Journal of Higher Education and Science

18-27

Authors: Zafer ÇELİK, Bekir S. GÜR

Since the establishment of the Council of Higher Education in 1981, university autonomy and the governance of higher education system in Turkey have been contentious topics. There is a public demand for decreasing the power of the Council and increasing the autonomy of universities in Turkey. Notwithstanding the consensus on reforming the higher education system, there is no consensus on the content of the reform. Accordingly, there is a need for scientific studies presenting the state of higher education in Turkey from an internationally comparative perspective. This study includes three parts. The first part investigates the governance of higher education systems based on the examples from the OECD and Europe. The second part discusses the governance of higher education institution and how the institutional autonomy is defined. The third part presents the changes that the governance of higher education system in Turkey underwent from a historical perspective. In the conclusion, based on the international comparisons, some policy recommendations are proposed in order to contribute to the reform discussions in Turkey.

36-50

Authors: Erkan YAMAN, Kayhan RUÇLAR

The aim of this study is to determine the relationship between the sense of organizational silence and the organizational culture the instructors perceived. In this study, the scale for determining organizational culture developed by İpek (1999) and the scale for measuring organizational silence developed by Çakıcı (2007) and adapted by Soycan (2010) are used. No remarkable difference was found in the academic staff's sense of organizational silence degree according to their genders and educational backgrounds. It was seen that the instructors' sense of organizational silence had remarkable differences according to their age group, faculty, sense of administration type in their institutions, frequency of their face-to-face communication with their administrators and their thoughts of speaking clearly with their administrators. It was observed that research assistants had a significantly higher sense of organizational silence than the lecturers in the sense of ‘Lack of Experience'. It was seen that academicians who had 1-5 years of employment period had the highest sense of organizational silence while those who had 21 years or more employment period had the lowest sense of organizational silence in the sense of ‘Lack of Experience' of organizational silence. When the points that participant academicians got from organizational silence and organizational culture scales analyzed in the correlation table, it was found out that there was a remarkable relationship between the academicians' sense of organizational silence and sense of organizational culture. This relationship was a medium-level negative relationship between subdimensions of two scales. A medium-level negative relationship between the organizational silence (total) and the organizational culture was also seen. Based on the findings, university administrators were proposed to create a participant culture in their institutions as well as to encourage instructors to speak clearly and increase the frequency of contact with them.

56-66

Authors: Dilek KEKEÇ MORKOÇ, Mustafa DOĞAN

Many institutions prepare websites for their users in order to meet the increasing need for information in the era of change. The importance of the internet is undeniable in distribution and sharing of information. The internet of the institutions and their methods of usage and functions via websites are one of those factors that improve the institutions’ reputation and prestige. Particularly, while universities convey a lot of knowledge/messages to their actual and potential users via websites, on the other hand many users are able to access to any information they need through these pages. In this study, the importance of university websites and their use of promotional purposes were examined via the websites of departments providing four-year tourism education. The first three tourism departments of State and Foundation Universities with the highest base score according to 2012-2013 ‘Student Selection and Placement Center’ were selected and examined with content analysis method. In this research, the question of how these six universities selected within the scope of case studies use their websites belonging to their tourism departments as a promotion tool is tried to be answered.