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Academic Administration

Academic administration

An academic administration is a branch of university or college employees responsible for the maintenance and supervision of the institution and separate from the faculty or academics, although some personnel may have joint responsibilities. Some type of separate administrative structure exists at almost all academic institutions, as fewer and fewer schools are governed by employees who are also involved in academic or scholarly work. Many administrators are former academics with advanced degrees who no longer teach or conduct research actively.

Key responsibilities

Key administrative responsibilities (and thus administrative units) in academic institutions include:
- Supervision of academic affairs such as hiring, promotion, tenure, and evaluation (with faculty input where appropriate);
- Maintenance of official records (typically supervised by a registrar);
- Library and archive management (by librarians and archivists);
- Maintenance and construction of campus buildings (the physical plant);
- Maintenance of the campus grounds;
- Safety and security of people and property on the campus (often organized as an office of public safety or campus police);
- Supervision and support of campus computers and network (information technology).
- Fundraising from private individuals and foundations ("development" or "advancement")
- Research administration (including grants and contract administration, and instituational compliance with federal and state regulations)
- Public affairs (including relations with the media, the community, and local, state, and federal governments)
- Admissions

United States

Academic administrations are structured in various ways at different institutions and in different countries.

Presidents and chancellors

In the United States a college or university is typically supervised by a President or Chancellor who reports regularly to a Board of Trustees made up of individuals from outside the institution and serves as chief executive officer. Most large colleges and universities now utilize an administrative structure with a tier of vice presidents, among whom the Provost (or Vice President for Academic Affairs) serves as the chief academic officer.

Dean

Deans supervise various and more specific aspects of the institution, and report directly to the president or a vice president. The division of responsibility among deans varies widely among institutions; some are chiefly responsible for clusters of academic fields (such as the humanities or natural sciences) or whole academic units (such as a graduate school or college), while others are responsible for non-academic but campus-wide concerns such as minority affairs. In some cases a provost supervises the institution's entire academic staff, occupying a position generally superior to any dean. Below deans in the administrative hierarchy are heads of individual academic departments and of individual administrative departments from groundskeeping to libraries to registrars of records. These heads (commonly styled "chairs") then supervise the staff of their individual departments. Category:Academia

University

A university is an institution of higher education and of research, which grants academic degrees. A university provides both tertiary and quaternary education. University is derived from the Latin universitas, meaning corporation (since the first medieval European universities were simply groups of scholars). medieval European universities]

History

Because of the above definition, the oldest universities in the world were all European, as the awarding of academic degrees was not a custom of older institutions of learning in Asia and Africa. However, institutions of higher learning considerably older than the most ancient European universities existed in countries such as China, Egypt and India. The Academy, founded in 387 BC by the Greek philosopher Plato in the grove of Academos near Athens, taught its students philosophy, mathematics, and gymnastics, and is sometimes considered a forerunner of modern European universities. Other Greek cities with notable educational institutions include Kos (the home of Hippocrates), which had a medical school, and Rhodes, which had philosophical schools. Another famous classical university was the Museum and Library of Alexandria. About a thousand years after Plato, institutions bearing a resemblance to the modern university existed in Persia and the Islamic world, notably the Academy of Gundishapur and later also al-Azhar University in Cairo. In Asia, there were a number of institutions of higher learning that vaguely resembled universities in the Western sense of the word. In general, these are of considerable antiquity, predating western institutions of higher learning by centuries. In China, it's recorded that the education system had been established during the Yu period (2257 BC - 2208 BC) and the imperial central academy was named Shangyang (Shang means higher and Yang means school) at the time. The higher learning institution - imperial central academy, was called Piyong in Zhou Dynasty (1046 BC - 249 BC), Taixue in Han Dynasty (202 - 220) and Guozijian in Sui dynasty. For example, Nanjing University traces its source back to the imperial central academy at Nanking founded in 258 by the Kingdom of Wu. The early Chinese state depended upon literate, educated officials for operation of the empire, and an imperial examination was established in the Sui Dynasty (581 -618) for evaluating and selecting officials from the general populace. The ancient cities of Nalanda, Vikramasila, Kanchipura and Takshasila were greatly reputed centres of learning in the east, with students from all over Asia. In particular, Nalanda was a famous center of Buddhist scholarship, and as such it attracted a vast number of Buddhist scholars from China, central Asia and Southeast Asia. In the Carolingian period, a famous academy was created by Charlemagne for the purpose of educating the children of aristocrats to help train the professionals needed to run an empire. It was a foreshadow of the rise of the University in the 11th century. The first European medieval university was the University of Magnaura in Constantinople (now Istanbul, Turkey), founded in 849 by the emperor Bardas, followed by the University of Salerno (9th century)University of Bologna (1088) in Bologna, Italy, and the University of Paris (c. 1100) in Paris, France. Many of the medieval universities in Western Europe were born under the aegis of the Catholic Church, usually as cathedral schools or by papal bull as Studia Generali. In the early medieval period, most new universities were founded from pre-existing schools, usually when these schools were deemed to have become primarly sites of higher education. Many historians state that universities and cathedral schools were a continuation of the interest in learning promoted by monasteries. In Europe, young men proceeded to the university when they had completed the study of the trivium–the preparatory arts of grammar, rhetoric, and logic–and the quadrivium: arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. (See degrees of Oxford University for the history of how the trivium and quadrivium developed in relation to degrees, especially in anglophone universities). Universities are generally established by statute or charter. In the United Kingdom, for instance, a university is instituted by Act of Parliament or Royal Charter; in either case generally with the approval of Privy Council, and only such recognized bodies can award degrees of any kind.

