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Meeting the needs of dual-career academic couples has become an important part of university efforts to foster family-friendly workplaces. Many universities have developed formal or informal approaches to addressing dual-career issues, but variation across institutions has made it difficult to detect wider patterns or probe their implications. In this paper, we analyze the dual-career policies and materials (848 documents total) of all R1 institutions in the United States. As with studies from roughly two decades ago, we find deficiencies in institutional support and transparency. However, given reduced state revenues for institutions of higher education and a rise in precarious employment arrangements over the same time period, conditions for academic couples are arguably worse today. In order for universities to address these concerns and contribute meaningfully to broader forms of inclusion, we argue that there is a need for sustained funding commitments and infrastructural support for dual-career programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article outlines the research conducted by Sakari Kauppinen and colleagues regarding the impact RNA molecules in HØrsholm, Denmark. They collaborated with RxGen and Standford University in California wherein they have successfully blocked the activity of one type of microRNA in non-human primates and the compound they developed is a potential treatment for hepatitis C. It also reveals that microRNAs regulate protein synthesis by binding to the messenger RNAs that provide the recipe for protein construction, repressing the relevant protein's production.

Background: The lack of racial diversity in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines is perhaps one of the most challenging issues in the United States higher education system. The issue is not only concerning diverse students, but also diverse faculty members. One important contributing factor is the faculty hiring process. To make progress toward equity in hiring decisions, it is necessary to better understand how applicants are considered and evaluated. In this paper, we describe and present our study based on a survey of current STEM faculty members and administrators who examined applicant qualifications and characteristics in STEM faculty hiring decisions. Results: There are three key findings of the present research. First, we found that faculty members placed different levels of importance on characteristics and qualifications for tenure track hiring and non-tenure track hiring. For example, items related to research were more important when evaluating tenure track applicants, whereas items related to teaching and diversity were more important when evaluating non-tenure track applicants. Second, faculty members' institutional classification, position, and personal identities (e.g., gender, race/ethnicity) had an impact on their evaluation criteria. For instance, we found men considered some diversity-related items more important than women. Third, faculty members rated the importance of qualifications with diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)-related constructs significantly lower than qualifications that did not specify DEI-related constructs, and this trend held for both tenure track and non-tenure track faculty hiring. Conclusions: This study was an attempt to address the issue of diversity in STEM faculty hiring at institutions of higher education by examining how applicant characteristics are considered and evaluated in faculty hiring practices. Emphasizing research reputation and postdoctoral reputation while neglecting institutional diversity and equitable and inclusive teaching, research, and service stunt progress toward racial diversity because biases—both implicit and explicit, both positive and negative—still exist. Our results were consistent with research on bias in recruitment, revealing that affinity bias, confirmation bias, and halo bias exist in the faculty hiring process. These biases contribute to inequities in hiring, and need to be addressed before we can reach, sustain, and grow desired levels of diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 enabled American universities to engage in technology transfer. Thirty years of research has investigated the legislation's effectiveness and derivative university practices, such as the establishment of technology transfer offices. Unfortunately, the technology transfer literature has focused primarily on patenting as the primary transfer vehicle for protecting intellectual property in universities, overlooking other forms of IP ownership, such as copyrights. Legal scholarship shows, however, that universities are increasingly using copyrights to protect their intellectual property and that the number of university-held copyrights exceeds patents. This paper examines the use of copyrights to protect and transfer university IP. It does so by reviewing underlying legal and policy concepts associated with copyrights and offers contemporary examples of copyright issues within universities. The paper therefore provides a foundation for future research on the role of copyrights in technology transfer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the first systematic investigation into the search engine optimization practices of major contract cheating websites in the United States. From a business perspective, visibility in organic search engine results is considered one of the top client recruitment tools. The current understanding of student recruitment strategies by these companies remains largely unexplored in both academic literature and popular press. Replicating the business research practices used in the search engine optimization industry, comprehensive search engine ranking and traffic data was obtained for the 38 largest contract cheating websites in the US. The overall objective was to illuminate the strategies that these companies take to get their services at the top of the search results of as many students as possible – not just the relatively small proportion of students actively cheating. The results show that these companies dominate the search results for not just students searching to cheat, but also for naïve search efforts, when students are simply doing genuine research or classwork. These nefarious companies use highly sophisticated search engine manipulation strategies to bait naïve student searchers onto their sites, thus enabling the