Promotion & tenure resources/outreach for teaching faculty

Public higher education has seen a drastic shift in the makeup of its professoriate over the last several decades. Whereas in 1975 contingent faculty made up 55% of all professors in America, that number rose to just over 75% by 2011. This disinvestment in tenured faculty has concrete consequences for the working conditions of the professoriate, given that contingent faculty often work under conditions that erode traditional practices and norms of academic life, including shared governance, academic freedom, and the exercise of peer review to name a few. My question is this: which policies, practices, or institutional arrangements have been most effective for improving the working conditions of contingent faculty on public college and university campuses?  I hypothesize that contingent working conditions will be most positive at universities and colleges that have unionized non-tenure track faculty  and whose members are actively involved, where faculty and administration have worked cooperatively for change, and where the administration has taken action to transition adjunct positions into tenure-track positions. In order to test this, I will take two cases and assess the active policies taken to address the issues of contingent faculty, followed by a discussion of each one’s manner of implementation. In the end, I hope to provide a model of the prevailing best practices alongside the most feasible manners of implementing them.

"The challenges facing tenure-track faculty in the areas of digital technology are unique. The relative infancy of web and multimedia technology has created an unexpected quandary for digital scholars teaching within academia. In many cases, these teachers are the vanguard for the movement to educate students and faculty across disciplines in how to best utilize new technology in the academic, artistic, and economic sectors of society. Until now, professors teaching in the area of digital technology have been traditionally judged by the liberal arts definition of scholarship. However, in the case of new and evolving fields of study, there are alternative criteria that would be better suited for the digital disciplines, and would serve as a more accurate assessment on the quality of faculty scholarship as they march towards tenure, promotion and reappointment. Under the current system there are numerous institutional biases and obstructions that unnecessarily complicate the pathway to tenure and promotion for faculty working with technology. If digital scholars are going to advance within the academy, the existing tenure and promotion system must be redefined and expanded to include a more
modern definition of intellectual excellence."

Texas Tech University: Lubbock, Texas 2 The Council for Programs in Technical and Scientific Communication (CPTSC) was founded in 1973 to promote programs in technical and scientific communication, promote research in technical and scientific communication, develop opportunities for the exchange of ideas and information concerning programs, research, and career opportunities, assist in the development and evaluation of new programs in technical and scientific communication, if requested, and p romote exchange of information between this organization and interested part i e s .

Junior faculty face greater challenges as a result of time constraints and administrative duties, which may impact their quest for tenure and promotion. Faculty may feel overwhelmed and frustrated by their countless responsibilities, including administrative duties, while tenure and promotion guidelines and requirements appear to be increasing. Using an electronic mailing list populated primarily with social work educators, this Web-based survey explored the perceptions of social work junior faculty regarding their willingness to engage in scholarly activities and their workload demands. The purpose of this mixed method study was to explore the perceptions of untenured and recently tenured social work faculty (n=97) about scholarship expectations, their desires for producing scholarship, and their perceptions about tenure and promotion expectations. The study explored perceived barriers to producing scholarship vis-á-vis workload expectations. The results of the study and strategies for meeting scholarship demands are presented.

Purpose: This research describes how well the newly implemented college and departmental tenure and promotion policies encourage faculty efforts to seek and secure external funding at Texas State University-San Marcos (Texas State). Specifically, the research describes college and departmental expectations for external funding within the context of Boyer’s (1990) broadened definition of scholarship. External funding was selected because it is a priority at Texas State that cuts across Boyer’s four domains of scholarship and was identified in the literature as an alternative to publication for fulfilling the scholarship requirement for tenure.

Methodology: A content analysis of seven college and forty-one department policies was used to measure the extent to which Texas State’s tenure and promotion policies encourage faculty to seek and secure external funding. The descriptive categories used to analyze the policies are Boyer’s four domains of scholarship (discovery, integration, application, and teaching) and the level of involvement (proposal submissions and grant awards).