Universities around the world

The funding and organisation of Universities is very different in different countries around the world. In some countries Universities are predominantly funded by the state, while in others funding may come from donors or from fees which students attending the University must pay. In some countries the vast majority of students attend University in their local town, while in other countries Universities attract students from all over the world, and may provide University accommodation for their students.

Universities and student life in different countries

- British universities
- Dutch universities
- French universities
- Irish universities
- Italian universities
- Spanish universities
- US universities
- Egyptian universities

Selective admissions

Unlike community colleges, enrollment at a university is generally not available to all. However, admission systems vary widely around the world, as discussed in the article college admissions.

Colloquial usage

Colloquially, the term university is used around the world for a phase in one's life: "when I was at university…"; in the United States, college is often used: "when I was in college…". See college, §3, for further discussion. In the United Kingdom and Australia "University" is often contracted to simply "Uni". The usual practice in the United States today is to call an institution made up of several faculties and granting a range of higher degrees a "university" while a smaller institution only granting bachelor's or associate's degrees is called a "college". (See liberal arts colleges, community college). Nevertheless, a few of America's oldest and most prestigious universities, such as Boston College, Dartmouth College and the College of William and Mary, have retained the term "college" in their names for historical reasons though they offer a wide range of higher degrees.

Related terms

: academia - academic rank - academy - admission - alumnus - aula - [http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/brain_farm Brain farm ]-Bologna process - business schools - Grandes écoles - campus - college - college and university rankings - dean - degree - diploma - discipline - [http://wiktionary.org/wiki/Dissertation dissertation] - faculty - fraternities and sororities - graduate student - graduation - lecturer - medieval university - medieval university (Asia) - mega university - perpetual student - professor - provost - rector - research - scholar - senioritis - student - tenure - tuition - undergraduate - universal access - university administration

References

- Walter Ruegg (ed), A History of the University in Europe, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (3 vols) ISBN 0521361079 (vol 3 reviewed by Laurence Brockliss in the Times Literary Supplement, no 5332, 10 June 2005, pages 3-4). Category:Educational stages ko:대학교 ms:Universiti ja:大学 simple:University th:มหาวิทยาลัย

Faculty

Faculty has several different meanings and can refer to:
- A faculty is a division of a university (e.g. a Faculty of Science or Faculty of Medicine). In North America, this meaning is applied to the instructors and/or researchers of high standing at universities, as opposed to the students or support staff. The term "faculty" may also be applied to instructors at colleges and private and public primary or secondary academies and some other educational institutions.
- A factorial is a mathematical function.
- A faculty is an instrument or warrant in canon laws, especially a judicial or quasi-judicial warrant from an ecclesiastical court or tribunal.
- A faculty is an ability, skill, or power.
- The Faculty of Advocates is the body of legal counsel or Advocates in Scotland.
- The Faculty of Actuaries is the professional body representing actuaries in Scotland. See also faculty psychology.

Academics

Academia is a collective term for the scientific and cultural community engaged in higher education and research, taken as a whole. The word comes from the akademeia just outside ancient Athens, where the gymnasium was made famous by Plato as a center of learning. The sacred space had formerly been an olive grove, hence the expression "the groves of Academe". By extension Academia has come to connote the cultural accumulation of knowledge, its development and transmission across generations and its practitioners and transmitters. In the 17th century, English and French religious scholars popularized the term to describe certain types of institutions of higher learning. The English adopted the form academy while the French adopted the forms academe and academie. An academic is a person who works as a researcher (and usually teacher) at a university or similar institution. In the United States, the term is approximately synonymous with professor. In the United Kingdom, various titles are used, typically fellow, lecturer, reader and professor (see also academic rank), though the loose term don is often popularly substituted. In other parts of the world, the term scholar is probably closer. Academic administrators are not typically included in this use of the term. Some sociologists have divided, but not limited, academia into four basic historical types: ancient academia, early academia, academic societies and the modern university. There are at least two models of academia: a European model developed since ancient times, as well as an American model developed by Benjamin Franklin in the mid-18th century and Thomas Jefferson in the early 19th century.

