Distributive Justice and Higher Education Resource Allocation: Perceptions of Fairness

Although the organizational justice theoretical framework has been used frequently across a wide variety of settings, its use in examining higher education institutions has been limited. The purpose of the study reported here was to begin the process of applying this framework to higher education by identifying the distributive justice sub-principles of equity in this setting. For the study we interviewed nine academic deans across diverse disciplines and identified five sub-principles. These sub-principles of equity were (a) quantity and quality of research publications, (b) external research funding, (c) quality of teaching, (d) impact on students, and (e) quality service. There were differences in the relative importance of these five possible contributions to the institution, as well as how they were assessed. The five sub-principles can be used in future research to examine higher education resource distributions and their impact more fully.