Results: Overall, Texas State policies encourage external funding activities. The scholarships of discovery and teaching are more prevalent in the policies than the scholarships of integration and application. The lack of incentive for integration and application can hinder multidisciplinary and commercial research efforts at Texas State. Grant awards receive credit equal to publication at a much higher rate than proposal submissions in all domains at both the college and department level. To avoid sending mixed messages to new faculty about the value of seeking external funding, academic heads are urged to recognize and reward proposal submissions in the policies

Pre-tenure faculty integrating service-learning into their professional roles are often uncertain about its position in the faculty reward system. This study gathered data from administrators at five institutions of higher education in Indiana to learn if and how service-learning is credited toward tenure and promotion at their institutions. The results point to the need for junior faculty members and administrators to be cautious when implementing and evaluating service-learning initiatives.

On December 1, 2011, the full professors at Claremont School of Theology unanimously recommended two of my colleagues and me for tenure.  Provided that the Board of Trustees approves their recommendation and two extremes never come to pass (either “financial exigency” compels my institution to start laying off people willy-nilly or I do something professionally or morally egregious enough to be dismissed “for cause”), I now have a job for life! :)

One of the greatest values of American education is the right to education yourself. The education is possible for all ages and for all social segments. Most importantly, this education is not an ideology, but an education which is oriented toward creating opportunities the educated person to find a job or to continue develop her/his personality through further education.
This article analyzes the place of honesty in some critical constructs of the educational system in the 21st century.

A questionnaire about how academic performance is evaluated and the importance of teaching and research was completed by 265 faculty at a UK research university. Factor analysis followed by t-tests showed that male faculty had a more realistic understanding of how their research is evaluated, rate the importance of research to their careers more highly, and are more likely than women to work over hours through choice. Women faculty are more likely than men to work over hours because of teaching workload and rate the importance of a teaching qualification more highly, despite giving similar ratings as men to the importance of teaching to their career. The implications for differential rates of promotion are discussed.

On March 8, 2013, the Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law & Justice hosted an all-day symposium featuring more than forty speakers at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law to celebrate and invite responses to the book entitled, Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia (Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs, Yolanda Flores Niemann, Carmen G. González & Angela P. Harris eds., 2012).  Presumed Incompetent presents gripping first-hand accounts of the obstacles encountered by female faculty of color in the academic workplace, and provides specific recommendations to women of color, allies, and academic leaders on ways to eliminate these barriers. The symposium held at Berkeley continued the conversation begun in the book through a series of concurrent and plenary panels, poetry readings, and keynote addresses. Selected papers from the symposium were published in both the Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law & Justice and the Seattle Journal for Social Justice (SJSJ). This introduction discusses and contextualizes the papers published in the Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law & Justice. These papers reflect the exhilarating breadth and depth of the discussions that took place during the symposium. Like the papers published in SJSJ, they enhance our understanding of the hierarchies of the academic workplace, and offer additional tools to promote a more equitable and inclusive campus environment.

This ASHE Higher Education report is devoted to the rise of non-tenure track faculty (NTTF) in higher education. This new majority, comprising 65% of new faculty hires, poses significant challenges to the professoriate. The authors explore the issue through four disciplinary lenses (economic, sociological, psychological, and organizational), synthesizing what is a complex, heterogeneous, often misunderstood group. Two ideologies dominate NTTF research. Scholars either focus on the systemic exploitation of NTTF or they tout the flexibility afforded to NTTF. Much of the research on NTTF is polarizing and largely undertheorized, and most suggestions for improving working conditions for NTTF are not nearly specific enough. As a corrective step, Kezar and Sam argue for viewing NTTF as a unique hybrid of professionals and laborers. This hybrid approach allows for clearer understanding of the unique ideological and practical tensions NTTF face.

In Behind the Seams, the editors and authors reflect on the oft-hidden path from initial submission to published piece. This feature centers on a recorded audio conversation—not an interview, but an open-ended discussion—built around observations and recollections of what stands out in the process of developing, editing, and publishing an article with JITP.