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This study's purpose was to investigate the level of involvement of Florida's full-time community college faculty in institutional governance, their perceptions of the faculty governance body's role in institutional decision-making, and the characteristics of an ideal governance process. This study also explored the relation between a faculty member's level of involvement in governance activities and his or her perceptions of the desired roles of faculty in institutional governance as well as the relation between a faculty member's level of involvement and his or her gender, race, age, and years of employment. Certain factors that encourage or discourage faculty participation in governance were also probed. Research methods included a 25-item survey (Miller & Vacik, 1998) detailing the purpose of the study and asking questions regarding the faculty member's demographics and level of involvement in governance. The research also included 12 faculty interviews. The interview analysis used established inductive methods. This study has shown that Florida's full-time community college faculty do participate in institutional governance but often do not attend faculty governance body meetings. They are, however, actively involved in service on committees and are likely to attend committee meetings regularly. While Florida's community college faculty can identify the roles faculty governance bodies play in institutional governance, they agree less about the characteristics of an ideal governance process or their perceptions of the roles of their faculty governance bodies. Age does not seem to affect faculty involvement in institutional governance although the race of the faculty member may have some effect. The faculty member's years of experience do not have a major effect on the faculty member's level of involvement. The interviewed faculty desire a faculty voice in decision making and believe that governance structures and processes should enable faculty to make their opinions known to all members of the college community. The influence of the college president and the senate president is critical for shared governance. The senate president should have access to the highest level of decision-making at the college.

This study attempts to examine the conception which faculty members at North Texas State University have of their roles in university governance. These views of role perception are then compared with those reported in the study by Archie Dykes5 (discussed in detail in Chapter III), whose findings were made at a large Midwestern university and then projected to other campuses across the country. The purpose of this research has not been to delve into all the reasons behind the various perceptions which faculty members on the North Texas campus--or any other--have regarding their participation in university governance; nor has it been designed to investigate the total occupational image held by faculty members in regard to all their roles. While such topics would indeed be worthy of additional research, this paper simply attempts to uncover, assess empirically, and compare the perceptions regarding faculty involvement in academic decision-making which are held by faculty members on the North Texas State University campus and in the Dykes' study.

This study was designed to examine tenured faculty perceptions of accreditation. This qualitative study utilized interviews and document analysis to gather the perspective of faculty in a college of education. While there are quantitative and qualitative studies that have addressed accreditation and faculty, the extant literature lacked the perceptions of faculty involved in the accreditation process. This qualitative study offers an in-depth analysis of the perceptions of faculty particularly tenured faculty in a college of education regarding accreditation. The inclusion criteria for faculty were: experience in higher education for a minimum of 10 years, involved in curriculum development, and tenured. The study included a total of 11 participants. The interview questions focused on experience with accreditation, impact of accreditation on curriculum, and faculty roles and rewards. A theme analysis was completed utilizing the interview transcriptions along with document analysis based on the research questions. Time emerged as a major theme throughout the interview questions. The sacrifice of ones’ own scholarship, hours spent aligning syllabi with standards, and/or coordination associated with the accreditation process were all referenced during the interviews. Additional themes such as accreditation serving as recognition and utilized for advertising purposes emerged as well. Implications and recommendations for administrators, faculty, and accrediting offices within universities or colleges are discussed.

<p>  </p> <p>Faculty are the primary designers and implementers of engineering curricula within the U.S. higher education system. This places them in a unique position to respond to decades of national calls for curricular change in undergraduate engineering education. Individual and institutional faculty efforts to respond to these calls are inevitably influenced by faculty ontologies of curricular change – in other words, what faculty understand curricular change to be. By ‘ontology,’ I mean what is or what they perceive as what is. Ontologies are agentic, meaning that ontological assumptions shape how faculty envision their own roles and thereby influence the sorts of curricular change actions they envision and legitimize for themselves.</p> <p>Faculty ontologies of curricular change and their roles therein are complex roles within complex phenomena. By interrogating these ontologies, I make-visible the ways faculty might view – and thereby shape – the curricular worlds they and their students inhabit. To use a theatrical analogy: how do faculty stage their narratives of curricular change – what kinds of worlds do they set up in their stories? What kinds of interactions do they allow within that world? What kinds of characters do they cast themselves and others as playing?</p> <p>To investigate faculty ontologies of curricular change, I analyzed the narratives they told about several curricular change projects they had been personally involved with. I gathered narrative data by conducting recurring interviews with six faculty narrators. I deconstructed the resulting narrative data corpus using a postmodern approach focused on tensions and contradictions. The resulting analysis generated four distinct and interrelated ontologies for curricular change. These four ontologies are presented as a starting point rather than an exhaustive catalogue, since infinitely many ontologies could be generated. Each of the four ontologies created for this work portrays faculty roles in curricular change in relation to both curriculum and students. Creating multiple ontologies then enabled me to show how the interaction of multiple ontologies can create insights that are not apparent from each ontology alone. Among other things, the interactions of all four ontologies form a complex portrait of faculty as learners who are always unmaking and remaking themselves in the context of curricular change.</p> <p>By constructing a collective memory of faculty ontologies, I work to interrogate and disrupt current conceptions of roles and relationships in curricular change. These ontologies, and the methods developed to pursue and play with them, serve as tools for “cutting meaning loose” and “keep[ing] difference… at play” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012, p. 70-71). In turn, these tools open up a wider space of new ideas and possibilities for courses, pedagogies, and cultures to be expressed, evaluated, and legitimized.</p>

This dissertation seeks to understand the conjunction of faculty roles as teachers and as researchers. This understanding is pursued through philosophical analysis. Discourse ethics, in particular, is used as a framework by which to best understand the roles played by faculty and if the roles of teacher and researcher are, in fact, commensurable. The purpose of the work is two-fold: 1) to develop a construct that may be used by future researchers to better understand the roles played by faculty, and 2) to suggest a best-construct that enables future researchers to propose how actual lived roles should be instantiated in the world. The dissertation reviews a series of university handbooks, professional association ethical guidelines, and philosophical arguments to establish how the roles of faculty are best understood. The investigation illuminates the tensions at the heart of faculty roles. This tension is not definitionally embedded in the roles of faculty as teacher and researcher. Rather, the tension emerges from the failure of institutions to fully actualize faculty roles as normatively grounded in human communicative interaction. As a result, the work suggests that in order to best resolve the cognitive dissonance that may be experienced as a result of role ambiguity, faculty should engage in a process of self-reflection and community dialectic in order to best determine how “faculty” can be actualized in a way that best benefits all stakeholders.