Issues of diversity in academia: through the eyes of ‘third-country’ faculty

Abstract

Third-country faculty are faced with significant challenges interacting with university students who come from different socio-cultural backgrounds and have different expectations regarding faculty's role, behavior, and leadership style. This paper compares diversity practices and action options that can facilitate or hinder the integration of third-country faculty across five universities established in an equal number of countries. The proportion of third-country faculty in American universities abroad is also used to provide a measure of diversity. Notwithstanding recent trends pointing to the internationalization of higher education universities have yet to develop an appropriate institutional mentality along with supporting diversity policies that would help them gain global efficiencies by hiring qualified international faculty. This may have serious implications for organizational effectiveness with respect to resource acquisition and even the long-term survival of the organization.

International Students’ Experience of Western Pedagogy in a British University

“…on teaching and learning (Dedoussis, 2007). Brown (2007), for example, describes the way in which the frustration Western academic staff and international students sometimes experience by explicitly teaching the skills of critical thinking.…”

Outsiders within: isolation of international faculty in an American university

“…The complexities involved in navigating this cultural-academic mix result in teaching difficulties around language and accent which sometimes result in student aggression towards the third-country faculty owing to student frustrations over unrealistic faculty role expectations in pedagogical and student assessment practices. These challenges ultimately lead to faculty resignations (Dedoussis 2007). Both Canada (Richardson, McBey, and McKenna 2006;Kershaw 2005) In Korea, international faculty teaching English encounter challenges linked to student perceptions about the inferiority of foreign faculty, cultural beliefs that give eminence to group conformity as opposed to individual initiative, grading policies, and unclear employment contracts for foreigners which have intensified the departure of many (Gress and Ilon 2009).…”

Professors as value agents: a typology of management academics’ value structures

“…Also, some might claim that any behaviour has an impact in terms of a role model, and that selected teaching styles, interactive or lecture-like, shape the way students think about human interaction and development. This has proved to be particularly relevant in the interaction of non-native faculty and native students (Dedoussis 2007). An important issue in the area of higher education is moral development, i.e.…”

“…Thus, those seeking an appropriate way to integrate value perspectives into processes, especially human resources processes, need to bear in mind that while it is considered self-evident that staff should be selected according to differences in factual knowledge, any selection based on value differences would, in contrast, be likely to be labelled unacceptable discrimination. Nevertheless, the consideration of some less explicit value-related aspects is becoming more and more common in the context of increasingly international teaching bodies (Dedoussis 2007). For instance, value-related aspects like a professor's teaching style or educational goals in the auditorium are inevitably considered when selecting, supporting, and evaluating staff.…”