potential to switch them to cheaters. Higher education institutions, armed with the specific details provided in this study, can use the strategies outlined in the discussion to directly and negatively impact on the success of these contract cheating services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the adoption of institutional innovations by not for profit organizations, an issue that can be considered in the context of the extensive literature on the adoption of technological innovation by firms. The specific institutional innovation considered is the offices of technology transfer (OTT)—the organization that assemble and disclose university innovations and negotiate and enforce licenses with users of these innovations. We propose a theoretical framework that depart from previous studies by focusing on the timing decision of institutions rather than on the percentage of institutions that adopt at each point in time. Our theoretical framework also incorporates organization theory via imitation effects on the timing of adoption. We find that number of adopters has an S-shape function of time, which may indicate a strong element of imitation led universities to create OTTs. We also find that universities with higher research incomes and rankings were earlier adopters of the OTT model and that universities with medical schools were generally late adopters. Finally, we find that the number of universities who have already adopted the OTT model increases the speed by which other non-adopters make their OTT adoption decisions and that the number of invention disclosures, a primary indicator of output of OTTs, increases with the size of research budget, is smaller for those with medical schools, and larger for those that were earlier adopters of OTT. Section 1 of the paper discusses the recent trends in technology transfer while Section 2 reviews the advent of OTTs as facilitators of technology transfer activities. Section 3 reviews the relevant technology and institutional innovation literature. Section 4 develops a conceptual framework that links Sections 2 and 3 to analyze the advent and timing of the establishment of OTTs. Section 5 estimates the time of adoption of the OTT working model on the part of major research universities in the US, and analyzes the impact of time of adoption of the OTT model on the intensity of the technology transfer process. Section 6 presents empirical results while the conclusions and policy implications are discussed in Section 7. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

US universities are leading the way in technology commercialization, while universities in Russia lag far behind. This paper discusses the best American practices, as well as the main issues of technology commercialization at the US universities. As an example, we consider the experience of the University of Maryland, College Park. In the next section, we turn to technology commercialization in Russia, where it struggles for several reasons. In this paper, we propose that Russia can improve its technology commercialization by studying the example of the leading US entrepreneurial universities and implementing proper procedures. And the important overarching point is that Russian universities need to improve their collaboration with industry, and they need to develop new standards of administrative, research, and business activity that will promote innovation and entrepreneurship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globalization and the revolution in technological communications are major forces of change in higher education. This environment, when coupled with the needs of adult learners and the rising costs of tuition at traditional colleges and universities, has stimulated the emergence of for-profit, degree-granting higher education in the United States. This paper examines the growth of for-profit higher education, provides a cost/profit analysis, and gives examples of for-profit universities that are increasing international in scope. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of these developments for traditional colleges and universities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes software for Electronic Visitor Management (EVM), EasyLobbyTM, currently in use in thousands of federal and corporate installations throughout the world and its application for school and campus environments. Protecting the physical safety as well as providing security safeguards regarding internet access of students, faculty, and teachers—K–12 or at the college level—has, unfortunately, become a necessity, especially in the United States at day care centers, schools, hospitals, and campus facilities. This paper describes the technology and its features which allow schools and campuses to use EasyLobbyTM software to (1) replace the visitor log; (2) capture and store visitor data electronically, including the purpose of their visit; and (3) provide badges that quickly allow anyone in the school to recognize authorized strangers. EasyLobbyTM, defined Electronic Visitor Management, has won major awards for innovation and achievement from the security industry and is quite inexpensive. Its web address is www.EasyLobby.com. Documented benefits to the corporate and government world can provide security for educational institutions as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The last quarter-century bore witness to a sea change in academic involvement with commerce. Widespread university-based efforts to identify, manage, and market intellectual property (IP) have accompanied broad shifts in the relationship between academic and proprietary approaches to the dissemination and use of science and engineering research. Such transformations are indicators of institutional changes at work in the environment faced by universities. This paper draws upon a fifteen-year panel (1981-1995) of university-level data for 87 research-intensive US campuses in order to document trends and transitions in relationships among multiple indicators of academic and commercial engagement. The institutional environment for public and private science is volatile, shifting in fits and starts from a situation conducive to organizational learning through high volume patenting to a more challenging arrangement that links indiscriminate pursuit of IP with declines in both the volume and impact of academic science. The pattern and timing of these transitions may support an enduring system of stratification that offers