Leslie D. Gonzales

Faculty Sensemaking and Mission Creep: Interrogating Institutionalized Ways of Knowing and Doing Legitimacy

Increasingly, regional and/or teaching colleges and universities are striving to assert themselves as national or international research universities. Although such shifts represent significant implications for faculty members, few works address the faculty perspective or experience with this change. In this qualitative, interpretive paper, I discuss how faculty members made sense of their university’s attempt to achieve a more national, more research-focused mission. Using a critical neo-institutional lens, I outline the sources that faculty members relied upon as they defined their university’s transition. From this analysis, I offer practical and theoretical implications.

Exploring faculty experiences in a striving university through the lens of academic capitalism

In this paper, we draw from academic capitalism to explore the work lives and experiences of faculty who work in a striving university. Our analysis suggests that faculty members feel pressures induced by academic capitalism, including a lack of space, no time and the sense of constant surveillance. Our work adds to the theoretical as well as empirical discussions concerning striving, academic capitalism and the impacts of both on the academic profession.

Framing Faculty Agency Inside Striving Universities: An Application of Bourdieu's Theory of Practice

Drawn from a qualitative study and framed with Bourdieu’s theory of practice, I present a three-pronged framework to describe how tenure-line professors assumed agency as their university strove to establish itself as a national research institution. Implications for practice and future research are offered.

Interdisciplinary scholars: negotiating legitimacy at the core and from the margins

In response to the incessant calls for interdisciplinary scholarship, universities adopt initiatives and encourage faculty to collaborate across discipline lines. Yet, the literature shows that it is difficult to institutionalise such work as faculty members are heavily influenced by their discipline-bound training. When faculty do participate, they wonder how their work will be regarded. Thus, in this paper, we set out to investigate the experience of STEM faculty who conduct work in the area of K-20 education. We were particularly interested in exploring how these faculty, whom we refer to as boundary crossers, position themselves as scholars and their work as scholarship to their discipline-based peers. Our analysis shows that boundary crossers assume great personal responsibility as their university failed to make firm structural or policy-based reforms in support of this particular initiative. Personal responsibility manifests in three distinct ways: working overtime, unpacking one’s work, and framing one’s work as a public good. We argue that these responses are grounded in a larger sociocultural framework, and that they reinforce the marginal position of these scholars.

Leading Change With Slogans Border University in Transition

In this study, the authors problematize the use of slogans when it comes to leading major organizational change. Specifically, they outline the slogans that Border University leaders used to explain and justify the university’s transition from a regional, primarily teaching-focused university to an aspiring nationally recognized, Tier One research university. They argue that Border leaders used slogans built out of dominant and attractive logics, which led to the silencing of important questions and critiques that faculty members had about the change, but failed to voice aloud. Educational leaders who are interested in administering a democratic and discursive organization will find the insights in this study useful.

Re-Envisioned Contributions: Experiences of Faculty Employed at Institutional Types That Differ from Their Original Aspirations.

Guided by the theory of figured worlds, this qualitative study focuses on 18 faculty members employed at community colleges, broad access liberal arts, comprehensives, and regional research universities, who have constructed professionally and personally meaningful careers at institutions that differ from their original aspirations and/or their graduate training. We offer two key findings that highlight how these professors re-envision their careers and contributions by advancing the learning of others and engaging in inquiry for purposes other than publication. In highlighting these two key themes, we expose tensions that participants experienced and navigated as they reenvisioned their careers.

University in Transition: Faculty Sense-Making and Responses

Across the institutional spectrum, universities are attempting to reposition themselves as more research dominant institutions, a pattern referred to as “mission creep.” Such changes in university missions have several critical implications for faculty members and their work. In this qualitative study, we interviewed ten tenure-track faculty members to explore how they make sense of and respond to Sun University’s creeping university mission. Through qualitative data analysis, we found that faculty use organizational scripts to construct and make sense of their role, yet they do so towards different ends. Some faculty members own the transition and attempt to contribute to its success, while others negotiate the transition by mobilizing these very same scripts. Finally, a third subgroup resists the transition to research status altogether by using the organizational scripts in different ways. Ultimately, this study shows the importance of organizational scripts as faculty members used them in disparate ways to carry out the personal ambition and hopes that faculty often have for their work.

Subverting and Minding Boundaries: The Intellectual Work of Women

ABSTRACT Using various methods and analytical angles, researchers consistently show that members of non-dominant groups, including women, experience academia as a hostile and marginalizing space. Such work is important, and yet, it is equally important that researchers approach the study of women’s academic careers by elevating their intellectual labor. In this study, I take up two questions: (1) What are the origins of womens intellectual work and (2) How do women go about doing their intellectual work? My findings suggest that women tend to locate the origins of their work in the everyday rather than in formal educational sites, such as disciplinary contexts or classrooms. In terms of the doing of their intellectual work, I found that most women utilize subversive tactics, as they challenge disciplinary and professional boundaries that have historically governed the recognition and legitimation of knowledge within academe. However, drawing from critical race feminism, I also find some notable distinctions between Women of Color and White women, and suggest that future researchers attend more carefully to how power and privilege yields particular conditions and consequences among women. This paper offers important insights for peer reviewers (e.g., hiring, promotion, disciplinary award committees, and publication reviewers) as to the grounding(s) and distinctive contribution(s) of womens intellectual work.

Colleagueship in different types of post-secondary institutions: a lever for faculty vitality

ABSTRACT In this paper, we analyzed 50 faculty interviews to explore the function of colleagueship across different types of institutions. Our findings highlight that colleagueship served toward the improvement of teaching, disciplinary and interdisciplinary learning, securing one’s research agenda, career management, and friendship. We attend to the nuances of our findings within distinct institutional types, and offer several suggestions for practice and research.

Reimagining Organizational Theory for the Critical Study of Higher Education

The aim of this chapter is to reimagine organizational theory so that higher education researchers and administrators can go about their work in ways that foreground justice. In Sect. 11.1, we set higher education in context and highlight ways in which justice has historically and persistently been undermined in the name of or through the administration of U.S. higher education. In Sect. 11.2, we sketch out our understanding of organizational theory and theories within the critical paradigm. In Sect. 11.3, we discuss several familiar organizational perspectives—which we present as schools of thought—only to reimagine them by infusing each with ideas, commitments, and insights drawn from the critical paradigm. To illustrate how conventional and reimagined organizational perspectives assist leaders and researchers, we apply both to issues of injustice within the field of higher education. Finally, in Sect. 11.4, we conclude with a summative discussion, note the limitations of our work, and offer various ways that leaders and scholars might use this chapter for policy, practice, and research.