Faculty conduct their teaching and research activity with high levels of autonomy as professionals (Braxton & Bayer, 1999). This autonomy is safeguarded by academic freedom which is one of the bases for the academic profession (Finkelstein, 1984). The autonomy is granted to have free inquiry in their respective fields so that they can develop expertise. A similar autonomy is granted to faculty members in their advising and supervising both undergraduate and graduate students (Braxton & Bayer, 1999; Braxton, Proper, & Bayer, 2011). Especially graduate education requires close supervision, and highly decentralized and privatized relationships while there is an asymmetrical power relationship between faculty and graduate students (Fox, 2000).

Norms represent shared beliefs in the work of faculty members as professionals of expected behaviors in each circumstance.  Professionalism is based on the ideal of service to protect the welfare of clients (Rossi & Berk, 1985; Merton, 1968). In graduate school, the clients are graduate students. Graduate students socialize into norms through seminars, courses, projects, laboratories, theses, qualifying examinations, presentations, and publications. These norms describe what is appropriate and what is inappropriate behavior when professionals are confronted with making choices prescribed or proscribed patterns of behavior (Braxton, Proper & Bayer, 2011).

When there is no normative structure in place, faculty members would have been left to behave as they consider appropriate. Therefore, norms are required for faculty members who do not practice self-regulation and when there is alleged misconduct or violation of norms, they are addressed through institutions and professional organizations. Norms create moral boundaries for the functioning of social systems for pattern maintenance, namely research and teaching (Parsons & Platt, 1973). Norms also serve as proscriptions (what should be prohibited) and prescriptions (what is recommended) of standards of professional behavior for faculty and graduate students (stewardship) to function effectively to protect the moral standards of academic disciplines (Golde, 2006). Finally, norms establish limits for the scope of reforms in graduate training (Braxton, Eimers & Bayer, 1996; Braxton, Proper & Bayer, 2011).

This study aims to investigate and delineate Braxton, Proper & Bayer’s (2011) inviolable and admonitory norms in graduate teaching and mentoring from faculty members’ perspective in the context of Turkish HE. Inviolable norms include disrespect toward student efforts, misappropriation of student work, harassment of students, whistle-blowing suppression, and directed research malfeasance, while admonitory norms are neglectful teaching, inadequate advising/mentoring, degradation of faculty colleagues, negligent thesis/dissertation advising, insufficient course structure, pedagogical narrowness, student assignment misallocation, disregard for graduate program. The study aims to contribute to a comprehensive understanding of normative behaviors in graduate education and provide insights into the factors influencing these norms in a non-western context. As such, this study poses the following research questions:

• What are inviolable and admonitory norms in graduate teaching and mentoring based on faculty members’ views?
• How do inviolable and admonitory norms in graduate teaching and mentoring differ based on gender, academic title, academic field, country of Ph.D., university-type academic orientation, and administrative duty?

Inviolable norms are to protect the welfare of students either directly or indirectly as clients and they are related to colleagues in departments and teaching roles. Admonitory norms are to protect different clients such as students, academic discipline, and faculty. Previous research also revealed that gender, academic title, academic field, country of Ph.D., and university type have in significant relationship with teaching and mentoring norms (Anderson & Louis, 1994; Braxton & Bayer, 1999; Braxton, Bayer, & Noseworthy, 2002; Braxton, Proper & Bayer, 2011; Helland, 2010; Hodum & James, 2010). Additionally, we tested the impact of faculty academic orientation and administrative duty within our sample.

The design of the study is a survey (Creswell, 2012) to obtain attitudes, opinions, behaviors, or characteristics of a group of people to describe trends about the topic and to test research questions. The study sample consists of faculty members from HEIs in Türkiye. To increase the representativeness of the sample, participants from different HEIs have been invited to study. As a result, 764 faculty members from 158 departments in 115 public and foundation universities provided large and comprehensive data. The Graduate Teaching and Mentoring Behaviors Inventory has been used to assess the normative behaviors of Turkish faculty. It was developed by Braxton, Proper & Bayer (2011) such that there are 124 behaviors or items in the scale. These behaviors are constructed on the dimensions of supervising graduate research assistants, mentoring and advising, planning for a graduate course or seminar, in-class practice and behaviors, class-seminar grading and examination practices, directing the thesis or dissertation, and other behaviors regarding graduate students and graduate program. They are classified as inviolable norms which are the strongest proscriptive norms, and admonitory norms which are less proscriptive. It was accompanied by a 5-point Likert-type grading. The survey also includes questions related to personal demographics and educational background, career characteristics, and disciplinary and institutional affiliations. This instrument is unique since it is theoretically grounded and quite comprehensive since includes researching, teaching, and mentoring. Both descriptive and inferential statistics have been performed. The z values have been estimated for each inviolable and admonitory norm, and 34 outliers have been cleared (Çokluk, Şekercioğlu & Büyüköztürk, 2014). Skewness and kurtosis vary between -1.5 and +1.5 based on each inviolable and admonitory norm. All these imply that the dataset is normally distributed (Tabachnick & Fidell, 2013). Apart from descriptive analyses, independent samples t-test and one-way ANOVA were used to test significant differences among groups. Scheffe post hoc test has been preferred as a more cautious method for reducing the risk of Type 1 errors. Lastly, Cronbach’s Alpha coefficients are estimated as .89 for inviolable norms and .96 for admonitory norms.

The means of age (M = 49.32, SD = 9.23) and professional seniority (M = 15.17, SD = 10.43) indicate that the participating group is middle-aged. Among research performance indicators, the publication of the article (M = 3.48, SD = .96) is higher than that of the chapter (M = 1.51, SD = 1.51) and that of the book (M = .66, SD = 1.09) during the last three years. As for teaching and mentoring performance indicators, we estimated the mean of committee membership except for mentees (M = 3.01, SD = 1.39), the number of graduate courses taught (M = 2.93, SD = 1.36) and the number of graduate students in the program (M = 43.29, SD = 64.70) during the last three years. The mean for inviolable norms (M = 4.39, SD = .38) is higher than that of admonitory norms (M = 4.07, SD = .41). Research results based on independent samples t-tests and one-way ANOVAs indicate that: • Female faculty rebuke disrespect toward student efforts, harassment of students, directed research malfeasance, degradation of faculty colleagues, negligent thesis/dissertation advising, pedagogical narrowness, and student assignment misallocation in the Turkish setting. • Assistant professors disdain student assignment misallocation compared to full professors and associate professors. • Faculty members of soft sciences rebuke misappropriation of student work, directed research malfeasance, degradation of faculty colleagues, negligent thesis/dissertation advising, insufficient course structure, student assignment misallocation, and graduate program disregard in the Turkish setting. • Faculty who graduated from Turkish universities rebuke degradation of faculty colleagues while outsiders disdain whistle-blowing suppression. • Faculty members with research orientation disdain pedagogical narrowness while teaching-oriented faculty rebuke student assignment misallocation. • There are no statistically significant differences for the remaining comparisons. • University type and administrative duty are not decisive factors in faculty members’ perception of normative behaviors related to teaching and mentoring.

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