Departmental Engagement, Quality, and Collegiality  ›  About this Theme

Guiding Principles

Faculty are employed by institutions, but they spend most of their time in departments, where culture has perhaps the greatest influence on faculty satisfaction and morale. We have highlighted three broad areas in which faculty judge the departments in which they work: engagement, quality, and collegiality.

Engagement. It is increasingly common to talk about student engagement, but less so faculty engagement. Yet, it is difficult to imagine an engaged student population without an engaged faculty. COACHE and the Faculty Survey of Student Engagement (FSSE) complement one another in that FSSE considers the faculty--student connection, while COACHE measures faculty engagement with one another--by their professional interactions and their departmental discussions about undergraduate and graduate learning, pedagogy, the use of technology, and research methodologies.

Quality. Departmental quality is a function of the intellectual vitality of faculty, the scholarship that is produced, the effectiveness of teaching, how well the department recruits and retains excellent faculty, and whether and how poor faculty performance is handled.

Collegiality. While many factors comprise faculty members' opinions about departmental collegiality, COACHE has discovered that faculty are especially cognizant of their sense of "fit" among their colleagues, their personal interactions with colleagues, whether their colleagues "pitch in" when needed, and colleague support for work/life balance. There is no substitute for a collegial department when it comes to faculty satisfaction, and campus leaders--both faculty and administrators-can create opportunities for more and better informal engagement.

Hallmarks of Successful Models

As arbiters of departmental culture, chairs especially are well-served to pay attention to departmental collegiality. They should keep their doors open so faculty can stop in and chat about departmental issues. Likewise, chairs should drop in to offer help, perhaps to intervene.

Be especially conscious that those who are in the minority--whether by gender, race/ethnicity, age, subfield, political views or another factor--are not marginalized in the department; what you might think of as respecting autonomy might be perceived by another as isolation. Create forums for faculty to play together: schedule some social activities and ensure everyone knows about important milestones in each other's lives. Celebrate! All institutions in our related Benchmark Best Practices report foster departmental engagement, quality, and collegiality by hosting social gatherings once or twice a month.

Create forums for faculty to work together: convene to discuss research, methodology, interdisciplinary ideas, pedagogy, and technology.

Provide chair training for handling performance feedback for tenure-track faculty members (e.g., annual reviews, mid-probationary period reviews), tenured faculty members (e.g., post-tenure review, annual or merit review, informal feedback); and non-tenure-track faculty members.

Discuss the vitality of the department by using COACHE and other analytical data to keep these matters from becoming overly-personalized.

Be an advocate for faculty participation in activities in the campuses' center for teaching and learning.

Use department meeting agendas not as a list of chores, but as opportunities for generative thinking. Enlist colleagues to discuss new teaching and research methods or to present case studies to problem-solve. Using this structured time to initiate departmental engagement may encourage continued engagement beyond the meetings. As often as possible, ask department colleagues to take ownership of the meeting by co-presenting.