increasing returns to first-movers while limiting the opportunities available to universities that are later entrants to the commercial realm. Unpacking the systematic effects of university research commercialization requires focused attention on the sources and trajectories of profound institutional change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Student academic misconduct continues to vex higher education institutions in the United States and internationally. The COVID pandemic learning environment yielded more rather than less reports of student academic misconduct. Substantial empirical research has considered the nature of academic misconduct in higher education institutions by identifying its antecedents and correlates. But given the reproducibility crisis in social research, the quality of knowledge that students have on academic misconduct warrants further empirical corroboration. With the intent to replicate, this study used Quantitative Content Analysis to examine 2631 written responses from first-year undergraduate students as they participated in academic misconduct programming implemented by a public university in the United States. Results reported a staggering proportion of first-year students possess piecemeal (at best) or non-existent (at worst) knowledge over citations/references and cheating. Furthermore, such proportions are uneven according to specific college membership. Results corroborate prior research that first-year undergraduate students hold limited understanding of academic misconduct in its premises, patterns, and processes. In turn, results support the design and use of systematic preventive mechanisms to address academic misconduct among higher education institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on findings from an analysis of data submitted through the Sustainability Tracking, Assessment and Rating System (STARS). STARS has addressed the demand for standard metrics to measure sustainability progress at US and Canadian colleges and universities, with expanding access to institutions in other countries gained through the launch of an International Pilot and release of STARS 2.0. Since its release in 2009, STARS has emerged as a reputable source of data that can provide a broad overview of the state of campus sustainability. The release of STARS Version 2.0 in 2013 improved upon the original reporting framework and also expanded accessibility of STARS to all higher education institutions worldwide. The findings in this paper tell the story of a campus sustainability movement that is quite young. As STARS matures along with this movement, STARS data will hopefully show a trend of continuous improvement at participating institutions. By participating in STARS and learning from examples set by other institutions, colleges and universities from across the world can be on the leading edge of moving toward a more just and sustainable world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at the social role played by community colleges, the students they serve, and some of the current challenges they face. Community colleges have always been multi-mission institutions and in recent decades have been leaders in enrolling students from diverse family backgrounds. 'Nontraditional' students make up the majority of community college students. This paper looks at the diversity of students in terms of race and ethnicity, first-generation college-goers, and students who are academically underprepared. The paper concludes with a discussion of the strengths of the community college experience for students coming from diverse backgrounds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports a qualitative study on the Chinese language learning trajectories of non-native Chinese instructors as successful Chinese language learners . While some literature has been found on studying good learners of English and other languages, there is a lack of research on studying good learners of the Chinese language, especially on their life-long Chinese learning process. Six active instructors teaching Chinese at K-12 schools or universities in the United States, whose native language is English, were interviewed on a one-on-one basis with an auto/biographical approach. This approach, as one type of narrative inquiries under a qualitative paradigm, has been increasingly used in the study of English language learners. Findings of the study include that the six participants all had experiences studying in Greater China, and all held lifelong learning attitude as well as demonstrated various self-regulation strategies with strong self-motivation and dedication. While they all took Chinese classes at college, only two of them studied prior to college, which is encouraging for Chinese learners who were unable to learn Chinese from an early age. This study helps to fill the gap in literature on good language learners of Chinese, and provides educational implications for Chinese language learners, instructors, researchers, and other stakeholders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we have taken initial steps towards highlighting the employability discourse in higher education by using content analysis to explore website data at 40 higher education institutions (HEIs) in the UK and 40 HEIs in the USA by searching for 'employability' in respective web engines. The findings from our preliminary data analysis were inserted into a MIT SIMILE software package to create a bespoke, interactive webpage that could be disseminated for discussion by higher education managers. The initial findings suggest that, in the UK, the broad discourse is centred upon government policies and targeted preparation for employment while in the USA it is centred upon the institutional vision and social inclusion agenda. Recent graduates' views were sought on these initial findings to validate whether their experiences corroborated with our suggested employability discourse claims. These insights are a useful first step for HEIs to question and re-evaluate employability at an institutional level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing literature has confined university technology transfer almost exclusively to formal mechanisms, like patents, licenses or royalty agreements. Relatively little is known about informal technology transfer that is based upon interactions between university scientists and industry personnel. Moreover, most studies are limited to the United States, where the Bayh-Dole Act has shaped