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Previous scholarly attention to the experiences of faculty members has emphasized the contexts of US institutions, with minimal attention to the experiences of faculty members at Canadian universities. This paper presents the findings of the Canadian component of an international survey that was administered in 19 different jurisdictions to understand the perceptions of faculty members about the nature and scope of changes to academic work. As such, the paper explores the perceptions on research and teaching of full-time faculty members affiliated with Canadian universities. Overall, faculty members revealed that Canadian universities have strong, engaging, and vibrant research and teaching environments, yet there are also areas for improvement. Specifically, findings showed that faculty members perceived considerable autonomy with respect to research activities, despite the increasing need to secure external funding for research. Also, faculty expressed substantial commitment to teaching undergraduate students but a lack of clarity about some issues related to graduate teaching. The survey results provide an important baseline for future studies of Canadian universities and the working conditions of the professoriate in a time of rapid institutional and professional change.

In 1994, the Government of Norway initiated a major restructuring of the non-university sector. Almost one hundred vocationally-oriented institutions were amalgamated to create twenty-six comprehensive, autonomous colleges. Nursing education was completely reorganized. Once offered in specialized schools closely linked to hospitals, nursing became a professional program within the new degree-granting colleges. Nurse educators found themselves in a new institutional environment that valued teaching and research. In this article, the authors illustrate with the Norwegian case two key points that they believe are extremely important in any discussion of introducing a research function to institutions that had previously focused only on teaching. The first, and perhaps the most obvious, point is that in the absence of institutional policies that steer research in alternative directions, there is a natural tendency for faculty to follow the traditional patterns of scholarly activity associated with the research university. The second point is that research has implications for resources, especially faculty time. There are many reasons for polytechnics to define a research mission that is directly related to their distinctive objectives and structures. Perhaps the most basic is that many of the institutions that would have been regarded as polytechnics a few decades ago no longer exist as distinct institutional forms. The college of applied education in Australia, the polytechnics of the United Kingdom, and even the local Ryerson Polytechnic have been merged or transformed into components of the university sector. Over time, these institutions simply became less distinctive, a phenomenon that is frequently described as academic drift. The authors contend that if polytechnics are to remain distinctive institutions, they should pursue a research function that reflects their distinctive mission, and that means defining, organizing, and assessing research in ways that reflect this mission.

Higher education is a key economic and social priority in the global arena. Many countries have sought to advance reforms aimed at increasing access, promoting greater educational quality, and ensuring financial responsibility and sustainability. Often, strategies for achieving these aims are informed by experiences elsewhere. However, transporting education policy reforms can be problematic. Kazakhstan, a signatory of the Bologna Process, offers an example of a country seeking to improve student access and success and promote greater fiscal efficiency to advance the overall quality of its higher education system (Merrill in "Int High Educ" 59:26-28, 2010). A key strategy for achieving these goals is through reforms in university governance. In Central Asia, policy makers advance education reforms in order to accomplish several goals, including meeting "the new demands of ethnic nationalism, a globally competitive economy, and a labour market freed from administrative control" (Anderson and Heyneman 2005, p. 361). In Kazakhstan, policy makers have concluded that a system predicated on decentralized control with greater institutional autonomy (and accountability), along the lines of the US system, offers a promising strategy for improving the overall quality of its higher education system. This research collected on-site data on Kazakhstani higher education and presents the most recent data since efforts from OECD and World Bank in 2006 ["OECD in Higher education in Kazakhstan (reviews of National Policies for Education)." OECD, Paris 2007]. This research utilized semi-structured interviews with senior higher education administrators (53), members of the Ministry of Education and Science (6), a representative from the government (1), and experts from the World Bank (2) for a total of 62 participants. The results of the study show that academic leaders in Kazakhstan want greater autonomy. However, there is no clear consensus about what level of fiscal and academic autonomy is desirable and whether all institutions are prepared to manage themselves without Ministerial oversight. The roles of key constituents in academic governance have also not yet been clearly defined.

