Color-Line as Fault-Line: Teaching Interethnic Relations in California in the 21st Century

In this article, I describe an undergraduate course on interethnic relations that I taught at a small, predominantly White, liberal arts college during the 1990s. First, I present the intellectual heart of the course (similarities and differences between Allport's [1954/1979] mainstream perspective and Du Bois' [1903/1969] oft-neglected, alternative perspective on race relations). Subsequently, I discuss the course background and a precipitating incident (verbal conflict between a White male student and a Black female student) that transformed the class. Finally, I reflect on my experiences, as well as individual and institutional factors (gender, institutional racism) that probably affected students' and faculty members' responses. Policy implications for courses on prejudice (and for teachers of such courses) are discussed .     

高职可持续发展的基础:"双师型"师资队伍建设

加强教师队伍建设是教育事业发展最重要的基础工作.高等职业教育同时具有"高等教育"和"职业教育"的双重属性,因此加强"双师型"师资队伍建设是高等职业教育事业发展的最重要的基础工作,对高等职业教育的可持续发展具有十分重要的意义.     

Biases in Ethical Decision Making among University Faculty

Over the years, cognitive biases have been examined throughout the decision-making literature, but little work has investigated the cognitive biases operating in ethical decision making. The present effort explores a taxonomy of biases through interviews with university faculty members. Additionally, this study identifies the psychological processes giving rise to these biases in ethical decision making. Results suggest that the biases listed in the taxonomy are indeed operating in the ethical decision making of university faculty. Implications of these results are discussed.     

The 100 Most Influential Contemporary Social Work Faculty as Assessed by the H-Index

The names of faculty employed by the 76 member social work programs of the Group for the Advancement of Doctoral Education in Social Work were retrieved via a web-search. This resulted in a list of 2204 social work faculty. Their individual H-Indices were then obtained, using either the Publish or Perish software, or via manual calculations from Google Scholar. The top 100 most influential contemporary social work faculty were identified, resulting in a listing of individuals who have published relatively large numbers of scholarly works which themselves have been subsequently highly cited. Apart from recognizing these productive individuals, listing them and their home institutions will permit future researchers to examine the causes and correlates of high academic productivity.     

Affirmative Action and Job Satisfaction: Understanding Underlying Processes

In the present article, we examine the relationship between perceptions of affirmative action and the satisfaction of racial and ethnic minority faculty members. We develop a conceptual model of factors that mediate the impact of affirmative action on the satisfaction of faculty of color, and investigate this model based on survey responses of 84 African-American, 48 Latina/o, and 59 Asian faculty. Analyses showed that the satisfaction of faculty of color is significantly related to how affirmative action is perceived to be embraced by the community, and that this effect is mediated by how supportive colleagues are seen and how much self-doubt faculty experience. Data also indicated the important role of mentoring for supporting the goals of affirmative action.     

The Faculty Field Liaison: An Essential Role for Advancing Graduate and Undergraduate Group Work Education

The faculty field liaison is responsible for representing a school’s social work program in monitoring agency internship sites and agency field instructors for an assigned cohort of the program’s BSW or MSW internship students. This article focuses on the faculty field liaison’s role in effectively monitoring the internship site and field instruction to ensure the internship experience is successfully providing the group work skills and knowledge the BSW or MSW student intern needs to be an effective group work practitioner. The field instructor role has been given a lot of attention in the social work literature, but the role of the faculty field liaison has been given little to no attention. This is despite the faculty field liaison’s significant responsibility of representing the BSW and MSW program by bridging the relationships between the program, the field instructor, and the internship student. This article identifies the importance of the faculty field liaison responding to concerns in group work education in the classroom and field setting. Practice vignettes illustrating the work of the faculty field liaison in monitoring group work assignments and field instruction supervision for graduate and undergraduate social work interns are provided.     

