Roger Baldwin

Roger Baldwin is Professor of Higher, Adult, and Lifelong Education at Michigan State University. Baldwin received his Ph.D. in higher education from the University of Michigan. His master’s degree in counseling and student personnel administration is from Cornell University. His B.A. in psychology is from Hiram College.  

Baldwin’s research interests include academic career development, conditions in the academic workplace, shifting faculty appointment patterns and organizational change. He is particularly interested in the evolving mission and curriculum of liberal arts colleges. Baldwin has written extensively on academic career stages and the changing experiences and needs of faculty as their careers progress over time.  

Baldwin’s co-authored Teaching without Tenure: Policies and Practices for a New Era with Jay Chronister of the University of Virginia. The book concerns the growing use of full-time, non-tenure-track faculty. It offers suggestions for improving the working conditions and performance of faculty in non-traditional appointments.

For the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Baldwin studied the implementation and impact of the Foundation’s Faculty Career Enhancement grants, a collaborative program that encouraged 23 liberal arts colleges to support faculty across the academic life cycle. Findings from this study are presented in “Collaborating to Learn, Learning to Collaborate” in the Fall 2007 issue of Peer Review, a publication of the Association of American Colleges and Universities.

Baldwin has done collaborative research with MSU colleagues on the mid-career faculty experience to assess the interests and career development needs of professors in this distinct, but ill-defined, stage of academic life. His research on mid-career faculty has been published in the Review of Higher Education, Liberal Education, and Change magazine. Baldwin’s mid-career faculty research with Deborah DeZure and other colleagues from the Michigan State University Office of Faculty and Organizational Development won the Robert J. Menges Award at the 2007 annual conference of the Professional and Organizational Development Network (POD).

With support from the Erickson Endowment, Baldwin is currently studying the growing number of retirement organizations in higher education. As the population of healthy retirees continues to grow, society needs more structures to ease the transition to a vital, fulfilling retirement. Retirement organizations at academic institutions, which take several different forms, are emerging as a means to maintain a connection to one’s institution, remain intellectually engaged, and provide fulfilling service after formal retirement. Baldwin’s research looks at the benefits, impact, and cost effectiveness of these relatively new organizational structures at colleges and universities. 

Baldwin is a member of the Board of Trustees of Hiram College in Ohio where he chairs the Faculty and Academic Affairs Committee.