ROPS 2012

Transnational education can both improve the lives of the students who experience it and also increase cooperation and reduce conflict across cultural lines. The value of transnational education is more apparent when one considers how, in a radically transformed twenty-first century, students need to develop a special set of nine essential qualities: curiosity, empathy, skepticism, logical thinking, patience, creativity, scientific literacy, effectiveness across cultural boundaries and multilingualism. The need to develop these qualities is framing the design of the educational...

Modes of board-level governance for public universities and especially public university systems should be re-examined in view of growing major forces that create both challenges and opportunities that are enormous for public higher education. To sustain the public mission and rise to the challenges and opportunities, there is a growing need to enhance funding from a variety of different sources, many of them private, and to map them onto new initiatives, partnerships, and directions of change. Boards of public universities need to develop new dimensions, including several of the...

Any serious inquiry about improving the quality of a university must begin with an examination of its faculty promotion and merit procedures, since a university’s quality cannot be higher than that of its faculty. In this essay, we will examine the tenure track or regular faculty promotion and merit systems at the University of California, Davis, and Wuhan University, with a view towards understanding how they motivate the professoriate and foster creativity. In our analysis, we will pay special attention to compensation, as well as to work-life balance, issues. Our hope is to...

Previous recommendations to eliminate the district-level, elected boards have met with strong local resistance, particularly from faculty. The findings in this report do little to strengthen the case for locally elected, community college boards, however. The highlights of our findings are as follows: (1) a very high proportion of trustees seem to choose not to run for re-election and, overall, relatively few individuals choose to compete for trustee positions; (2) nearly half of the races involve just two individuals competing for a trustee seat; (3) there are some districts where...

The topic of undergraduate academic engagement has been a matter of intense inquiry for more than a generation. This paper examines the other side of the coin: the size and characteristics of academically disengaged populations. Drawing on classic sociological work on conformity and deviance, we theorize four dimensions of student academic disengagement: values disengagement, behavioral disengagement, alternative involvement, and interactional disengagement. Using survey data, we estimate the size of disengaged populations along each of these dimensions and the characteristics of...

n the wake of the Cold War era, America’s research universities became increasingly characterized by a tribal mentality among schools and departments, and disciplines. The surge in research funding, and the tremendous growth rate among the major public universities in particular, fostered the idea of the “multiversity” was becoming less communal, and less aware of the collective purpose. These patterns have accelerated considerably over the past two decades in the US that reflect three relatively new realities or influences: a) within the public university sector, decreasing public...