Structure

Academia is usually conceived of as divided into disciplines or fields of study. These have their roots in the subjects of the ancient trivium and quadrivium, which provided the model for Scholastic thought in the first universities in medieval Europe. The disciplines have been much revised, and many new disciplines have formed since medieval times; in general, academic fields have probably become more and more specialized since the Enlightenment, dividing their research into smaller and smaller areas. Because of this, interdisciplinary research is often prized in today's academy. It can also be made difficult by practical matters of administration and funding. In fact, many new fields of study have initially been conceived as interdisciplinary, and later become specialized disciplines in their own right (cognitive science is one recent example). In short, there is a historical process behind the internal differentiation of the academy. Most academic institutions reflect the divide of the disciplines in their administrative structure, being divided internally into departments or programs in various fields of study. Each department is typically administered and funded separately by the academic institution, though there may be some overlap and faculty members, research and administrative staff may in some cases be shared among departments. In addition, academic institutions generally have an overall administrative structure (usually including a president and several deans) which is controlled by no single department, discipline, or field of thought. Also, the tenure system, a major component of academic employment and research, serves to ensure that academia is relatively protected from political and financial pressures on thought.

Qualifications

Main article: Academic degree The degree awarded for completed study is the primary academic qualification. Typically these are, in order of completion, bachelor's degree (awarded for completion of undergraduate study), master's degree, and doctorate (awarded after graduate or postgraduate study). These are only currently being standardized in Europe as part of the Bologna process, as many different degrees and standards of time to reach each are currently awarded in different countries in Europe. In most fields the majority of academic researchers and teachers have doctorates or other terminal degrees, though in some professional and creative fields it is common for scholars and teachers to have only master's degrees.

Academic conferences

Closely related to academic publishing is the practice of bringing a number of intellectuals in a field to give talks on a paper they have written, often allowing for a wider audience to be exposed to their ideas. The papers are usually refereed first and only a smaller number of authors are invited to speak about their writing. The chance to speak can allow fuller explanation of points that may not have been clearly written or fully expanded upon in writing. The greater interactivity that is inherent in the conference format can allow for quicker feedback and criticism on the ideas discussed. Since papers are typically submitted ahead of time, conference attendees have had time to read the paper and be prepared with insightful questions if they wish.

Conflicting goals

Within academia, diverse constituent groups have diverse, and sometimes conflicting, goals. In the contemporary academy several of these conflicts are widely distributed and common. A salient example of conflict is that between the goal to increase services and the goal to reduce costs. The conflicting goals of professional education programs and general education advocates currently are playing out in the negotiation over accreditation standards.

Practice and theory

Academia is sometimes contrasted pejoratively with "practice", such as daily living, employment, and business. Critics of academia say that academic theory is insulated from the 'real world', and thus does not have to take into account the real effects, results, and risks of actually performing the actions which academics study. Academic insularity is sometimes referred to as the ivory tower. This often leads to a real or perceived tension between academics and practitioners in many fields of knowledge, particularly when an academic is critical of the actions of a practitioner. Depending on the degree of criticism, the practitioner's critique of academia could also be seen as anti-intellectualism. The balance to the view from the practitioner is that even if academia is insulated from practice in the real world, that does not mean academic study is valueless. In fact it is often seen that many academic developments turn out only much later to have great practical results. However, given that among practitioners there is a perception of academic insularity, it may increase the value and impact of the academician's studies and or opinion if she takes that insularity into account when discussing or offering criticism of a practitioner or a practice in general.

Town and gown

Universities are often culturally distinct from the towns or cities where they reside. In some cases this leads to discomfort or outright conflict between local residents and members of the university over political, economic, or other town and gown issues. Some localities in the Northeastern United States, for instance, have tried to block students from registering to vote as local residents—instead encouraging them to vote by absentee ballot at their parents' residence—in order to retain control of local politics. Other issues can include deep cultural and class divisions between local residents and university students. The film Breaking Away dramatizes such a conflict.

Commerce and scholarship

The goals of research for profit and for the sake of knowledge often conflict to some degree.

History

Ancient times

Main article: Academy Academia takes its name from the Academy, a sacred sanctuary outside the city walls of ancient Athens. It was dedicated to the legendary hero Akademos and contained several olive groves, a gymnasium and an area suited for intimate gatherings. In these gardens, largely planted and enchanced with statuary by its previous owner Cimon, the philosopher Plato conversed with followers who believed Plato would enlighten them. These informal sessions came to be known as the Academy. Plato later further developed his sessions into a method of teaching philosophy and in 387 BC, established what is known today as the Old Academy. Plato's colleagues and pupils developed spin-offs of his method. Arcesilaus, a Greek student of Plato established the Middle Academy. Carneades, another student, established the New Academy. In 335 BC, Aristotle refined the method with his own theories and established the Lyceum in another gymnasium.