Social Work Gerontological Practice: The Need for Faculty Development in the New Millennium

There is a pressing need to upgrade the gerontological knowledge and skills of practicing social workers. Geriatrics and gerontology, as specialized fields of knowledge, have not been sufficiently integrated into formal academic training programs. There are major trends in the health care environment which impact on social work education, including technological advances, a shift from inpatient to outpatient and community care settings, increasing diversity of the older population, and client and family participation in decisionmaking. These trends necessitate social work education to emphasize new content areas in gerontology and the development of new skills in clinical, case management, care coordination, and teamwork. A significant obstacle to the preparation of future social workers to deliver the complex services needed by older adults and their families is a serious shortage of social work faculty in gerontology. Sustained and broad initiatives, such as the John A. Hartford Foundation funded Geriatric Social Work Faculty Scholars Program, are needed to develop academic and practice-based faculty in gerontology. This is crucial if social work is to maintain an important service role in the new millennium.     

The Faculty Meeting: Practicing Social Justice-Oriented Group Work

Social group work scholars and practitioners have begun to locate and recognize important sites for thinking about and practicing social group work as increasing evidence demonstrates its diminishing importance. This article identifies faculty meetings as a significant site for integrating social group work more fully into departments and schools of social work and helping to achieve the profession's social justice mission. Challenging the meaning of the faculty meeting and thinking of it as a faculty group is a necessary prerequisite to realize this goal. A set of principles is presented and next steps explored to reclaim and reinsert the value of social group work for the profession today.     

Is There an Inherent Mismatch Between How Black and White Students Expect to Succeed in College and What Their Colleges Expect from Them?

Students enter college with expectations about how they will succeed; likewise, colleges configure their courses, resources, and activities according to implicit expectations of how their students will succeed. Data from 1079 students at 6 universities was used to explore whether college-success matches existed for Black students attending historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and for White students attending predominantly white institutions (PWIs) , and whether mismatches existed for Black students attending PWIs. Results confirmed these matches and mismatches, and suggested that Black students worked harder to persist at PWIs. So while Brown aimed to provide educational access across color lines, this study's implications are that once students enter college, they must be supported as individuals who succeed along many paths .     

Gender differences in faculty pay and faculty salary compression

A recording distinction between cost-of-living and merit adjustments at a unionized, public liberal arts college allows us to examine several issues related to gender differences in faculty pay. For example, we find that annual fixed-dollar merit increases and similar starting salaries contribute to comparable salary growth rates for female and male faculty. In this setting, the male faculty earnings advantage is traced to higher rank and years of service. These results underscore the importance of gender-neutral salary-setting practices and equal access to promotion and retention for female faculty. The salary distinctions also allow us to determine the source of the seniority penalty. The economics literature is divided on whether the often-observed lower pay of senior faculty is deserved. We find that merit pay rises with additional years of seniority and that the seniority penalty is rooted in cost-of-living adjustments that fail to keep pace with market trends. These findings illustrate how the seniority penalty can be linked to budget considerations rather than the lower productivity of senior staff.     

Underexplored Aspects of Group-work Education in MSW Programs

Warnings about social group work’s diminished place within social work education date back to 1978. This article reports the findings of a national study exploring the state of group-work education in Council on Social Work Education accredited programs. Our 2014 publication compared study results with those of the 1994 Birnbaum and Auerbach publication. This article highlights additional findings regarding underexplored aspects of group-work education including concentrations/specializations in group work, social work faculty expertise and involvement in group-work associations, efforts to link students with professional group-work associations, continuing education opportunities in group work for field supervisors, online/hybrid group-work course offerings, links between institutional characteristics and group-work offerings, and faculty members’ perceptions of the state of group-work education.     

Plus ça Change…? Multiraciality and the Dynamics of Race Relations in the United States

The issue of race has long cast a shadow on the founding mythology of the United States, but today some scholars argue race is declining in significance, as evidenced by the rise of interracial unions and the fact that the offspring of such unions can now officially acknowledge their mixed-race backgrounds. However, the sizeable growth of the Asian and Latino populations in the United States through immigration complicates the issue. Seemingly neither black nor white, the new immigrants are generating increased diversity and raising questions about whether today's color line replicates the old Black–White demarcation. The research results introduced in this article suggest the contemporary color line in the United States more reflects a Black/non-Black division than a White/non-White one.     