the institutional environment since 1980. In this paper, we provide a comparative study between the United States and Germany where the equivalent of the Bayh-Dole Act has come into force only in 2002. Based on a sample of more than 800 university scientists, our results show similar relationships for the United States and Germany. Faculty quality which is however based on patent applications rather than publications serves as a major predictor for informal technology transfer activities. Hence, unless universities change their incentives (e.g., patenting as one criterion for promotion and tenure) knowledge will continue to flow out the backdoor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scheduling term-end exams ( TEE) at the United States Military Academy in West Point is unlike any other exam timetabling problem we know of. Exam timetabling normally produces a conflict-free timetable covering a reasonably long exam period, where every exam is scheduled exactly once for all the students enrolled in the corresponding class. The situation is quite different at West Point. There are hundreds of exams to schedule over such a short time period that there is simply no feasible solution. The challenge is then to allow something that is not even considered elsewhere, that is, creating multiple sessions of some exams, scheduled at different times within the exam period, to allow each student to take all exams he/she must take. The overall objective is to find a feasible exam schedule with a minimum number of such duplicate exams. The paper describes a system that has been developed at GAMS Development Corp. in close cooperation with the scheduling staff at West Point, and that has been used successfully since 2001. It uses mathematical optimization in several modules, and some of the techniques proposed are new. It is fast and flexible, and allows for human interaction, such as adding initially unexpected constraints, coming for instance from instructors’ preferences and dislikes, as well as their hierarchical rankings. It is robust and can be used by people familiar with the organization at West Point, without the need for them to be technically-trained. Overall, using the course and student information databases, it is an effective decision support system that calls optimization tools in an unobtrusive way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes an empirical study of the differences in industry interaction of US tenure and tenure-track academics that are funded by civilian and military funding agencies. Significant differences in industry interaction as manifested in a range of different interaction types can be observed between academics funded by Department of Defense (DoD) resources and those enjoying other non-military means of support. The policy implications of these divergent patterns of behavior in university–industry interactions will be analyzed and discussed. Furthermore, a qualitative assessment of changes in university–industry relationships in response to more stringent DoD contracting practices reveals that several types of industry interaction will be adversely affected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes a flaw in the teaching of issues related to market economics and social justice at American institutions of higher learning. The flaw we speak of is really a gap, or an educational disconnect, which exists between those faculty who support market-based economies and those who believe capitalism promotes economic injustice. The thesis of this paper is that the gap is so wide and the ideas that are promoted are so disconnected that students are trapped into choosing one or the other position (or neither) and are left unable to link the two sides of the discussion. Such an educational process is not one that produces free and reasoned discernment. In this paper, we briefly relate how we came to be aware of the disconnect and its harms. We present evidence that a pedagogical gulf exists within the teaching of markets and capitalism at American universities – faculty interviews, course syllabi, portions of the corpus of material generally referred to as Catholic Social Thought, as well as references to traditional, mainstream economic theory. Further, we give evidence of the confusion and frustration among students this gulf causes. We suggest possible reasons for the gulf–primarily through an investigation of the differences in underlying assumptions and misperceptions that exist between two divisions within universities. We conclude by suggesting a set of curricular changes designed to improve teaching. The authors’ aim is not to change people’s minds. It is to change their teaching. The authors believe that these curricular changes will leave students less frustrated and better prepared for a life of significant service – with improved critical thinking skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article questions the assumption that increasing competition among higher education institutions is the best method of achieving a strong higher education sector in developing countries. It notes that there has been increasing emphasis on the importance of higher education institutions for sustainable development, particularly because of their importance to the global knowledge economy. For the same reason, the appropriate management of the relationship between the state and higher education institutions is vital to a strong and dynamic future for these institutions. This paper proposes a menu of options for higher education governance, grouped around ‘state-centric’ and ‘neo-liberal’ models of development. The ‘state-centric’ model proposed is based on a variety of examples of high performing Asian economies, in particular, while the ‘neo-liberal’ model is based on emerging trends in higher education management in countries such as Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom. The paper suggests that despite pressure across the globe to encourage a market among universities, this may not always be the most efficient use of resources, or the best way to integrate universities in a country’s drive for economic growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores the dynamics of competition in higher education. National competition and global competition are distinct, but feed into each other. Higher education produces ‘positional goods’ (Hirsch 1976) that provide access to social prestige and income-earning. Research universities aim to maximise their status