Early development

Main article: Medieval university Academia as a modern institution began to take shape in the Middle Ages (AD 350 to 1450). At this time, the Roman Empire had crumbled and new regimes were beginning to take shape throughout Western Europe. Europe had just come out of the Dark Ages, a period of mass illiteracy and loss of information. The only repositories of ancient knowledge were the Roman Catholic monasteries with hermits, monks and priests compiling all the world's knowledge into elaborate hand written books. The earliest precursors of the colleges and universities were just being developed at these monasteries in order to redistribute the knowledge they had saved through the Dark Ages. One had to go to a monastery to learn about ancient Greece and Rome and the wealth of information created in those societies. Being schooled at a monastery meant academia was effectively restricted to men who wanted to become monks and priests. But by the 11th century, some Roman Catholic church leaders began a revolutionary campaign to proliferate the knowledge they had to the greater society of early Europe. They believed that Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, Homer, Sophocles and the others belonged to the people and not just for the religious. The monks and priests moved out of the monasteries and went to the city cathedrals where they opened the first schools dedicated to advanced study. Most notable of these schools were in Bologna, Paris, Oxford and Cambridge, though others were opened throughout Europe. Studying at these schools, now called universities, meant sitting through a method of education called the lecture. In a lecture, the master read aloud from manuscripts written by monks and priests while students sat at their pews reading along from their own handwritten copies of the massive amounts of texts. Only the master could determine if a student had achieved enough knowledge to graduate and organize lectures of their own. By the end of the 13th century, there were over 80 universities in Europe.

Early methods

Seven liberal arts

The seven liberal arts became codified in late antiquity through textbooks by Varro and Martianus Capella, who offered the standardized structure through which men (and it was men, by and large, for women were excluded) could visualize the world of learning. The Liberal Arts consisted of the Trivium, the basic "three ways" of Grammar, Rhetoric and Logic, and the Quadrivium, the "four ways" of Arithmetic, Geometry, Music and Astronomy. Philosophy and Theology were the all-embracing studies that encompassed the Liberal Arts, but philosophy in the early Middle Ages was largely a matter of dialectic. The didactic allegory of the 5th-century pagan Martianus Capella's De nuptiis philologiæ et Mercurii ("The wedding of philology and Mercury") was of stupendous importance in fixing the unchanging formulas of Academia for the Latin West, from the Christianized Roman Empire of the 5th century until newly available Arabic texts and the works of Aristotle became available in Western Europe in the 12th century. The conceptual scheme established by Martianus Capella, given Christian readings and interpretations, remained largely in effect in western Academia, even after the new scholasticism of the School of Chartres and the encyclopedic work of Thomas Aquinas, until the humanism of the 15th and 16th centuries opened new studies of arts and sciences.

Encyclopedists

Three medieval writers attempted to encompass the whole of Academia, the entire world of learning: Isidore of Seville, Bernard of Clairvaux and Thomas Aquinas.

Abelard

In the 12th century, French philosopher Peter Abelard instituted his own revolution in the world of academia with the 1123 publication of his book, Sic et Non. He did away with the master reading from a text aloud in lectures and instead sat his students at desks in front of two separate texts contradicting each other. Instead of telling them which method was correct and which was wrong, he required his students to ask each other questions and come up with their own conclusions. Soon, almost all universities experimented with the use of the Abelard method.

Scholasticism

In the early 13th century, Saint Thomas Aquinas revolutionized academia once again with his popularization of scholasticism. Scholasticism employed the Abelard method of education but went further. Masters offered their students long, involved resolutions in examining two opposing texts and asked them to consider religious faith in their reasoning. The resolutions were based on newly rediscovered philosophies of Aristotle which tried to balance out reason with faith in God.

Rise of academic societies

Main article: Learned society Academic societies or learned societies began as groups of academics who worked together or presented their work to each other. These informal groups later became organized and in many cases state-approved. Membership was restricted, usually requiring approval of the current members and often total membership was limited to a specific number. The Royal Society founded in 1660 was the first such academy. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences was begun in 1780 by many of the same people prominent in the American Revolution. Academic societies served both as a forum to present and publish academic work, the role now served by academic publishing, and as a means to sponsor research and support academics, a role they still serve. Membership in academic societies is still a matter of prestige in modern academia.

Eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

Academia began to splinter from its Christian roots in 18th-century colonial America. In 1753, Benjamin Franklin established the Academy and Charitable School of the Province of Pennsylvania. In 1755, it was renamed the College and Academy and Charitable School of Philadelphia. Today, it is known as the University of Pennsylvania. For the first time, academia was established as a secular institution. For the most part, church-based dogmatic points of view were no longer thrust upon students in the examination of their subjects of study. Points of view became more varied as students were free to wander in thought without having to add religious dimensions to their conclusions. In 1819, Thomas Jefferson founded the University of Virginia and developed the standards used today in organizing colleges and universities across the globe. The curriculum was taken from the traditional liberal arts, classical humanism and the values introduced with the Protestant Reformation. Jefferson offered his students something new: the freedom to chart their own courses of study rather than mandate a fixed curriculum for all students. Religious colleges and universities followed suit. The Academy movement in the U.S. in the early 19th century arose from a public sense that education in the classic disciplines needed to be extended into the new territories and states that were being formed in the Old Northwest, in western New York State, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana and Illinois. Dozens of academies were founded in the area, supported by private donations. During the Age of Enlightenment in 18th-century Europe, the academy started to change in Europe. In the beginning of the 19th century Wilhelm von Humboldt not only published his philosophical paper On the Limits of State Action, but also directed the educational system in Prussia for a short time. He introduced an academic system that was much more accessible to the lower classes. Humboldt's Ideal was an education based on individuality, creativity, wholeness, and versatility. Many continental European universities are still rooted in these ideas (or at least pay lip-service to them). They are, however, in contradiction to today's massive trend of specialization in academia.

