Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis is a baseline, population study, designed to create historical and contemporary contexts for and to inform current understanding of the department chair function in Canadian universities. Chairs are explored from five discrete yet dependent perspectives to discern distinctions and associations among institutions, disciplines/fields of study and individuals: What is the job? Who holds the job? Does formal position prescription match practice? Has the job changed over time? What makes department chairs job ready and effective? Canvassing 43 predominantly English-language public universities in 10 provinces, the inquiry encompasses four data sources: (1) 58 university policy documents and faculty association collective agreements; (2) a national electronic survey in two versions – for incumbent chairs, which generated replies from 511 email recipients, representing 38 per cent of the 1,333 individuals in the population approached; and for incumbent deans, sought for their views of the chair function, which drew the participation of 79 email recipients of 269 prospective contributors, signifying a 29 per cent response rate; (3) telephone interviews with 30 chairs and 15 deans (active, former and retired); and (4) curricula vitae of 134 chairs and deans (active, former and retired). The findings confirm the longstanding tradition of the job’s temporary nature, irrespective of institution and discipline. Candidates are usually drawn from tenured faculty ranks, primarily from the immediate unit. The notion of non-academic professionals from outside the university setting occupying the role is viewed by chairs and deans with disdain and is not evident in practice, either in hard pure and applied fields of study such as science, engineering and medicine, or in the soft pure and applied areas such as arts, business and education. The notion of a business-oriented approach to departmental administration appears to be largely a function of an institution’s size and its culture shaped by senior management rather than its location, age and type or a specific discipline with the exception of medicine and engineering. Chairs remain members of the collective bargaining unit in unionized faculty associations during their term of office and typically deem their ability to lead professorial peers with authority constrained as an equal.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.005 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.013 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
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".