as producers of positional goods. This status is a function of student selectivity plus research performance. At system-level competition bifurcates between exclusivist elite institutions that produce highly value positional goods, where demand always exceeds supply and expansion is constrained to maximise status; and mass institutions (profit and non-profit) characterised by place-filling and expansion. Intermediate universities are differentiated between these poles. In global competition, the networked open information environment has facilitated (1) the emergence of a world-wide positional market of elite US/UK universities; and (2) the rapid development of a commercial mass market led by UK and Australian universities. Global competition is vectored by research capacity. This is dominated by English language, especially US universities, contributing to the pattern of asymmetrical resources and one-way global flows. The paper uses Australia as its example of system segmentation and global/national interface. It closes by reflecting on a more balanced global distribution of capacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1950s and 1960s, Clark Kerr led the University of California's Berkeley campus, and then the University of California as a whole. Throughout these years, he developed a system of managerial strategies. This paper shows how Kerr's administrative views drew upon his background in industrial relations, his liberal theories of pluralistic industrial change, and contemporary understandings of American business organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we employ a genealogical imprinting approach to theorize that experiences incurred during the founding of a first-generation university spin-off will influence future spin-off activity from the focal firm. We propose that firms that secure equity investment during their founding process will have a higher likelihood of generating subsequent spin-offs, and that this impact is conditional on the human capital of the founding team. We test our hypotheses on a sample of 101 first generation university spin-offs around a large US research university and their subsequent progeny firms. This study develops a new understanding of multi-generational spin-off processes in a region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An examination timetabling problem at a large American university is presented. Although there are some important differences, the solution approach is based on the ITC 2007 winning solver which is integrated in the open source university timetabling system UniTime. In this work, nine real world benchmark data sets are made publicly available and the results on four of them are presented in this paper. A new approach to further decreasing the number of student conflicts by allowing some exams to be split into multiple examination periods is also studied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is the largest funder of health and life science research in the United States. The research sponsored by the agency has continued to aid in the development of new biopharmaceutical therapies, many of which are commercialized via alliances between universities and biopharmaceutical firms. In this paper, we examine this commercialization pathway more closely, evaluating the effects of NIH research funding on US universities' alliance formation. Based on results from instrumental variables models, we estimate that, on average, producing one additional university-firm alliance requires a sustained increase of $294 million in universities' total NIH research funding over the preceding five-year period. In addition, a sustained increase in funding of $100 million over 5 years increases the probability of a university forming at least one alliance by 0.54, or 54 percentage points. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to measurement of licensing performance of U.S. research institutions by suggesting an approach for identifying time-lags in the licensing process. Licensing is a multi-state process starting with a disclosure, and resulting in intermediate outcomes such as patents, licensing agreements, and licensing income. The time duration among these variables is critical in understanding which investment is responsible for which outcome. This study develops a statistic procedure estimating time-lag coefficients among licensing variables using an unstructured regression model (OLS). The procedure is applied to 46 U.S. academic research institutions using the licensing survey data from 1991 to 2007 by Association of University Technology Manager. The results present individual time-lag relationships between each pair of licensing variables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the effectiveness of university research centers as a Science and Technology policy mechanism. Using the case of nanotechnology, it assesses if establishing dedicated research centers at universities influences their patterns of knowledge production, and specifically the production of commercially relevant nano-knowledge. Based on bibliometric data on patents and publications for a panel of the top patenting US universities (n = 82), the study finds that nano-centers positively impact nano-patent production at universities. Policy and theoretical implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on the effects an experimental English as a Foreign Language (EFL) program in Second Life (SL) had on Chinese student EFL learning. The study took an evaluative approach using quasi-experimental design with participants from one Chinese university and one American university in the southeastern United States. Results indicated significant main effects between a control group and the SL group on EFL measures, as well as significant gains in total score and several subcomponents between pre-test and post test. Further analysis using a post study survey, students' blog posting, and interview transcripts revealed that the SL_EFL Program had a positive impact on students' EFL learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Across the field of U.S. higher education, regional teaching and comprehensive universities are striving for national research status. This tendency has most often been explored at the organizational level, but in this paper, the views and actions of faculty members are the unit of analysis. Based on qualitative data, I put forward a three pronged frame-work that organizes overarching faculty responses to one