Recent economic changes

In the 1980s and 1990s significant changes in the economics of academic life began to be felt, identified by some as a catastrophe in the making and by others as a new era with potentially huge gains for the university. Some critics identified the changes as a new "corporatization of the university." Academic jobs have been traditionally viewed by many intellectuals as desirable, because of the autonomy and intellectual freedom they allow (especially because of the tenure system), despite their low pay compared to other professions requiring extensive education. And until the mid-1970s, when federal expenditures for higher education fell sharply, there were routinely more tenure-track jobs than Ph.D.'s. Now, by contrast, despite rising tuition rates and growing university revenues (especially in the U.S.) well-paid professorial positions are rarer, replaced with poorly paid adjunct positions and graduate-student labor. People with doctorates in the sciences and, to a lesser extent, mathematics, often find jobs outside of academia (or use part-time work in industry to supplement their incomes), but a Ph.D. in the humanities and many social sciences prepares the student primarily for academic employment. However, in recent years a large proportion of such Ph.D.'s—ranging from 30 percent to 60 percent—have been unable to obtain tenure-track jobs. They must choose between adjunct positions, which are poorly paid and lack job security; teaching jobs in community colleges or in high schools, where little research is done; the non-academic job market, where they will tend to be overqualified; or some other course of study, such as law or business. Indeed, with academic institutions producing Ph.D.'s in greater numbers than the number of tenure-track professorial positions they intend to create, there is little question that administrators are cognizant of the economic effects of this arrangement. The sociologist Stanley Aronowitz wrote: "Basking in the plenitude of qualified and credentialed instructors, many university administrators see the time when they can once again make tenure a rare privilege, awarded only to the most faithful and to those whose services are in great demand" (The Knowledge Factory 76). Most people who are knowledgeable of the academic job market advise prospective graduate students not to attend graduate school if they must pay for it; graduate students who are admitted without tuition remission and a reasonable stipend are forced to incur large debts that they will be unlikely to repay quickly. In addition, most people recommend that students obtain full and accurate information about the placement record of the programs they are considering. At some programs, most Ph.D.'s get multiple tenure-track offers, whereas at others few obtain any; such information is clearly very useful in deciding what to do with the next 5–7 years of one's life. Some believe that, as a number of Baby Boomer professors retire, the academic job market will rebound. However, others predict that this will not result in an appreciable growth of tenure-track positions, as universities will merely fill their needs with low-paid adjunct positions. Aronowitz ascribed this problem to the economic restructuring of academia as a whole: :In fact, the program of restructuring on university campuses, which entails reducing full-time tenure-track positions in favor of part-time, temporary, and contingent jobs, has literally "fabricated" this situation. The idea of an academic "job market" based on the balance of supply and demand in an open competitive arena is a fiction whose effect is to persuade the candidate that she simply lost out because of bad luck or lack of talent. The truth is otherwise. (75–76) The effects of a growing pool of unemployed, underemployed, and undesirably employed Ph.D.'s on the Western countries' economies as a whole is undetermined.

Academic publishing

Main article: Academic publishing

History of academic journals

Among the earliest research journals were the Proceedings of meetings of the Royal Society in the 17th century. At that time, the act of publishing academic inquiry was controversial, and widely ridiculed. It was not at all unusual for a new discovery to be announced as an anagram, reserving priority for the discoverer, but indecipherable for anyone not in on the secret: both Isaac Newton and Leibniz used this approach. However, this method did not work well. Robert K. Merton, a sociologist, found that 92% of cases of simultaneous discovery in the 17th century ended in dispute. The number of disputes dropped to 72% in the 18th century, 59% by the latter half of the 19th century, and 33% by the first half of the 20th century. The decline in contested claims for priority in research discoveries can be credited to the increasing acceptance of the publication of papers in modern academic journals. The Royal Society was steadfast in its unpopular belief that science could only move forward through a transparent and open exchange of ideas backed by experimental evidence. Many of the experiments were ones that we would not recognize as scientific today—nor were the questions they answered. For example, when the Duke of Buckingham was admitted as a Fellow of the Royal Society on June 5, 1661, he presented the Society with a vial of powdered "unicorn horn". It was a well-accepted 'fact' that a circle of unicorn's horn would act as an invisible cage for any spider. Robert Hooke, the chief experimenter of the Royal Society, emptied the Duke's vial into a circle on a table and dropped a spider in the centre of the circle. The spider promptly walked out of circle and off the table. In its day, this was cutting-edge research.

