Nature of Work  ›  About this Theme

Guiding Principles

Faculty satisfaction with research is a function not just of the time faculty members have to commit to research, but importantly, of the clarity and consistency of institutional expectations for research productivity and the resources colleges and universities provide faculty to meet them. When faculty are criticized for falling short of others' expectations for research, consider the demands, obstacles, mixed signals, and lack of meaningful support that may be undermining their ability to do their best work.

The COACHE instrument invites faculty to assess the environmental qualities conducive to research productivity. The questions are designed to be agnostic on institutional type (e.g., research university, liberal arts college) and research area (in the disciplines, creative work, the scholarship of teaching and learning). It is in the analysis where participating colleges and universities can determine whether faculty feel they are being supported in fulfilling the expectations of them.

Hallmarks of Successful Models

If your institution is serious about supporting faculty research and creativity, then be prepared to commit to the essential elements of success:

Leadership on research support comes from the top. C-level leadership in stressing the importance of excellence in research is critical substantively and symbolically. This means that resources directed at supporting faculty work--across the creative lifecycle--are crucial, as is the messaging that goes along with the financial support.

Formal offices and programs energetically support faculty research. Visibly dedicating resources to support faculty work clearly demonstrates how important faculty members are to institutional success. Our studies identified the following areas of focus for full-time college staff:

Grant support. Many universities offer pre-award support to faculty preparing proposals for outside funding. What is less common, but equally important, is post-award support.

Internal grants. Faculty are grateful for internal funding, even in small amounts. Well-designed programs can foster interdivisional collaboration, extramural mentoring, and other innovations.

Research institutes. Such institutes may be a source of internal grant support, but even more, they are places where faculty find collaborators and inspiration.

Colloquia, workshops, and seminars. All faculty, and especially pre-tenure faculty, appreciate opportunities to present their research at colloquia on campus, receive feedback, and fine-tune their work prior to presenting at a national conference. Workshops and seminars for writing grants, running a lab, getting published, mentoring undergraduates and graduates, getting tenure and "getting to full" are all programs that support fulfilling collaboration and engagement.

Guiding Principles

Among the core areas of faculty work explored by the COACHE survey, teaching--and the supports institutions provide faculty to teach well--is bound by significant constraints, but also by great opportunities. The challenge for every faculty member is to strike a balance between institutional expectations for teaching and the time and ability available to invest in it.

Dissatisfaction can occur when expectations for teaching are unreasonable or contrary to what faculty were promised at the point of hire, when institutional support is lacking, or when the distribution of work is inequitable. Time is the common denominator: if expectations for teaching outstrips the time available to meet them, morale and productivity can suffer.

When considering COACHE results on this benchmark, keep in mind that our instrument measures not teaching load, but faculty satisfaction with teaching load. While reducing teaching load is often "off the table" as a short-term fix, increasing faculty satisfaction with teaching load can be accomplished through workshops and seminars about improving teaching, mentoring students, using instructional technologies, and experimenting with new pedagogical techniques. These opportunities may be housed in centers of teaching and learning (or of "faculty success" or "faculty excellence"), where other resources and advice are dispensed by seasoned experts. The implementation of and communication about these supports can increase faculty satisfaction with the nature of teaching.

Hallmarks of Successful Models

Most COACHE institutions with exemplary results on this benchmark had a number of qualities in common. They make expectations for teaching clear from the point of hire. They recruit faculty with a demonstrated devotion to teaching. They ensure that faculty members have a say in which courses they teach and in their content. They offer grants for pedagogical development and innovation, usually through a center for teaching. They also recognize excellence in the classroom through prestigious and substantive awards (e.g., for exemplary teaching informed by creative scholarship, or for outstanding teaching in the humanities) given in public (e.g., at mid-court during a basketball game).

Guiding Principles

Among the top three responsibilities of the tenure--stream faculty--but almost always the third--service is infused in the ethos of shared governance and the DNA of faculty life. In COACHE focus groups, faculty included in their definition of their most "vital" colleagues an engagement in service to the discipline and university. Yet, tenured faculty expressed their dissatisfaction with their service work: too many committees doing unfulfilling work, too many reports sitting unread on administrators' shelves, and too many good soldiers picking up the slack of faculty colleagues who, whether by influence or incompetence, seem always to evade service commitments. Meanwhile, college and universities are often encouraged as a best practice to "protect" pre-tenure faculty from too many time commitments outside of the teaching and research that will make their tenure case. The aggregate result is a gulf between institutional expectations for service and the recognition it receives in evaluations of faculty.

The COACHE survey instrument invites faculty to explore these tensions with questions about the quantity, quality, and equitable distribution of their service work broadly defined, as well as their institutions' efforts to help faculty be service leaders and sustain their other commitments as faculty. In follow-up interviews with faculty and institutional leaders, a common refrain emerged: faculty are eager to participate not in more service, but in more meaningful service, and we must do better to engage and to reward those contributions.

Hallmarks of Successful Models

Colleges and universities with faculty satisfied with service consistently cited institutional mission and culture in explaining their results. Among these exemplars were land-grant universities committed to fostering a service-oriented culture; religiously-affiliated colleges with an explicit service mission; comprehensive colleges with strong ties with the local community; and former normal schools whose minority-serving mission is inextricable from its faculty's ethic of care. So, institutions struggling with service might do well to explore, engage, and elaborate their mission and historical circumstances--above and beyond the usual website boilerplate--as the foundation of an ethos of service.

College leaders cited other commitments as the basis for ensuring faculty satisfaction with service. Most communicate expectations regarding service through a number of avenues including handbooks, guidelines for mentoring, workshops, orientations, and reviews. It is also common practice to provide course release time for taking on leadership roles and to keep the service commitments of tenure-track faculty few (but not zero), particularly at the college and university level, and to make certain what commitments are required are meaningful.