Exploring the ambiguity: what faculty leaders really think of sustainability in higher education
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine how a cohort of university faculty leaders in Canadian universities conceptualize sustainable development, sustainable universities, the role universities play in achieving a sustainable future, key issues facing the university, and the barriers to implementing sustainability initiatives on campus. Design/methodology/approach Research was collected through in‐depth interviews with university faculty leaders from university members of the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada. Interviews included both closed and open‐ended questions and two checklists focused on sustainable development and sustainable universities. Interview transcripts are analyzed through the identification of respondent themes and using N'Vivo software. Findings The majority of participants demonstrated they had previously given thought to their own understanding of sustainable development, but less had thought about the term sustainable university. The majority of participants would like to see their institutions incorporate sustainability in the avenues of education, research and daily operations. Participants agreed that the most obvious barriers to sustainability were financial and that leadership, incentive and demand are required to move forward with improving sustainability at universities. Originality/value There are few studies that explore the conceptualizations of sustainability, what constitutes a “sustainable university” and what role universities should play in achieving sustainability held by major stakeholders, including faculty leaders. Higher education scholars share a reasonably common understanding of these concepts, but if universities are accountable for creating a sustainable future, all university stakeholders too must share a common understanding. This paper attempts to make a contribution to this significant gap in the literature.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.015 | 0.021 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".