As the American university has evolved, so have the roles of faculty. In the last two decades, this evolution has been particularly profound. Colleges and universities have sought to address internal and external challenges to their ability to effectively prepare their students for the workforce and/or the professions. Institutions seek to determine and to demonstrate their effectiveness in producing well-prepared graduates, in providing quality learning environments, and in making sound fiduciary judgments, all the while responding to accrediting bodies, parents, the public, community stakeholders, professional organizations, and business entities. This module discusses the new and emerging roles of faculty as they relate to supporting institutional goals. These challenges require policy changes to doctoral programs so that future faculty are trained for these new roles.
Changing Roles of College and University Faculty
From the 1636 founding of Harvard College, to contemporary times, faculty have had to adjust and readjust to curricular changes. These have included changes in the racial, gender, and cultural composition of their student bodies, variability in the secondary preparation of their incoming freshmen, and the emergence of outcomes-based accreditation (1.1.2 Changing Expectations for Higher Education). The assumption that faculty will have primary responsibility for teaching and research only within their discipline has become an anachronistic notion. The academy must therefore do a better job of communicating the importance of the second discipline of teaching/learning (Middaugh, 2001).
Professional standards for faculty now call for “higher, more comprehensive, more inclusive, and more competent performance” (Pruitt-Logan, Gaff, & Weibl, 2000). Within this evolution of roles, faculty members, regardless of their rank or institutional affiliation, are being asked to contribute to their colleges or universities in ways previously associated with administrative staff. As the demand for institutions to demonstrate greater evidence of effectiveness in academic affairs, student services, and finances has grown, faculty find themselves moved from the traditional role of teacher/scholar, toward more dynamic and complex roles of teacher/scholar and practitioner and promoter of institutional effectiveness. Often, the performance criteria for these new roles lie outside the scope of the faculty member’s disciplinary preparation. Within this more complex set of roles, chemistry professors are being asked to collaborate with English professors to create rubrics for evaluating student outcomes; fine arts and physics faculty are being asked to jointly and individually develop multiple assessment instruments, outline strategic goals, and contribute to coordinated efforts to develop institutional grant proposals (1.1.3 Efforts to Transform Higher Education).
Faculty Involvement in Institutional Effectiveness
Faculty members have become more involved in institutional effectiveness efforts for several reasons. First, academic leaders have realized that regional accrediting bodies have substantially altered their approaches to institutional review over the past ten years to emphasize teaching and learning outcomes versus the mere quality of data collection efforts within the self-study process (Ewell, 2005) (1.5.2 Methodology for Designing a Program Assessment System). Second, as more discipline-specific accrediting bodies have entered the fray of external, accountability-seeking oversight-and-compliance structures, it has become increasingly necessary for faculty to become involved in determining and demonstrating programmatic effectiveness, particularly since more highly specialized knowledge is required of this more discipline-specific and profession-based type of accreditation (Berdahl, 1991). Third, the need for institutions to do more with less has made it necessary for faculty to shift from the role of pure academic to that of facilitator of institutional effectiveness (1.5.8 Assessing Program Assessment Systems). Fourth, there are many institutions, particularly community colleges, that are attempting to transform themselves to be more learner-centered and more learning-centered (4.1.3 Mindset for Assessment). And lastly, faculty no longer desire to be managed via the administrative model of higher educational governance, and instead view shared governance models as a more viable means of asserting their will and bringing their expertise to bear upon the issues which affect their functioning as faculty members (Berdahl, 1991). In short, faculty members must share “responsibility for keeping the institution accountable to those upon whom the academic enterprise depends for its very existence” (Lucas, 1998).
According to Process Education researchers, the five primary functions of the faculty member are to enhance learning, to foster learner development, to nurture self-growth, to develop professionally, and to work systematically to expand institutional effectiveness (Preface). Though each of these functions are indeed important and central to the faculty member’s everyday existence, the last function, expanding institutional effectiveness, has risen to primacy as institutions continually scramble to demonstrate their effectiveness (2.3.2 Framework for Implementing Process Education).
Factors Impacting Faculty Involvement
There are differing expectations of faculty and their roles within the ongoing process of determining and demonstrating institutional effectiveness. These faculty roles differ based on six key factors impacting individual institutions: campus culture, institutional mission and vision, institutional type, relationship between the college and the local community, faculty demographics, and the institution’s current financial condition. Despite variation in these factors, one commonality exists among all institutions, there is an increased level of expectation for faculty contributions to the determination and demonstration of institutional effectiveness.