university's transition. I focus most specifically on one faculty response, which I call operationalizing in order to show how faculty members take agency in a moment of complex change that illuminates tensions between faculty, university leaders and the field of higher education, more generally. Contributing to the literature on faculty agency, mission creep/striving and change in higher education, I unpack specific ideas and practices that faculty used as they took agency over their careers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research has found that there is a good deal of stability in departmental prestige, but has not considered its long-term dynamics. This paper investigates a hypothesis implied by some accounts in the sociology of science and organizational theory: that there will be a permanent component of prestige associated with the department or university. The data are the ratings of graduate departments of sociology between 1965 and 2007 using a measure of prestige constructed from hiring patterns. There is no evidence of a permanent component for individual departments, but there is evidence of a permanent difference between departments in 'elite' universities and those in other universities. Despite change in rankings within each group, the difference between the groups remained constant over the period. That is, there appear to be enduring barriers that limit the mobility of individual departments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Universities play a unique role in society, providing a community of experimentation and innovation. Even so, leaders around the world have had to push for university primacy to retain competitiveness in the global economy. This paper examines efforts taken by universities in the United States to evaluate their contribution to economic development. An emerging role for universities is one of active neighborhood involvement, in which they are engaged in projects with local communities. These projects include providing assistance to local firms and policy advice to state and local government, and getting involved in community outreach. In this role and in an unprecedented manner, universities are engaging on a wide range of topics with local communities, using these communities as labs to test new ideas and find better ways to achieve social and economic goals. This is precisely why it is important to consider the larger role of universities' in economic and social development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the characteristics of US colleges and universities that were early adopters of post-1970 academic growth fields. It examines hypotheses drawn from four analytical perspectives on sources of organizational change: organizational ecology, inter-institutional stratification, demographic composition, and historical traditions. Focusing on 20 'newly established' and 'emerging' growth fields, we find strong support for density-dependence and organizational size as influences on early adoption for all fields, as well as support for institutional status variables as influences on the early adoption of new liberal arts and basic sciences fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an introduction discussing the Ninth Annual International Conference Promoting Business Ethics. The Conference was held in Niagara Falls, New York. The conference is cosponsored by the Vincentian universities in the United States. Some of the papers presented at the conference are presented in this issue.

Despite the academic successes of Jewish students on college campuses in the United States, challenges remain, particularly in terms of social involvement and ability to practice religion, much like the challenges that face student who are members of other ethnic and religious minorities. In this paper we examine date from 1,087 Jewish students at eight elite colleges and universities in the United States. The greater the percentage of Jewish students on campus and, individually, the more Jewish students feel connected to other students, including Jewish friends, the more at ease they feel. Those more engaged in Jewish religious practices experience greater difficulty, especially if there are no kosher dining facilities on campus. Both the "invisible hand" of social structure and the practical matters of Jewish observance affect Jewish students' personal sense of ease. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper the design and application of a control algorithm is discussed to control the test conditions within plenum chamber and the test section of a supersonic blow-down, variable throat wind tunnel at the University of Alabama. The artificially intelligent controller algorithm was designed using a gain scheduled Proportional-Integral-Differential (PID) control approach. The PID controller was augmented to work with time variant properties of the control problem by determining a functional form of the integral term of the controller from the governing equations of the tunnel. The controller was optimized using genetic algorithms (GA) on a neural network (NN) model of the tunnel and was compared to a conventional PID controller using the same NN model. The process was repeated for different throat settings to find the control gains for each setting. The controller algorithm was next applied to the actual wind tunnel at different throat settings and the results were compared. The optimized controller is proven to work very well at every throat setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of increasing support for interdisciplinary modes of research, many in the policy, scientific, and academic communities propose that universities should change structurally to reduce the barriers to investigation that involves researchers from multiple disciplines. This paper examines ‘interdisciplinary strategies’ in U.S. research universities—deliberate efforts to spur collaborative research across traditional departmental and disciplinary boundaries, including the creation and adaptation of university policies, practices, and structures. It identifies and analyzes the use of incentive grants to initiate new interdisciplinary units, the establishment of ‘campus-wide institutes’ that steer campus investments in interdisciplinary areas, and new modes of faculty hiring and evaluation. Illustrative examples are provided, and the implications of these strategies are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article draws on the narratives of 