Finding professional true to self-authenticity in public university faculty experience

ABSTRACT

Within the expanding climate of academic capitalism, the public university faculty’s professional true to self-authenticity is diminishing. For faculty, professional true to self-authenticity is a genuineness embedded within an absolute, natural and core self-expression of academic professionalism. In this current study, a research platform (psycho-social construct and self-appraisal instrument) was developed to assess faculty’s professional true to self-authenticity based on faculty identity, self-aspect of authenticity, durable occupational happiness, autonomy (latitude of academic freedom) and self-competency. Faculty at a public university completed a web-based questionnaire derived from the proposed research platform. Through factor analysis, factor scores were obtained to perform a multiple regression. The result of this data analysis showed the possibility of an inverse relationship between durable happiness and self-competency for public university faculty. Overall, this study offers important researchable directions for future investigations within professional self-authenticity of faculty.

KEYWORDS:

• Faculty authenticity
• durable occupational happiness
• self-competency
• autonomy
• self-aspect
• academic capitalism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Kenny A. Hendrickson http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6382-458X

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation under grant no. [1463991].