Current status and development

Research journals have been so successful that the number of journals and of papers has proliferated over the past few decades, and the credo of the modern academic has become "publish or perish". Except for generalist journals like Science or Nature, the topics covered in any single journal have tended to narrow, and readership and citation have declined. A variety of methods reviewing submissions exist. The most common involves initial approval by the journal, peer review by two or three researchers working in similar or closely related subjects who recommend approval or rejection as well as request error correction, clarification or additions before publishing. Controversial topics may receive additional levels of review. Journals have developed a hierarchy, partly based on reputation but also on the strictness of the review policy. More prestigious journals are more likely to receive and publish more important work. Submitters try to submit their work to the most prestigious journal likely to publish it to bolster their reputation and curriculum vitae. Andrew Odlyzko, an academician with a large number of published research papers, has argued that research journals will evolve into something akin to Internet forums over the coming decade, by extending the interactivity of current Internet preprints. This change may open them up to a wider range of ideas, some more developed than others. Whether this will be a positive evolution remains to be seen. Some claim that forums, like markets, tend to thrive or fail based on their ability to attract talent. Some believe that highly restrictive and tightly monitored forums may be the least likely to thrive.

Academic dress

Main article: Academic dress Gowns have been associated with academia since the birth of the university in the 1300s and 1400s, perhaps because most early scholars were priests or church officials. Over time, the gowns worn by degree-holders have become standardized to some extent, although traditions in individual countries and even institutions have established a diverse range of gown styles, and some have ended the custom entirely, even for graduation ceremonies. At some universities, such as the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, undergraduates may be required to wear gowns on formal occasions and on graduation. Undergraduate gowns are usually a shortened version of a bachelor's gown. At other universities, for example, outside the UK or U.S., the custom is entirely absent. In general, in the U.S. and UK recipients of a bachelor's degree are entitled to wear a simple full-length robe without adornment and a mortarboard cap with a tassel. In addition, holders of a bachelor's degree may be entitled to wear a ceremonial hood at some schools. In the U.S., bachelor's hoods are rarely seen. Bachelor's hoods are generally black, but may have a silk lining denoting the subject of the degree, and are often edged in white fur. Recipients of a master's degree in the U.S. or UK wear a similar cap and gown but closed sleeves with slits, and usually receive a ceremonial hood that hangs down the back of the gown. The hood is traditionally edged with a silk or velvet strip displaying the disciplinary colour, and is lined with the university's colors. Recipients of a doctoral degree tend to have the most elaborate academic dress, and hence there is the greatest diversity at this level. In general, doctoral gowns are similar to the gowns worn by master's graduates, with the addition of velvet stripes across the sleeves and running down the front of the gown, tinted with the disciplinary color for the degree received. Holders of a doctoral degree may be entitled or obliged to wear scarlet (a special gown in scarlet) on high days and special occasions. The doctoral hood is identical in virtually every way to the master's hood, with the exception that it is generally longer, and the velvet strip is wider. While some doctoral graduates wear the mortarboard cap traditional to the lower degree levels, most wear a cap or tudor bonnet that resembles a tam o'shanter, from which a colored tassel is suspended. In modern times in the U.S. and UK, gowns are normally only worn at graduation ceremonies, although some colleges still demand the wearing of academic dress on formal occasions (official banquets and other similar affairs). In the 19th and early 20th centuries, it was more common to see the dress worn in the classroom, a practice which has now all but disappeared. One notable exception is the University of Oxford, where students are required to wear formal academic dress in the examination room.

References

- Aronowitz, Stanley. The Knowledge Factory: Dismantling the Corporate University and Creating True Higher Learning. ISBN 0807031232.

External links

- [http://palinurus.english.ucsb.edu/BIBLIO-UNIVERSITY-history-of-university.html Bibliography on the history of the university][http://www.academicforum.co.uk ,] provided by [http://palinurus.english.ucsb.edu/ Palinurus: The Academy and the Corporation], a web site from the University of California, Santa Barbara
- [http://www.acenet.edu/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Frequently_Asked_Questions3&Template=/CM/HTMLDisplay.cfm&ContentID=8086 An Academic Costume Code and An Academic Ceremony Guide] Category:Education

Academic

Structure

Qualifications

Academic conferences

Conflicting goals

Practice and theory

Town and gown

Commerce and scholarship

The goals of research for profit and for the sake of knowledge often conflict to some degree.

History

Ancient times

Early development

Early methods

Seven liberal arts

Encyclopedists

Three medieval writers attempted to encompass the whole of Academia, the entire world of learning: Isidore of Seville, Bernard of Clairvaux and Thomas Aquinas.

Abelard

Scholasticism

Rise of academic societies

Eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

Recent economic changes

Academic publishing

Main article: Academic publishing

History of academic journals

Current status and development

Academic dress

References

- Aronowitz, Stanley. The Knowledge Factory: Dismantling the Corporate University and Creating True Higher Learning. ISBN 0807031232.

External links

Registrar

Registrar may refer to:
- In education, a registrar is an official in an academic institution (a college, university, or secondary school) who handles student records. Typically, a registrar processes registration requests, schedules classes and maintains class lists, enforces the rules for entering or leaving classes, and keeps a permanent record of grades and marks.
- On the Internet, a registrar is a service that sells and manages domain names. See Domain name registry and :Category: Domain registrars.
- In courts a registrar is responsible for the administration of the court service, and may also have a quasi-judicial role.
- In UK medicine, a registrar or specialist registrar is a doctor in the process of advanced specialist training.

