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Responding to mission creep: faculty members as cosmopolitan agents

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Abstract

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.

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Notes

  1. That more universities and colleges are attempting to remake themselves in the image of prestigious research universities is just one example of mission creep. Other examples include liberal arts colleges that aim for enhanced research status (O’Meara and Bloomgarden 2011 and/or women’s colleges that adopt co-educational admissions policies (Ward and Wolf-Wendel 2005).

  2. “Tier One” is language used in the state where Border University is situated. It is used loosely in the state, and also in the U.S., more generally, to loosely refer to research universities that fall into Carnegie Foundation’s “research universities with high activity” and/or the highest ranking research universities as identified by rankings systems like the U.S. News and World Ranking (U.S.N.W.R.) system.

  3. F/N = Field Notes; I/T = Interview Transcript; S/C = Survey Comments. Each data source is followed by semester and year.

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  1. Educational Leadership, Counseling, Human & Organizational Development, Clemson University, 316 Tilman Hall, Clemson, SC, 29634, USA

    Leslie D. Gonzales

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  1. Leslie D. Gonzales
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Correspondence to Leslie D. Gonzales.

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Gonzales, L.D. Responding to mission creep: faculty members as cosmopolitan agents. High Educ 64, 337–353 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-011-9497-9

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