Academic mobility is an increasingly crucial topic to the current and future dynamics of doctoral study and the professoriate. Much of the research has focused on US, UK and European contexts. This research explores academic mobility and the manifold issues that arise between the jurisdictions of Canada and the US, in ways that parallel and diversify previous research based on various understandings of mobility. The qualitative perspective is grounded in a reflective narrative approach that enables exploration of powerful themes. The findings indicate that there are costs, tensions and benefits to academic mobility that serve to emphasise specific personal and professional elements to the pursuit of academic life that need explicit articulation. These findings encourage additional scholarly and practical attention to the changing nature of doctoral study and of academic work and life across jurisdictions.

This research explores the various ways in which performative inquiry was implemented in a graduate organizational theories course within an educational leadership cohort at a medium-sized urban Canadian research university. Drawing on Fink's framework for significant learning experiences, the researchers used performative inquiry to enact the "Practice" and "Reflection" domains of his pedagogical model. The data show that as the course unfolded, the class experienced a shift from instructor-centered transmission of information to a curriculum co-constructed by students and instructors. We conclude with ways in which educational leadership professors can incorporate performative inquiry as a teaching strategy to enhance the learning process for aspiring educational leaders.

While studies have examined a myriad of issues in doctoral study, much of this research has not employed the tools of major social and cultural thinkers to the dynamics of doctoral education. This paper explores the use of Bourdieu's notion of field to render visible the practices and contexts of doctoral education that produce inequalities across doctoral students. This qualitative study with 15 doctoral students in Engineering and in Philosophy demonstrated that these inequalities related to conflicted and codified rules of success within doctoral study, and students' struggle to understand these rules, and then act in ways that enable students' success in doctoral education.

This article sheds light on the availability and characteristics of international scholarship programs that are sponsored by national and federal governments worldwide and that are intended to promote student mobility. Utilizing descriptive and cluster analyses, the article produces a framework for organizing the population of these programs. The analyses take into account both the central characteristics of programs and economic and political characteristics of the nations sponsoring the program. The typology produced in this analysis may be used by policy makers and researchers to facilitate cross-national comparisons of program design, implementation, and outcomes.

This conceptual article uses the tools of Pierre Bourdieu (1977, 1986, 1990) to examine the socialization of doctoral students by suggesting that the processes of doctoral study highlight inequities among students. Using Young's (1990) social justice approach as a framework to complement the ideas of Bourdieu, I demonstrate how aspects of academic work, which tend to socialize doctoral students, also operate as mechanisms to create or maintain inequities within doctoral education. I conclude by suggesting specific strategies that contribute to a more diversified conception of socialization and achievement in doctoral education.

Although scholarly interest in doctoral education has increased dramatically over the last two decades, much of this attention has focused on the experiences of doctoral students who are enrolled full-time in their programs. This study explored the experiences of 10 part-time doctoral students in different disciplines. Through semi-structured interviews with these students, we found that many of the issues surrounding these part-time doctoral students involved concerns related to balance, support, and fitting the mold of a "traditional" doctoral student. Importantly, while some of these issues are consistent with the experiences of full-time doctoral students, the experiences of part-time doctoral students are more complicated and required sustained and flexible efforts to adequately address. We conclude by suggesting both institutional and empirical efforts to better understand the complicated experiences of part-time doctoral students as well as to develop multi-faceted initiatives to support the experiences of this growing doctoral student population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyzed 217 description of "higher education for the public good" that were provided by participants in two national programs that focused on the public role and responsibilities of higher education. Both programs were created and administered by the national Forum on Higher Education for the Public Good at the University of Michigan. Four independent content analyses were conducted on the 217 descriptions, which yielded five main themes and nineteen subthemes of "higher education for the public good." Additionally, several overarching foci emerged that cut across many of the thematic areas. This article concludes with a discussion of important implications for public policy, institutional practices, community relations, research, curricular and cocurricular offerengs to students, and the choices and quality of relationships institutions engage in with other social entities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]