ボーダーフリー大学教員の大学教授職に対する認識 : 「大学教授職の変容に関する国際調査」を用いた基礎的分析

Today, the academic profession has been facing some issues on reconstructions of its missions, roles and functions caused by environmental changes surrounding universities. These issues seem to be especially serious in low-prestige universities. Consequently, this paper conducts a basic analysis using the "International Survey of the Changing Academic Profession" in order to make clear how faculty who belong to low-prestige universities relate to the changes occurring in the academic profession. In short, this paper clarifies what sort of difficulties faculty in these universities have been encountering, with a strong focus on younger faculty. The key findings are as follows.

The faculty of low-prestige universities generally do not always have lower job satisfaction and do have a more positive view as a whole of their current job situation than those of high-prestige universities. However, the younger faculty of low prestige universities do seem to have been struggling to balance the demands of teaching and research.

There are three possible key factors which cause younger faculty to suffer from such difficulties. First, the low-prestige universities basically do not expect their faculty to be so active in research. Second, the faculty of low-prestige universities generally provide more practical, concrete and easy-to-understand course contents as well as appropriate teaching methods for those of their students with learning difficulties, and consequently their teaching activities are likely to be disconnected from their research activities. Third, the low-prestige universities have poor frameworks for encouragement of educational improvements systematically, although they emphasize their teaching activities.