Archivist

An Archivist is someone who collects, organizes, and maintains control over a wide range of important information. Information can be any form of media (photographs, video or sound recordings, letters, documents, etc.) deemed important enough for permanent safekeeping. Archivists work for a variety of organizations, including government agencies, museums, historical societies, corporations, and educational institutions whose records may potentially be valuable to researchers, exhibitors, genealogists, or others. One may attend school to earn a dregree in Archival science, and/or can seek certification in the field.

Sources

[http://stats.bls.gov/oco/ Occupational Outlook Handbook] Category:Education, training, and library occupations

Public Safety

This is an article about the modern meaning of the term "public safety." See the Committee of Public Safety for the French Revolutionary governing body. Public Safety involves the protection of the general population from all manners of significant danger, injury, damage or harm, such as may occur in a natural disaster, and the prevention of the same. Although this protection is provided by those traditional organizations known as Emergency Services: the police, fire and rescue, and ambulance, in the preventative sense "public safety" must be the priority of all those who, in any way, engineer circumstances for others. Additional organizations may include consumer protection, the Emergency telephone number system, animal control officers, various utility inspectors, and others.

International

Some European Union Laws includes the competence in civil protection and safety. There is not a world civil protection authority or a common world emergency number.

Campus police

Security police (also known as special police) are the special security officers employed by (usually governmental) organizations to protect their facilities, properties, personnel, users, visitors and operations from harm and who enforce laws and administrative regulations. Security police are usually endowed with full police powers of crime prevention, arrest, law enforcement and investigation within their jurisdictions. They fall into two broad categories:
- Security guards with on-site only police type powers.
- State-certified police officers whose jurisdiction may be limited to that of the agency or organization which employs them. These include park police, campus police, hospital police, housing police, and capitol police. An example of campus police is the Los Angeles School Police Department. Examples in the United States of federal security police are the Federal Protective Service, the Veterans Affairs Police and Security Service, the United States Marshals Service, and the Federal Air Marshal Service. Some of these services may have concurrent jurisdiction with civil police agencies, such as the United States Park Police and the National Zoological Park Police. Category:Law enforcement Category:Protective service occupations Category:Police officers ja:公安警察

Local area network

A local area network (LAN) is a computer network covering a small local area, like a home, office, or small group of buildings such as a college. Current LANs are most likely to be based on switched Ethernet or Wi-Fi technology running at from 10 to 1000Mb/s (megabits per second). The defining characteristics of LANs in contrast to WANs are: (a) much higher data rates, (b) smaller geographic range and (c) they do not involve leased telecommunication lines.

Technical aspects

Although switched Ethernet is now most common at the physical layer, and TCP/IP as a protocol, historically many different options have been used (see below) and some continue to be popular in niche areas. Larger LANs will have redundant links, and routers or switches capable of using spanning tree protocol and similar techniques to recover from failed links. Many LANs will have connections to other LANs via routers and leased lines to create a WAN. Most will also have connections to the large public network known as the Internet, and links to other LANs can be 'tunnelled' across this using VPN technologies.

History

In the days before personal computers, a site might have just one central computer, with users accessing this via computer terminals over simple low-speed cabling. Networks such as IBM's SNA (Systems Network Architecture) were aimed at linking terminals or other mainframes at remote sites over leased lines—hence these were wide area networks. The first LANs were created in the late 1970s and used to create high-speed links between several large central computers at one site. Of many competing systems created at this time, Ethernet and ARCNET were the most popular. The growth of CP/M and then DOS based personal computer meant that a single site began to have dozens or even hundreds of computers. The initial attraction of networking these was to share disk and printers, which were both very expensive at the time. There was much enthusiasm for the concept and for several years from about 1983 onward computer industry pundits would regularly declare the coming year to be “the year of the LAN”. In reality the concept was marred by proliferation of incompatible physical layer and network protocol implementations, and confusion over how best to share resources. Typically each vendor would have their own type of network card, cabling, protocol, and network operating system. A solution appeared with the advent of Novell NetWare which gave: (a) even-handed support for the 40 or so competing card/cable types, and (b) a much more sophisticated operating system than most of its competitors. NetWare dominated the personal computer LAN business from early after its introduction in 1983 until the mid 1990s when Microsoft introduced Windows NT Advanced Server and Windows for Workgroups. Of the competitors to NetWare, only Banyan Vines had comparable technical strengths, but Banyan never gained a secure base. Microsoft and 3Com worked together to create a simple network operating system which formed the base of 3Com's 3+Share, Microsoft's LAN Manager and IBM's LAN Server. None of these was particularly successful. In this same timeframe Unix computer workstation from vendors such as Sun, HP, Silicon Graphics, Intergraph, NeXT and Apollo were using TCP/IP based networking. Although this market segment is now much reduced, the technologies developed in this area continue to be influential on the Internet and in both Linux and Apple Mac OS X networking.

