Work

Role Tension in the Academy: A Philosophical Inquiry into Faculty Teaching and Research

Year: 2015
Type: dissertation
Abstract: This dissertation seeks to understand the conjunction of faculty roles as teachers and as researchers. This understanding is pursued through philosophical analysis. Discourse ethics, in particular, is used as a framework by which to best understand the roles played by faculty and if the roles of teacher and researcher are, in fact, commensurable. The purpose of the work is two-fold: 1) to develop a construct that may be used by future researchers to better understand the roles played by faculty, and 2) to suggest a best-construct that enables future researchers to propose how actual lived roles should be instantiated in the world. The dissertation reviews a series of university handbooks, professional association ethical guidelines, and philosophical arguments to establish how the roles of faculty are best understood. The investigation illuminates the tensions at the heart of faculty roles. This tension is not definitionally embedded in the roles of faculty as teacher and researcher. Rather, the tension emerges from the failure of institutions to fully actualize faculty roles as normatively grounded in human communicative interaction. As a result, the work suggests that in order to best resolve the cognitive dissonance that may be experienced as a result of role ambiguity, faculty should engage in a process of self-reflection and community dialectic in order to best determine how “faculty” can be actualized in a way that best benefits all stakeholders.
Author: Nicholas Michaud
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2344817942
Cites: 47
Cited by:
Related to: 10