34 immigrant women professors from 22 different countries who teach in a major research university in the U.S. First, the article presents immigrant women professors’ voices of experiencing traditional academic activities in terms of teaching, research, and administration/service. Second, the paper voices women’s stories of social climate prevailing in their departments and institutions that affects their academic careers. Third, the article narrates women’s expressions of their efforts to balance academic life and family life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The evolution and current status of sustainable production education (SPE) in the United States is reviewed, both as a discrete entity and as an intersection of multiple disciplines. This paper (a) examines the current array of compatible and conflicting theories that guide the alternative approaches to SPE, (b) reviews the wide array of applications to which such theories and associated methodologies have been applied, and (c) presents a case study of the emerging interdisciplinary approach to SPE at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, USA, and its network of national and international collaborators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Institutions of higher education are looked to by society as the training grounds and gatekeepers for college-trained workers. However, despite a long history of being viewed by many as unresponsive to labor force needs, the academy has not found ways of effectively meeting these demands, nor articulating why it is that they have difficulty doing so. This paper discusses how institutional researchers can help explain to campus administrators and others the role that institutions play in training individuals for the workplace, and why they cannot always quickly respond to and solve shortages of college-trained workers. The first section outlines what economic theory and research has to say regarding labor markets, how labor market shortages arise, and how students make decisions about which major to pursue. The last section describes problems institutional researchers face when using their skills with data to identify solutions to this problem. Using data from the state of New Hampshire, it will be shown that the data available to institutional decisionmakers can be out of date, inaccurate, and not particularly useful for designing policies that would enable an institution to respond to the labor needs of the economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports trends in educational assortative marriage from 1940 to 2003 in the United States. Analyses of census and Current Population Survey data show that educational homogamy decreased from 1940 to 1960 but increased from 1960 to 2003. From 1960 to the early 1970s, increases in educational homogamy were generated by decreasing intermarriage among groups of relatively well-educated persons. College graduates, in particular; were increasingly likely to marry each other rather than those with less education. Beginning in the early 1970s, however; continued increases in the odds of educational homogamy were generated by decreases in intermarriage at both ends of the education distribution. Most striking is the decline in the odds that those with very low levels of education marry up. Intermarriage between college graduates and those with "some college" continued to decline but at a more gradual pace. As intermarriage declined at the extremes of the education distribution, intermarriage among those in the middle portion of the distribution increased. These trends, which are similar for a broad cross section of married couples and for newlyweds, are consistent with a growing social divide between those with very low levels of education and those with more education in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following landmark legislation passed more than 20 years ago, university-industry relationships have now become central to understanding the changing role of research universities in American Society. The paper analyzes the development of university-industry partnerships during the 1990s. Past studies have used a broad array of measures of ties and a variety of research methodologies, but they have shared a focus on top collaborators or on samples of universities skewed toward the top. However, findings based on top collaborators may not be valid for other universities. Universities involved in mid- to low-levels of collaboration are qualitatively different in many ways from the more extensively studied set of top collaborators, suggesting that characteristics affecting university-industry ties may not be the same for these institutions. The paper shifts the focus away from top collaborators to this sizable and less studied majority. In general, we find that the same characteristics predicting high levels of involvement for the sample as a whole also predict high levels of involvement for the sub-sample of mid- and low-level collaborators. However, We find some particular characteristics of these institutions, such as land grant status, are also associated with stronger ties to industry, and that some characteristics of 25 top institutions do not predict the level of involvement of these lower-level collaborators. We will discuss whether the licensing of new technology is likely ever to become an important source of net revenues for current middle and low-level collaborators. Our findings raise doubts about whether many universities below the top 25 will earn substantial net revenues from licensing, though they do not dispute the potential service value of these ties. The study is based on examination of a wide range of potential influences on university-industry collaboration for institutions that are not currently among the most heavily involved in partnerships. These include status, other institutional characteristics (such as size and control), investment in science and engineering, and characteristics of offices or technology transfer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Explores the work of Nicolas Rashevsky, a Russian émigré theoretical physicist who developed a program in mathematical biophysics at the University of Chicago in Illinois during the 1930s. Resistance of experimental biologists to mathematical biology during the time of Rashevsky; Claims of Rashevsky that methods of theoretical physics were needed to simplify complex biological processes; Gap between the physicist's idealizations and work.

