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As campus carry policies are implemented at colleges and universities across the country, the concern for the safety of students, faculty members, and campus community members has heightened. In the state of Texas, broad sweeping campus carry policies were recently enacted by Texas State Legislature that allows individuals to conceal carry firearms within educational spaces on campus. Within these educational spaces, faculty members are often relied upon to deliver educational content without having their Second Amendment speech rights chilled by the prospect of loaded firearms within a classroom. Given this tension, this study fills an important gap in the research and explains how faculty members view campus carry as it relates to their personal safety and professional work. This study employed a mixed methods design (survey and qualitative) to expound upon the attitudes toward campus carry of 226 faculty and staff members working in a large research-intensive university within the state of Texas. Results suggest strong gender differences between how faculty members view campus carry policies and their safety on campus, with women often reporting feeling less safe and less able to perform their job duties under the pressure and anxiety of campus carry policies. Ultimately, this study’s results imply that women faculty members may more less safe, more marginalized, and further victimized by campus carry laws than men faculty members, transgressing gender equity progress in the professoriate, as women have been traditionally underrepresented on college faculties.

This exploratory study responds to the criticism that non-instructional faculty or “academic professionals” at American universities are the cause of “administrative bloat.” The purpose of the study was to build from the work of Rhoades (1998) and Kane (2007) to examine whether academic professionals at an R-1 (very-high research activity university) performed core university work of research, teaching, and/or public service. A survey of 1036 academic professionals suggested that many of these individuals were routinely and directly contributing to research, teaching, and public service instead of administrative work, failing to contribute to any notions of “administrative bloat.” In addition to the three areas of core work, academic professionals often had advanced degrees, published in peer-reviewed journals, had specialized skills and bodies of knowledge, applied for grants, and engaged in entrepreneurial activities. The study concludes with a discussion of academic professionals in European countries and the role of disruptive innovation and new professionalism in compelling universities to expand the use of academic professionals in order to produce cheaper degree alternatives and generate new sources of funding .

Cheating comes in many forms in higher education. This report examines unpermitted collaboration, a form of cheating in higher education that may be pervasive and exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The frequency and brutality of social injustices played out upon the personal, local, national, and global levels prompted a response from faculty and staff at Benedictine University that took the form of a Teach-In on Social Justice. It is presented here as a model to address the need for social justice education through high-impact learning practices, particularly for underrepresented and at-risk students. The Teach-In has developed into a co-curricular structure embedded within the university culture, and its annual program draws over 1,000 students, faculty, and staff on a racially and religiously diverse campus. Mission-centric and tied to the formal general education curriculum learning goals, the Teach-In is a collaborative undertaking of both the academic/curricular and student life areas of the university. This Teach-In model integrates scholarship, activism, and civic engagement with the goal of individual transformation and structural reform within the institution. In addition to conveying the mechanics of the Teach-In and arguing for its value as a permanent, institutional co-curricular structure, this chapter situates the Teach-In within influential discourses of social justice education concerning critical pedagogy, twenty-first-century liberal education, and US women of color feminism.