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Academic rigor has long been considered important for students’ learning and development in higher education. However, findings about students’ outcomes from previous studies of rigor are mixed, in...

Positive public perceptions of academic quality and professional ethics are critical to the long-term legitimacy of American colleges and universities. Faculty codes of conduct are one mechanism whereby the professoriate can define acceptable practice, exercise social control, and maintain public confidence in higher education, yet the drivers of their adoption are not well understood. Building upon previous research into such organizational behavior by institutional type, this study examined the prevalence and content of publicly posted faculty codes of conduct within an organizational field of institutions that share a common religious identity but differ in their institutional types and employment structures. Faculty handbooks from American member institutions of the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities (CCCU), an international association of faith-based institutions, were gathered and analyzed. Although only 27% of CCCU member institutions in the U.S. (36/135) publicly posted faculty codes of conduct, the average number of tenets present in each code (n = 7.5) was higher than suggested by previous research. Study findings also revealed that membership category, institutional type, and employment structures influence the content of faculty codes of conduct, indicating that isomorphic pressures operate within this particular organizational field. The piece concludes by commending publicly posted codes of conduct as an affirmation of the personal responsibility, fairness, and care exercised by ethical professionals in the academy.

The purpose of this study was to determine if there is evidence of a normative structure for primary role advisors and, if so, whether views of those norms vary by personal and positional characteristics. We developed the Academic Advising Behaviors Inventory (AABI) and surveyed members of NACADA: The Global Community for Academic Advising. Using principal components factor analysis, we identified four inviolable norms that primary role advisors regard as requiring severe sanctions when crossed: Policy Violation, Disrespectful Interactions, Neglectful Supervision, and Confidentiality Breach. Regression analyses revealed some significant differences in the perception of these norms by gender identity, race, and supervision. We conclude by discussing implications for practice and future research.

Boyer’s four domains of scholarship provided the basis for a comparative investigation of the scholarly output of faculty members in 14 countries and at 100 English-speaking universities on the Times Higher Education World University Rankings (2013–2014) top-400 institutions. Full-time university faculty members who held tenured, tenure-track, and non-tenure-track academic appointments across three high-consensus and three low-consensus academic fields were the population of interest. The findings revealed that faculty members in US Research I and doctoral-granting universities and their international faculty counterparts in English-speaking universities publish relatively similar levels of scholarship directed toward application and discovery and have similar levels of inactivity in their publication of teaching-oriented scholarship. Tests for academic discipline-specific differences revealed little variation except for the finding that academic chemists tend to produce more publications in the application domain. Cross-national variation was also found in the publication of application-oriented scholarship. Suggestions for further research are proposed.

While previous research has examined outcomes related to academic rigor, mixed findings have resulted from differing conceptualizations of rigor as well as varying methodological approaches. Defining rigor as those in-class practices and assignments that require students to engage in deep learning and demonstrate cognitive complexity, we use longitudinal student-level data from 46 four-year institutions in the USA to examine the relationship of academic rigor with undergraduate development of critical thinking skills and two aspects of self-motivated learning (need for cognition and positive attitudes towards literacy). We find that academic rigor is positively related to both aspects of self-motivated learning at the end of the first year of college, with an advantage for students who enter college with low ACT scores and those with less positive attitudes about reading and writing. Rigor is positively related to all three outcomes at the end of the fourth year, with the magnitude of these relationships tending to increase from the first year to the fourth year. Further, by disaggregating the composite measure of rigor into subscales that separate rigorous in-class practices from rigorous exams and assignments, we find that the relationship between rigor and intellectual development is sometimes driven by one form of rigorous practice, with in-class rigor especially benefitting the critical thinking skills of first-generation students. These findings have important implications for instructors, administrators, and scholars in higher education.

The prevailing theories of student persistence have been developed in Predominantly White Institutional (PWI) contexts. The extent to which these theories—in whole or in part—apply to Minority Serving Institutions such as Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) has not been studied in depth. This study tests a PWI-based theory of student persistence in residential colleges and universities at two residential HBCUs. Four-hundred and fifty-one residential students completed a survey testing the theory, and then administrative data were used to link student persistence data. Findings suggest that theories developed at PWIs—such as the model tested in this study—hold salience for understanding student persistence at Minority Serving Institutions such as HBCUs. However, a complete picture of student persistence at HBCUs may benefit from the addition of HBCU-specific constructs and models.

Codes of conduct for undergraduate teaching stipulate quality professional standards for teaching. Besides contributing to the safeguarding of student welfare, such codes are critical given the autonomy the professoriate has in the performance of its teaching role, the need for professional self-regulation, and research evidence linking positive teacher behaviors to student success. This study investigated the incidence of publicly-posted codes of conduct for undergraduate teaching in four types of institutions. It is the first stage of a research program that will assess the extent of faculty adherence to codes of conduct and arrangements for reporting and instituting sanctions for violations of such codes.