References

- Charp, S. (Ed.). (1994). Networking & telecommunications. "T.H.E." ("Technical Horizons in Education"), 21(10). (EJ 483 802-807)
- Charp, S. (Ed.). (1995). Networking & telecommunications. "T.H.E." ("Technical Horizons in Education"), 22(9). (EJ 501 732-735)
- Communications, computers, and networks. (1991). [Special Issue.] "Scientific American," 265(3).
- Ellis, T. I. (1984). "Microcomputers in the school office. ERIC Digest." Syracuse, NY: ERIC Clearinghouse on Education Management. (ED 259 451)
- Klausmeier, J. (1984). "Networking and microcomputers. ERIC Digest." Syracuse, NY: ERIC Clearinghouse on Information Resources. (ED 253 256)
- Neubarth, M. (Ed.). (1995, October). The Internet in education. [Special issue]. "Internet World," 6(10). (ERIC ED pending, IR 531 431-438)
- Rienhold, F. (1989). "Use of local area networks in schools. ERIC Digest." Syracuse, NY: ERIC Clearinghouse on Information Resources. (ED 316 249)

External links

- [http://www.ericdigests.org/1996-3/local.htm Local Area Networks for K-12 Schools]
- [http://www.ericdigests.org/pre-9214/local.htm Use of Local Area Networks in Schools.]
- [http://www.ericdigests.org/pre-922/office.htm Microcomputers in the School Office]
- [http://compnetworking.about.com/cs/homenetworking/a/homenetguide_2.htm How to Build a Wireless Home Network (Tutorial)]
- [http://www.homenetworkhelp.info Home Network and Computer Help (Tutorials and help)] Category:Computer networks Category:Office equipment ja:Local Area Network th:แลน

President

President is a title held by many leaders of organizations, companies, universities, and countries. Etymologically, a "president" is one who presides, who sits in leadership (from Latin prae- "before" + sedere "to sit"). Originally, the term usually referred to the presiding officer of a ceremony or meeting (i.e. chairman); but today it most commonly refers to an official with executive powers. Among other things, President is today a common title for the head of state of a republic, whether popularly elected, chosen by the legislature or a special electoral college. It is also often adopted by dictators. The bulk of this article is dedicated to this usage by heads of state. For more on other kinds of presidents, see Non-Governmental Presidents, below. For more on the usage of term "president", see President (history of the term). President (history of the term) (1789-1797)]]

History

Though there had been several republican countries in the past, it was the United States of America which popularized the position of President when the post was created as the new republic's Head of State (and Head of Government) in 1789. As South America became independent from Spanish rule, so too did these new republics adopt the title of "President" for their leaders, creating constitutions purposely similar to that of the US. The first European president was the President of France, a post created in the Second Republic of 1848. (The First Republic had harkened back to the ancient Roman Republic by appointing several consuls at its head.) The first Asian president was Emilio Aguinaldo the President of the 1st Republic of the Philippines (1898) though the first Asian President recognized internationally was the President of the Republic of China (1912), and the first African President was the President of Liberia created in 1848. Today, the majority of countries have a President as their Head of State.

Presidents in democratic countries and international organizations

Presidential systems

In states with what is called a Presidential system of government, the President is also the head of government, as well as the head of state. Countries with such a system include the United States and most nations in Latin America. In this system the office of President is very powerful, both in practice and theory. In the United States, the President is indirectly elected by the U.S. Electoral College made up of electors chosen by voters in the presidential election. In most U.S. states, each elector is committed to voting for a specified candidate determined by the popular vote in each state, so that the people, in voting for each elector, is in effect voting for the candidate. However, in several close U.S. elections (notably 1876, 1888, 2000), while one candidate received the most popular votes, another candidate managed to win more electoral votes in the Electoral College and so won the presidency.

Parliamentary systems

2000 (1950-1962)]] Other states have what is called a Parliamentary system of government, in which the President is only head of state, and the Prime Minister is the head of government. Countries with such systems include Finland, Germany, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy and Singapore, as well as Portugal (which has a very similar system but slightly different from the aforementioned). Under such a system, executive authority is often vested in the president, with the Government governing in his or her name, producing phrases such as "His/Her Excellency's Government" in some formal state documentation. However a president may also possess some reserve powers or powers which can be exercised by the President without formal advice (ie, binding instruction) from 'His' or 'Her' Governnment. Usually in parliamentary systems, the president's role is primarily ceremonial. However, due to the combination of constitutionally established "reserve powers," protocol (which may require them to formally chair cabinet meetings and/or have access to all cabinet memoranda), and his or her role as the person in whose name executive authority is vested, often gives the president a degree of informal influence not often publicly realised. An example of this influence is the following: between 1870 and 1940, and again from 1945 to 1958, France operated a classic parliamentary system of government, with power in a cabinet chosen by the National Assembly, and a largely though not totally symbolic president; in 1877, President Mac-Mahon showed that his office was constitutionally significant when he dismissed the then prime minister before calling new elections, in the hope of achieving a royalist majority to restore the monarchy (the plan failed).

"President of Government" in parliamentary systems

Mac-Mahon (1982-1996)]] Some countries with parliamentary systems use the term 'president' in connection with the head of parliamentary government, often as President of the Government, President of the Council of Ministers or President of the Executive Council. However, such an official is explicitly not the president of the country. Rather, he or she is called a president in an older sense of the word to denote the fact that he or she heads the