias.Am I proposing something contrary to human nature? Not at all. We know there are cultures ("primitive?") in which dream life is viewed as an important, meaningful dimension of one's existence. We in the contemporary Western world are the exceptions. We dismiss this other life of ours. As a result, we fail to fully appreciate it in its own right.Indeed, as I've said, there are often connections. One needs no arcane theory of unconscious symbols to recognize this in my professorial dream. My embarrassing dream life as an unprepared professor is obviously related to my quasi-obsessive concern when awake to be prompt and thoroughly prepared. Clearly, in this regard, my two lives form a... (shrink)

Over the past 50 years the diversity of higher education faculty in the mathematical, physical, computer, and engineering sciences has advanced very little at 4-year universities in the United States. This is despite laws and policies such as affirmative action, interventions by universities, and enormous financial investment by federal agencies to diversify science, technology, mathematics, and engineering career pathways into academia. Data comparing the fraction of underrepresented minority postdoctoral scholars to the fraction of faculty at these institutions offer a straightforward (...) empirical explanation for this state of affairs. URM postdoc appointments lag significantly behind progress in terms of both undergraduate and Ph.D.-level STEM student populations. Indeed, URM postdoc appointments lag well-behind faculty diversity itself in the MPCES fields, most of which draw their faculty heavily from the postdoctoral ranks, particularly at research-intensive universities. Thus, a sea-change in how postdocs are recruited, how their careers are developed, and how they are identified as potential faculty is required in order to diversify the nation’s faculty, and particularly the R1 MPCES professoriate. Our research shows that both Ph.D. students and postdocs benefit from intentional structure at various levels of their respective “apprentice” experiences, a factor that we believe has been neglected. Several key structural approaches are highly effective in these regards: A collaborative approach in which leading research universities collectively identify outstanding URM candidates; Faculty engagement in recruiting and supporting these postdocs; Inter-institutional exchange programs to heighten the visibility and broaden the professional experiences of these postdocs; Community-building activities that create a sense of belonging and encourage continuing in academia for each cohort; and Continuing research based on outcomes and new experimental approaches. The California Alliance, consisting of UC Berkeley, UCLA, Caltech, and Stanford, has been engaged in such a program for almost a decade now, with most of the California Alliance URM postdocs now in tenure track positions or on the path toward careers as faculty at research intensive institutions. If this approach was brought to scale by involving the top 25 or so URM Ph.D.-producing R1 institutions in the MPCES fields, about 40% of the national URM postdoctoral population in these fields could be affected. Although this impact would fall short of bringing URM MPCES faculty ranks up to full representation of the United States population as a whole, it would vastly improve the outlook for URM students and their aspirations to take on leadership roles as scientists and engineers. (shrink)