• Front Page
• Work Project
• Conference

The Pew Charitable Trusts have awarded a $225,000 grant to support ANAC's Faculty Work Project. The grant will make possible a fifteen-month ANAC effort to address alignment issues between faculty and their institutions revealed in the Project's first phase completed in 1998. The first project, also supported by Pew, consisted of a comprehensive audit (e.g., surveys, interviews, focus groups, and time motion studies) of faculty policies, work practices, and perceptions to determine how effectively faculty work advances the institutional mission and institutional policies and rewards support faculty endeavors.

The results of this audit were eye-opening. Although ANAC members stress their focus on students and the service commitment of their faculty to institution and surrounding community, the audit revealed that many faculty feel institutional policies fail to provide incentives for such contributions. This evidence created considerable motivation within ANAC to design policies that better reward and support faculty endeavors. In designing the new project, ANAC has benefited from other studies of faculty work which have found that simply changing policies, without questioning policy assumptions and institutional practices, either leads to a dead end or to ineffectual tinkering at the edges.

Consequently, in the newly-funded project, ANAC faculty and academic administrators will collaborate to analyze and articulate underlying principles that are tailored to support faculty in the work their institutions most need of them and to design a menu of strategies for effective implementation of such policies and practices. A principle, for example, might be that the measure of faculty workload in teaching should be identified with specific tasks (e.g., pedagogies, mentoring, assessment, etc.) that contribute effectively to student learning, rather than with abstract measures of credit or contact hours taught. The design strategy might be for academic departments to inventory the work tasks that need to be performed to fulfill the departmental contribution to the institution's mission and to devise methods for allocating faculty expertise, time, and interests optimally to carry out this inventory.

A second product of the project will be a faculty handbook template incorporating project principles and design strategies as models for personnel policies intended to encourage and reward effective faculty work practices, to improve faculty-institutional governance and service relationships in fulfilling the mission, to provide mutually beneficial support for faculty development throughout faculty careers, and to contribute to faculty satisfaction and morale. The template will be developed in a format widely adaptable to the individual needs and circumstances of ANAC members and those of other institutions interested in addressing issues of faculty work.

Initial implementation of the new project occurred June 6-7, when thirty faculty and academic administrative representatives from nineteen ANAC member institutions and three consultant advisors gathered at Saint Mary's College of California to share ideas, organize into working groups, and refine the project work plan and time line. Working groups will meet at three-month intervals over the next two summers and the coming academic year and, in the spirit of a "think tank," conduct ongoing interaction via electronic technologies. In addition, they will conduct an extensive literature and data search of best policies and practices in faculty work and have the assistance of a variety of resource specialists on faculty work issues. Early project findings will be presented at the AAHE Faculty Roles and Rewards Conference in New Orleans, February 3-6, and a national conference for dissemination of project results will be held in June 2000, with representatives of all sectors of higher education to be invited. The outcomes of the project will also be made available on the World Wide Web and in follow-up papers and publications.

ANAC has also named a project management team that will work with grant director Jerry Berberet. They include Linda McMillin, professor of history and honors program director at Susquehanna University, who will serve as project manager with special responsibilities for conducting the literature search and coordinating project communications and the working groups. Marion Terenzio, professor of psychology and vice president of student life at The Sage Colleges, and Lawry Finsen, professor of philosophy and associate academic dean at the University of Redlands, will each moderate one of the working groups.