America's research universities, approximately 125 in number, play important roles in the nation's research system, and help to set the tone for all institutions of research and higher learning. As the research universities have formed closer links with industry, new problems have arisen that have precipitated a major debate. The academic medical centres and related life science departments present some of the most challenging new issues, which are analysed in this paper within the framework of the biomedical research system that has evolved in the United States since the Second World War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research suggests that universities that fear tenuring bad candidates more than they fear rejecting good candidates would optimally have both department and outside evaluating committees. I find that a higher relative cost of accepting bad candidates is neither necessary nor sufficient for the optimality of more than one committee. Also, with some probability, t, the administration will tenure one with split recommendations from two committees, if one committee is more accurate than the other, one structure will have fewer errors of both types for some range of t, and possibly a lower expected loss from errors for all t. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the early stages of a social movement--the development of a militant faculty union. It is a socio-historical analysts of the major internal and external factors and the interaction between them that determined the course of the movement's development. Although the analysts is limited to one state university system, the structural and procedural characteristics are relevant to other universities faced with collective bargaining choices.
This research examines a faculty union as an insurgent group. An insurgent group is a movement organization which attempts to bring about structural change by thrusting new interests into the decision-making process (Jenkins and Perrow, 1977). The paper will analyze the key issues and events that enabled a small, rag-tag army to march into legitimate power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on the development of a micro-economic model for academic department functioning of universities and colleges in the United States. It presents an analysis on the cost structure of universities in the country as well as the significance of tuition in higher education financing, viewing these institutions as organizations with profitable activities.

Background: Although a large body of research has identified challenges faced by women in STEM fields and strategies to improve the experience for women in STEM, little of this research has examined which strategies undergraduate women would recommend to their peers. In the current study, undergraduate women in STEM fields (N = 89) wrote letters to younger women in STEM about their experiences. The participants were recruited from a small public liberal arts college and a large public research institution in the United States. Participants were juniors and seniors majoring in engineering, mathematics, computer science, physics, biological or biomedical sciences, and chemistry. Results: Using thematic analysis, we identified seven types of advice. The participants shared advice about improving academically, forming communities, finding family support, and seeking out women role models. They also provided general words of encouragement and reassured women that everyone struggles, and failure is not indicative of their potential. In some cases, the letters were consistent with themes from prior research; however, other influences that have been studied by quantitative research were not prominent in women's own advice to their fellow students. For example, although the letters focused on communal themes such as building community, they did not focus on the communal goal of helping others through their careers. Additionally, they highlighted the role of family, which has been relatively neglected in prior work. Conclusions: The present research highlights which empirically supported theories about retention and success in STEM are reflected in students' advice to others. These letters also provide insight into which obstacles and solutions were most salient for women students looking back on their undergraduate STEM careers. The women's letters provide a rich understanding of how women navigate STEM fields and what they would tell future students about persisting in those fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author discusses the initiative of research leaders to address research misconduct. The author says that research integrity has been put in the spotlight worldwide. He states that two studies by InterAcademy Council and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences will be released in 2013 to reflect on the shift of the attitudes by scientists. He adds universities in Great Britain has a voluntary concordat which obliges them to conduct investigation on misconduct allegations.

The global expansion of access to higher education has increased demand for information on academic quality and has led to the development of university ranking systems or league tables in many countries of the world. A recent UNESCO/CEPES conference on higher education indicators concluded that cross-national research on these ranking systems could make an important contribution to improving the international market for higher education. The comparison and analysis of national university ranking systems can help address a number of important policy questions. First, is there an emerging international consensus on the measurement of academic quality as reflected in these ranking systems? Second, what impact are the different ranking systems having on university and academic behavior in their respective countries? Finally, are there important public interests that are thus far not reflected in these rankings? If so, is there a needed and appropriate role for public policy in the development and distribution of university ranking systems and what might that role be? This paper explores these questions through a comparative analysis of university rankings in Australia, Canada, the UK, and the US. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Compares and contrasts three groups that conducted biological research at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut during overlapping periods between 1910 and 1970. Description of the research produced by the three groups; Suggestion that new models for research groups are needed, particularly for those that include much field research.