2 Studies Suggest Just How Different International Faculty Members Are

[Harold Schiffman]

Monday, April 20, 2009


2 Studies Suggest Just How Different International Faculty Members Are
By PETER SCHMIDT


San Diego


Two new studies offer fresh insights into how foreign faculty members
at American colleges relate to their jobs and to their colleagues,
potentially shedding light on both differences between American
colleges and those abroad and on the role gender plays in the work of
professors.

One of the studies, which were presented here at the American
Educational Research Association’s annual conference last week,
reveals marked differences between foreign faculty members who earned
their undergraduate degrees in the United States and those who did so
abroad. It found that those with foreign degrees were more productive
than those who had earned degrees in the United States. And the latter
turn out to not be as different from their American counterparts as
had been concluded in previous studies that did not consider where
those faculty members had been educated.

The other study, comparing female faculty members who are not U.S.
citizens with those who are, found that female professors from abroad
are much more involved in research and less involved in teaching than
their American counterparts, and are thus posing new challenges to old
ideas about the role of women in academe.

The study examining differences between international faculty members
with foreign or American undergraduate degrees was conducted by three
researchers in the department of educational leadership and policy
studies at the University of Kansas: Dongbin Kim, an assistant
professor, and two professors, Susan Twombly and Lisa Wolf-Wendel.

The three researchers based their analysis, summarized in a paper
titled “International Faculty: Experiences of Academic Life and
Productivity in U.S. Universities,” on 2003 data from the National
Science Foundation’s "Survey of Doctorate Recipients" and from the
National Center for Education Statistics’ Integrated Postsecondary
Education Data System. They focused solely on tenure-track faculty
members at four-year colleges, with foreign-born faculty members
accounting for 19 percent of the total population they studied. Of the
international faculty members they examined, about one-third had
earned their undergraduate degrees in the United States and the rest
had obtained their degrees abroad.


Foreigners Are More Productive

While past studies have found that international faculty members are
both much more productive and less satisfied with their jobs than
those from the United States, the three Kansas researchers found that,
at least in terms of research productivity, foreign faculty members
with American undergraduate degrees are really not all that different
from their American peers. There is no statistically significant
difference in the number of articles they wrote or co-authored and got
published annually.

International faculty members who earned their undergraduate degrees
abroad are much more productive, however. The paper says the reasons
for this are unclear, especially given the relative dissatisfaction
such professors feel toward their jobs. The Kansas researchers offer
several possible explanations: That only the best and brightest
scholars of other countries secure tenure-track faculty positions at
American colleges; that the foreign colleges where such faculty
members received their undergraduate degrees were more selective or
more focused in their offerings than the American colleges their
colleagues attended; or that faculty members with foreign degrees
simply work harder, perhaps because they are more focused or isolated
or believe they need to work especially hard to gain tenure or earn
citizenship.

Compared with domestic faculty members and those who were born abroad
but earned their undergraduate degrees here, international professors
with foreign degrees are more likely to be male, to be married, and to
have stay-at-home spouses. The paper suggests that those background
factors may also play a role.

The paper sheds some light on American faculty members as well,
finding that their productivity appears linked to their exposure to
faculty members from abroad. All other things being equal, the larger
the proportion of international faculty members on a campus, the more
productive its domestic faculty members are.


Foreign Women Do More 'Masculine' Work

The other paper discussed here, “International and Citizen Women
Faculty Productivity at Research Universities in the United States,”
was based on an analysis performed by Kate Mamiseishvili, an assistant
professor of higher-education leadership at the University of Arkansas
at Fayetteville. She restricted her study to research universities,
where international faculty members tend to be clustered, and defined
international faculty members as those who were not U.S. citizens.

Using the U.S. Education Department’s 2004 "National Study of
Postsecondary Education Faculty," Ms. Mamiseishvili compared survey
data on 230 women who were U.S. citizens with data on 230 noncitizen
women in the same disciplines or types of research institutions.

She found that the foreign women she studied were substantially less
productive than the American counterparts in terms of the time they
spent teaching and working with students. They were substantially more
productive, however, when it came to research, as measured by their
publication records and the numbers of presentations or exhibitions
they had given over the previous two years.

Although citizen and noncitizen women did not significantly differ
from each other in the time they had devoted to service activities,
the international female academics were substantially more likely to
perform such activities within their own institutions.

Ms. Mamiseishvili’s paper says her findings “contradict the gendered
division of labor that is so often talked about when discussing women
faculty participation in work activities.” The foreign women she
studied were “more involved in the work role that is considered more
masculine, such as research, and less engaged in more feminine work
roles, such as teaching,” than were other female faculty members.

The paper suggests that faculty members who are both female and
foreign-born are doubly marginalized in the academy, which might put
them under pressure to prove themselves to their peers and their
employers through research, the activity that their institutions are
most focused on.

The paper offers the caveat that her analysis did not try to account
for the possible influence of race and ethnicity on her findings. Of
the women she studied, 87.1 percent of the U.S. citizens and just 56
percent of the noncitizens were white.

>>From the Chronicle of Higher Education, 4/20/09

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