Professors are increasingly encouraged to adopt multiple role relationships with their students. Regardless of professor intent, these relationships carry risks. Left unexamined is whether student–faculty social multiple relationships impact student in-class behaviors. Provocatively, our exploratory study provides empirical support suggesting that when undergraduate students perceive that their professors engage in the multiple faculty–student relationships of friendships, drinking (alcohol) relationships, and sexual partnerships, students report they are more likely to engage in uncivil behaviors in the professor’s classroom. Accordingly, our study provides (...) a backdrop against which to think more substantively about the professorial role and the boundaries that accompany it. (shrink)

International education is impacted by multiple discourses, in particular the discourse of university as an educational institution responsible for producing and curating knowledge for the public good, pursuing truth and transforming student life, and the neoliberal marketing discourse which portrays the university as a business organization providing a service for international students as customers/consumers. Following a multimodal discourse analytic perspective, this study examines ‘Why Choose’ webpages of one British and two Australian universities to identify how the apparently conflicting higher education (...) and neoliberal marketing discourses are managed in the interdiscursive space using language, images and videos. The results reveal that ‘Why Choose’ webpages are hybrid texts where the discourse of higher education is upheld in relation to the neoliberal marketing discourse through multimodal strategies of accentuation, infusion and progression. The study argues for the necessity of undertaking a multimodal discourse approach to understand how various positions are negotiated interdiscursively in online media. (shrink)

An extensive literature has focused on the impact of new public management oriented structural changes on academics’ practice and identity. These critical studies have been resolute in concluding that NPM inevitably leads to a degeneration of academics’ ethos and values. Drawing from the moral philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre, we argue that these previous analyses have overlooked the moral agency of the academics and their role in ‘moralizing’ and consequently shaping the ethical nature of their practices. The paper provides a new (...) theoretical understanding of NPM-oriented reforms in light of the virtue ethics approach, thereby directing the attention to the moral character and moral agency of academics. Our analysis of interviews collected in the business department of a Danish university provides an example of how individuals have divergent ethical understandings of these structural changes and enact/resist pre-defined social roles in different ways. While in some cases the NPM agenda of the institutions has triggered internal moral conflict and a crisis of moral character, in other cases the new logic resonates with academics’ values and evaluative standards. Partially departing from the theoretical ground of MacIntyre, we conclude that academics can play a crucial role in shaping the morality of NPM-oriented institutions and in transforming these settings into suitable contexts for the cultivation of virtues. (shrink)

MacIntyre’s earlier work and concern with social science enquiry not only exposes its limits, but also provides an insight into how its knowledge claims have been put to ideological use. He maintains that the institutional embodiment of these ideological ideas is the bureaucratic manager who has had a negative role to play in social structures because managerialism revolves around a notable absence, or at least marginalisation of conflict since the nature of rational debate and conflict is unpredictable and unmanageable, and (...) hence would seriously undermine the perception trying to be projected of a competent technocrat in control of their organisation. MacIntyre, in lamenting the place of contemporary universities in society, highlights how most universities have become business corporations and irremediably fragmented and now serve purposes so alien and foreign from their initial conception as sites of constrained mutual rational debate and conflict. As a result, MacIntyre’s account of how managerial authority is justified in bureaucratic institutions and its social role and character is scathing and particularly apt for explaining the malaise of contemporary universities. In order to overcome this malaise, I want to struggle against the corporatisation of universities by revitalising and extending upon MacIntyre’s argument that a university is set up for constrained disagreement and imposed participation in conflict, and also highlight the importance of reason or wisdom and its development because it enables us to see the interconnectedness and interrelationship between different forms of knowledge that can lead us to truth and of the good. (shrink)