Abstract
Using data from a 2010 survey of academic chairs, this study reports on academic department chairs' recommended time allocations to new assistant professors. I contend that personal values about research and teaching influence the department chair's recommendations along with organizational characteristics. Multi-level modeling indicates that department chairs' own academic time allocations, promotion history, and desire for quality teaching as well as organizational characteristics such as research facilities, average teaching load, and research ranking influence the department chairs' advice. These results suggest that organizational characteristics do not dominate official, individual actions within the university setting as bureaucratic and neo-institutional theories might predict.
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Notes
To simplify understanding and due to how I decided to measure the relative time allocations to teaching and research, my remaining hypotheses are worded with "teaching time" as the dependent construct. The data section of this paper explains how I measured research and teaching time recommendations; suffice to say here that, when I hypothesize that something makes the advice regarding teaching time go up, I am also implying that the advice relating to research time will go down to the same degree.
The variable "time to full professor" ended up with a few negative values indicating an error in coding or reporting; these negative instances were dropped from the data set.
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Acknowledgement
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0710836 to Monica Gaughan, University of Georgia, Principal Investigator. I would like to thank Monica Gaughan for granting access to these data as well as for giving initial advice. Barry Bozeman provided feedback and guidance throughout. Spiro Maroulis, Tom Catlaw, Azfar Nisar, and Linda Williams were very helpful with feedback.
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Taggart, G. Department Chair Advice on Teaching and Research at U.S. Research Universities. Innov High Educ 40, 443–454 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10755-015-9329-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10755-015-9329-4