ANAC Faculty Work Project Preliminary Report Advocates Faculty-Institutional Collaboration


The preliminary report of ANAC's four-year Faculty Work Project received a thorough airing at the Woodrow Wilson Summer Institute at Ithaca College, June 14-17. The report challenges colleges and universities to become "healthy institutions" that nurture the full-flowering of faculty professionalism and entrepreneurial capacities by developing workload policies and rewards that engage faculty talents and interests effectively and recognize faculty achievements. The report contends that healthy institutions recognize that the faculty is their essential resource and invest vigorously in faculty professional development. Because most institutional rewards fail to address what motivates faculty, just as institutions may fail to develop curricula and pedagogies that best facilitate student learning outcomes, the report identifies faculty recognition and rewards as a prime area for institutional attention. Moreover, the report argues that the healthy institution is one that establishes a career-long compact with faculty members which acknowledges the different stages of the faculty career and that institutional and faculty needs and interests will evolve over time. Thus, planning, negotiation, and adaptability are mutually important to maintain faculty member and institutional vitality over a career lifetime.

The report envisions a relationship among individual faculty members, their departments and schools, and the university as a whole that might be characterized as a "Circle of Value," e.g., a process of collaboration in which each adds value to the other in ways powerful and generative. Such a relational dynamic might best be triggered by differential workloads resulting from department/school planning and negotiation to best deploy the resources of its faculty in serving the unit and institutional missions. The institution would in turn institute department/school evaluation and reward policies that would parallel those in place for individual faculty. More effective governance structures and the rationalization of faculty service to the institution in the workload, evaluation, and reward system are essential to build the vibrant community necessary for realization of the full potential of the Circle of Value.

The Faculty Work Project preliminary report represents the culmination of a year-long analysis of the findings of an extensive 1997-98 assessment of the perceptions of some 1,500 faculty and administrators at sixteen ANAC member institutions. The 1997-98 assessment methodology included partnering with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching 1997 national survey of 10,000 faculty in all types of institutions, a special ANAC survey on the alignment of faculty work patterns and institutional policies with institutional mission, focus groups and full faculty meetings on member campuses, and time/motion studies on how faculty allocate their work time. The assessments established that faculty members work hard (50-55 hours per week on average, including approximately 30 hours on their teaching, 10 on scholarship, and 10 on institutional service), are highly satisfied with their individual work—teaching, students, and scholarship—and perceive themselves as meeting their institution's mission expectations. The rub occurs with faculty perceptions that institutional structures are ineffective—rewards, governance, and management—that the sense of institutional community is weak, and that institutional support for faculty professional development is lacking.

Over the past year, a group of thirty ANAC faculty and academic administrators met four times in two-day meetings prior to the Institute to address the issues the assessment process identified with the help of respected scholars and consultants. In addition to the finding that institutions need to take steps to create an optimal environment for faculty effectiveness, the group concluded that faculty must develop greater understanding of their roles as institutional citizens. Institutional citizenship requires an integrative perspective of individual-in-community that should be addressed more effectively in doctoral programs, in new faculty hiring and orientation, and in the tenure track socialization and evaluation process.

The Faculty Work Project "management team" of Jerry Berberet, Linda McMillin, Marion Terenzio, and Lawry Finsen will now spend the summer revising the manuscript on the basis of Institute feedback and the criticisms of a range of reviewers. Institutional best practices and case studies, statements from Institute respondents, and essays from faculty work leaders and scholars will be added to the document as it is prepared for publication. The project goal is to produce a volume that will stand as a seminal collection of insights which contribute significantly across higher education to the ongoing consideration of faculty work and its relationship to educational quality, cost-effectiveness, and accountability.

Members of ANAC's hard-working Faculty Work Project group.