Two Faculty Groups’ Process in Delivering a Joint MSW Program: Evaluating the Outcome

ABSTRACT

In 1995, two state universities’ Schools of Social Work, 30 miles apart, agreed to implement a joint master's of social work program. In 2011, the Council on Social Work Education reaccredited the program. This qualitative study describes the stages of development of the group of faculty members based on Tuckman's perspective. Through surveys, interviews, and focus-group reports, a combination of convenience and purposive subsamples with a total of 22 participants provided data on the program strengths and limitations, as well as the new trends identified in the field of social work. The findings of this exploratory design study include program strengths such as availability of personal and technical resources, adequate faculty communication processes, and their willingness to change and embrace innovations. The program limitations include the diversity of faculty members and their different subcultures, the large number of students, and the recurrent disruptions of the distance-learning technology system. The inclusion of new trends in the field of social work is required to effectively educate students to meet their future clients’ expectations. Due to its qualitative methodology using nonprobability sampling strategies and a small sample size, the generalizability of this study is limited.     

Status quo bias in decision making

Most real decisions, unlike those of economics texts, have a status quo alternative—that is, doing nothing or maintaining one's current or previous decision. A series of decision-making experiments shows that individuals disproportionately stick with the status quo. Data on the selections of health plans and retirement programs by faculty members reveal that the status quo bias is substantial in important real decisions. Economics, psychology, and decision theory provide possible explanations for this bias. Applications are discussed ranging from marketing techniques, to industrial organization, to the advance of science.     

Faculty job satisfaction across gender and discipline

It is projected that by 2014 colleges, universities, and professional schools will witness an employment growth of 34.3% (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2005). Thus, issues of faculty satisfaction, retention, and persistence will become increasingly important for university administrators and education policy makers. The need to study faculty satisfaction at universities also stems from the fact that the intellectual and social structures of higher education are changing over time. Increasingly, women and minorities are more likely to occupy higher ranks of the professoriate. The purpose of this research is to explore and compare the job satisfaction rates of faculty members employed in research institutions with special attention paid to differences across gender and disciplines. The study employs data from the 2003 Survey of Doctorate Recipients, which is a biennially collected survey of doctoral awardees and is funded by the National Science Foundation.     

Mentoring in a Post-Affirmative Action World

Mentoring can be an effective strategy in improving retention of college students and faculty from fields where historical underrepresentation has occurred. This article reviews the benefits of mentoring in higher education, and identifies components of effective mentoring strategies that promote educational and career advancement. It illustrates how effective programs can be institutionalized and scaled through consortial and national collaborations. Traditional and alternative mentoring models are described through four successful programs designed to increase the academic and professional success of undergraduates, graduate students, and junior faculty. The article concludes with a set of general recommendations and caveats gleaned from the literature and programs reviewed.     

Being the Only One: Finding Connection through the Shared Experience of “Otherness”

ABSTRACT

There is a noticeable paucity of clinical resources that help clinicians of color to name and navigate the multitude of challenges in working through racial, cultural, and power differences in psychotherapy with White clients. African American therapists rarely receive adequate preparation for clinical practice in identifying, addressing, and working through transference and countertransference reactions in racially mixed dyads. The author highlights the challenges she faced early in her career with addressing racial and sociopolitical differences as an African American female clinical social worker providing individual psychotherapy to her older White male client whose traumatic experience focused on racial issues.     

Expanding the Scope of Responsible Conduct of Research Instruction

We argue that responsible conduct research (RCR) instruction should be extended beyond students and trainees funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) or National Science Foundation (NSF) to include all students, trainees, faculty, and research staff involved in research. Extending the scope of RCR instruction can help institutions develop and maintain an environment that promotes ethical research conduct. Universities and scientific organizations have objected to expanding the scope of RCR instruction on the grounds that it would be a major undertaking that would require the expenditure of additional institutional resources. We argue, however, that expanding the scope of RCR instruction can be done efficiently without placing undue burdens on institutions.     

What Will You Think of Me? Racial Integration, Peer Relationships and Achievement Among White Students and Students of Color

Brown v. Board of Education (1954) emphasized that segregation in schools leads the stigmatized students to withdraw from and lower their educational and professional aspirations. I consider this process in a modern sample by examining the relationship between the number of friends students report having at school and their goals and plans and their enjoyment of achievement activities in a sample of elementary and middle school students ( N = 80). Students of color were more isolated at school, and this isolation was negatively correlated with interest in academic work. Among White students, however, no relationship between social isolation and interest in academic work was found. Discussion focuses on the role of the social climate in fostering or inhibiting achievement among students of color .