Abstract:

The important role of academic community in achieving a university’s goals has been emphasised by many higher education institutions. It is a generally held belief that a university can only accomplish its tasks with the involvement of the entirety of its academic community: scholars, students and administrative employees. The status of the students as fully-fledged members of this group is an especially important aspect of this belief. It is assumed that a student helps create the academic community and is its active member as a result. A student should cooperate with the university in order to achieve mutual benefit.

However, during the recent years, it has been observed that students, in their daily study practice, are perceived as stakeholders (clients) of universities. This may be related to the fact that, often, “higher education is perceived (...) as another object of consumption” [Readings, 2017, p. 52]. As consumers, students are not as much interested in acquiring knowledge, skills and social competence as in completing courses, passing exams and, ultimately, acquiring a diploma without putting any considerable effort into building community relations. Students who assume a transactional attitude cannot be treated as fully-fledged members of the academic community.

The question arises: how important are community values in universities in the current environment? This paper, being in opposition to the transactional attitude in student-university relations, assumes the following hypothesis: “Only the process of building long-term relations based on commitment allows to fully satisfy the needs and expectations of both a university and its students”.

It appears that the best place to start and at the same time a necessary condition for a student to exist in the academic community is on one hand the university creating such an opportunity and on the other commitment from the student. Thus, the purpose of this paper is primarily to evaluate the students’ loyalty and commitment as the features of a relational model, and secondly to measure the level of transactional attitude which is mainly based on observance of regulations, norms, legal acts and contracts. Meyer and Allen's three-component model of organizational commitment has been utilised to allow the analysis of all aspects of the studied phenomenon. The final purpose in the context of the featured hypothesis is a measurement of the benefits resulting from engagement based relations, both for the student and the university. The results of an empirical study conducted on over 360 polish university students will be presented in this paper.

References:
[1] Readings B., Uniwersytet w ruinie, Narodowe Centrum Kultury, Warszawa 2017.

Keywords:

Academic community, student, commitment.