Search

In recent years an uneasy peace has descended in U.S. academe between those who feel research universities have done too little to advance the representation of minority groups and women and those who feel that the administrative policies developed to improve representation can and sometimes do come into conflict with core intellectual commitments of universities. Using quantitative and qualitative evidence from interviews with 47 natural sciences, engineering, and mathematics faculty members at a U.S. research university, the paper examines the background characteristics of three sets of protagonists -- academic progressives, academic traditionalists, and those whose views bridge the divide -- and the way respondents discussed and justified their viewpoints. The paper draws on the theory of strategic action fields to illuminate the structure and dynamics of the conflict and suggests modifications to the theory that would improve its explanatory power for this case.

Social science interest in professionals and managers as a left- and liberal-trending stratum has increased in recent years. Using General Social Survey data over a 44-year period, the authors examine 15 attitudes spanning social, economic, and political identity liberalism. On nearly all attitudes, professionals and managers have trended in a liberal direction, have liberalized more quickly than blue-collar workers, and are either as or more liberal than blue-collar workers. The authors find that the higher levels of education among professionals and managers, their tendency to adopt nonauthoritarian outlooks, and their lower propensity to identify with fundamentalist religion mediate their more liberal trends vis-à-vis blue-collar workers. Conversely, their higher relative incomes suppress the extent of their economic and criminal justice liberalism. The authors’ theorization links changes in the macro-economy to growing gaps in the composition of the two strata and the activities of politicians and parties to consolidate emerging political differences.

La clasificación de la educación superior surgió en Estados Unidos a raíz del crecimiento drástico de las instituciones y del estudiantado en las décadas de los cincuenta y sesenta, así como del creciente papel del Gobierno Federal en el financiamiento de la investigación. En el presente artículo se analizan dos enfoques epistemológicos de la clasificación —el enfoque a priori y el enfoque empírico— y sus fortalezas y debilidades. Asimismo, se examinan hechos recientes de los que se desprende que la era de la clasificación de la educación superior podría estar llegando a su fin en los países desarrollados. Se concluye el presente estudio aplicando las lecciones del caso estadounidense a los debates actuales sobre la clasificación de la educación superior en Chile.

Using data from the 2008 University of California Undergraduate Experience Survey, we show that study time and academic conscientiousness were lower among students in humanities and social science majors than among students in science and engineering majors. Analytical and critical thinking experiences were no more evident among humanities and social sciences majors than among science and engineering majors. All three academically beneficial experiences were, however, strongly related to participation in class and interaction with instructors, and participation was more common among humanities and social sciences students than among science and engineering students. Bok’s (2006) influential discussion of “underachievement’ in undergraduate education focused on institutional performance. Our findings indicate that future discussions should take into account differences among disciplinary categories and majors as well.

Co-written by the SERU Research Team of Steven Brint, John Aubrey Douglass, Gregg Thomson, and Steve Chatman, this year’s report offers two new areas for analysis – the extent of research engagement among undergraduates at UC, and data on student self-assessed learning gains. Among their findings:

This paper traces the history of two reform movements organized more than two decades ago to improve teaching and learning in U.S. colleges and universities: the teaching reform movement, led by the liberal philanthropies, and the accountability movement, led by the states and, later, the regional accreditors. The paper concludes that the teaching reform movement helped to dislodge research as the accepted center of academic life and helped to spread progressive education methods throughout academe. Both of these changes are consistent with continuing low levels of student effort and limited student learning in college. The accountability movement, by contrast, has had little impact thus far due to frequent changes in accountability and institutional assessment mechanisms, and the tendency of universities to comply only minimally with the demands of accreditors for increased accountability and institutional assessment.