1. Campus Culture
The culture of an institution is important to the socialization of the faculty in the institutional effectiveness process (Pruitt-Logan et al., 2000). Campuses that have adopted a progressive culture of assessing effectiveness expect faculty to be part and parcel of the process. The decentralization of the institutional self-study process to academic departments has necessitated the increased responsibility and accountability of not only program and department chairs, but of faculty as well. In such progressive institutions, assessment, for example, as a component of ascertaining institutional effectiveness, is not seen as tangential to the faculty role, but is instead viewed as a microcosm of a larger framework for programmatic justification, and of course the ongoing challenge of institutional compliance with external accreditation criteria.
2. Institutional Mission and Vision
Some institutions of higher education believe that the responsibility, action, and accountability for institutional effectiveness efforts rest jointly between the administration and faculty, rather than administrators alone. Such institutions tend to foster and encourage greater faculty involvement in the process of data collection, data analysis, data interpretation, and data reporting of critical elements related to institutional effectiveness. Within these visionary organizations, the institutional mission and vision encompass faculty as not only the purveyors of discipline-specific knowledge, but as relevant practitioners within the organization who are able to contribute in meaningful ways to the crafting and designing of the institutional assessment process, as well as the larger effort of demonstrating institutional effectiveness.
3. Institutional Type
Postsecondary institutions usually define themselves based on the classification system designed by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (Lucas, 1996, <http://www.carnegiefoundation.org>). Most institutions can be broadly defined, however, as either research universities, liberal arts colleges, comprehensive or state colleges and universities, community colleges, proprietary schools, stand-alone professional schools, or special focus institutions (which includes historically black colleges and universities, tribally-controlled colleges and universities, Hispanic-serving institutions, single-sex institutions, and theological schools). The specific role of faculty within the institutional effectiveness process differs largely, therefore, based on the type of institution involved.
Rather than relying heavily on their faculty as the primary agents of institutional effectiveness, large institutions, which have greater resources than their smaller counterparts, and faculty who possess a greater research-orientation and discipline-allegiant focus, generally tend to employ layers of departmental management who are responsible for marshaling resources in support of the institutional effectiveness effort. While faculty may be utilized within this milieu, it is generally done in an effort to support the administrative structures already in place that facilitate institutional effectiveness activities.
In smaller, more student-centered institutions, however, faculty members are expected to be intensely involved in the institutional effectiveness effort. Faculty are expected to be involved despite the fact that their time commitment to the process may be compromised by their teaching obligations, or significantly hampered by the dearth of in-house intellectual resources within and among the faculty, who are well-versed or otherwise knowledgeable in key areas of expertise. Faculty expertise may be needed with respect to assessment techniques, indicators and measures of institutional effectiveness, and common practices related to data collection, analysis, and interpretation.
4. Relationship Between the Institution and the Community
Many colleges and universities have strategic alliances and partnerships with organizations, companies, and stakeholder institutions within their local communities. The benefits of these relationships flow bilaterally, and the expectation of the community stakeholders is that the students attending the local college or university will be well prepared by the institution, academically and socially, thereby potentially meeting their needs for a pool of well-educated and well-trained applicants. Faculty at local colleges and universities must therefore seek out, establish, and maintain these relationships within the local community, all the while demonstrating the institution’s effectiveness to these local stakeholders, through tangible student outcomes.
5. Faculty Demographics
Institutions of higher education utilize faculty in many ways to respond to institutional challenges, as well as to contribute to the demonstration of institutional effectiveness. Generally speaking, full-time, tenure-track faculty at all levels tend to be the most involved in the institutional effectiveness effort. Meanwhile, part-time and adjunct faculty tend to be less involved or are fully-excluded from the institutional effectiveness data collection, information synthesis, and report-writing efforts. Of the full-time faculty, junior faculty at the assistant and associate levels tend to be the most highly involved with the effort to determine and demonstrate institutional effectiveness, either because of their openness to non-traditional faculty roles and responsibilities for future tenure considerations, or simply because they want to be engaged in the actual shaping of institutional policy (Lucas, 1998). In large institutions, tenured faculty are generally less involved in these types of activities, while in smaller institutions, faculty, regardless of rank, are expected and held accountable for their participation in institutional effectiveness efforts.
6. Current Financial Condition
As previously stated, those institutions of higher education which boast greater financial resources can often parlay their financial advantage into the proliferation of greater human resources, including multiple layers of administrative staff in academic areas, financial services areas, and student affairs, to support their institutional effectiveness efforts. Additionally, these big-budget institutions are more likely to have large offices of institutional research, institutional planning, or institutional effectiveness to address the questions surrounding institutional effectiveness, as well as the ability to hire external consultants to assist with the institutional effectiveness effort. In these instances, though faculty are certainly involved in the effort to determine and demonstrate institutional effectiveness, they are involved to a much lesser degree than faculty in less financially able institutions who shoulder the lion’s share of the burden of grassroots, institutional effectiveness activities.
Preparing Future Faculty
The academy is headed in new directions with respect to the way it utilizes its faculty, as well as its expectations for the roles of faculty. As internal and external pressures are continuously brought to bear upon institutions of higher education to measure and demonstrate effectiveness, faculty are being asked to do more work with fewer resources to assist with the effort, and must otherwise make themselves available to the institution like never before (1.4.6 Overview of Evaluation and 1.4.8 Mindset for Evaluation). This new and evolving obligation for faculty should be communicated to new faculty and to doctoral students preparing for academic careers. Gone are the days when teaching, research, and loosely-defined service were the prevailing triumvirate for faculty within higher education. There is now a greater expectation that the faculty, who already help to shape higher education through their teaching and research, will also help to demonstrate the utility and effectiveness of their efforts via outcomes (2.4.5 Learning Outcomes, 4.1.1 Overview of Assessment, 2.4.1 Overview of Instructional Design, and 3.2.1 Overview of Facilitation).
According to Pruitt-Logan et al. (2000), the changes taking place in faculty roles and in higher education tend not to be reflected in higher education because the policy leaders in these environments are not completely aware of the changes. For this reason, doctoral programs must elucidate these changes by addressing the incongruence of doctoral program preparation with the evolving set of expectations of the new academic, which include an increasing shift from teaching to learning; the need for collaborative skills and more faculty generalization; increased understanding and embracing of shared governance and professional service internal and external to the institution; and the need for growing respect for the plethora of relevant research and professional literature about the systems that undergird higher education including teaching, learning, the curriculum, and the administration and organization of colleges and universities.
Often-times new faculty, arriving fresh from their discipline-focused doctoral programs, are being hired with the flawed expectation by hiring officials that these new hires can, based on their doctoral training readily contribute to the institution in the areas of goal-setting, strategic planning, personnel decisions, fundraising, budget creation and monitoring, public relations, and program review (1.5.3 Defining a Program). This is a very unrealistic expectation which cannot be fully realized until the doctoral programs institute components which sufficiently address these new areas of faculty responsibility (2.3.1 Introduction to Process Education).
Concluding Thoughts
Ewell (2005) asserts that colleges and universities have operated as closed systems whose “internal languages and information systems subtly enforce conformity to a dominant organizational paradigm.” New and emerging roles for faculty, beyond those of teacher and scholar, include those of contributor, facilitator, and purveyor of institutional effectiveness. It is true, as asserted by Rosovsky (1992), that American faculties operate, “without a written constitution, and with very little common law…” and that “there is no strong consensus concerning duties and standards of [faculty] behavior” (Rosovsky, 1992). Further, as fluid notions, definitions, and criteria for institutional effectiveness persist, faculty members’ ability to become experts at determining and demonstrating institutional effectiveness are thwarted, since there are few common criteria which truly indicate effectiveness (Cameron, 1991). The comprehensive and complementary nature of the Faculty Guidebook is intended to provide a coherent and meaningful framework for faculty as they assume and explore new roles in the higher education enterprise.
References
Berdahl, R. O. (1991). Shared governance and external constraints. In M. Peterson (Ed.), Organization and governance in higher education: An Ashe reader. Needham Heights, MA: Ginn Press.
Cameron, K. S. (1991). Measuring organizational effectiveness in institutions of higher education. In M. Peterson (Ed.), Organization and governance in higher education: An Ashe reader. Needham Heights, MA: Ginn Press.
Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. (1977). Missions of the college curriculum. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Ewell, P. T. (2005). Strength in difference. Change, 37 (1), 4-5.
Lucas, C. J. (1998). Crisis in the academy: Rethinking higher education in America. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Middaugh, M. F. (2001). Understanding faculty productivity: Standards and benchmarks for colleges and universities. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Pruitt-Logan, A. S., Gaff, J. G., & Weibl, R. A. (2000). Building the faculty we need. Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges & Universities.
Rosovsky, H. (1992). From the belly of the whale. New Policy Perspectives, (3) 4 , p. A1-A8; B1-B4.