Retention and Negotiation  ›  About this Theme

Guiding Principles

Research on the professoriate confirms: the academy's culture of requiring faculty to seek external offers in order to renegotiate the terms of their employment actually pushes them toward accepting a position elsewhere (O'Meara, 2015). Most literature on faculty departure, like this COACHE survey of faculty at your institution, informs our understanding of the factors influencing faculty members' intent to leave, rather than reasons for actually leaving. While the COACHE Faculty Retention & Exit Survey fills that gap, a survey of faculty at your institution can still shed light on the differences between faculty groups on your campus and your differences in the faculty labor market. This module of the COACHE Survey captures (a) what faculty most wish to change about the nature of their employment (and whether those wishes differ by gender, rank, tenure status, etc.); and the extent to which your institution is, in the next five years, likely to lose or push away pre-tenure or tenured faculty.

Hallmarks of Successful Models

Your comparative results can inform a number of recruitment and retention policies on your campus. They might, for example:

  • Suggest improvements to chair training and development in the handling of faculty intent to leave;
  • Identify more quickly than could a single institution's data any renegotiation patterns or pressures with respect to disciplinary cultures, gender, and URM status;
  • Educate deans and chairs about the efficacy of "home field advantage" in preemptive retention actions and counteroffers;
  • Provide fundable propositions for interactions with foundations (e.g., Sloan, NSF ADVANCE);
  • Create compelling cases to donors in the name of retaining the best and brightest talent, for example, by endowing chairs, funding a school for children of faculty, allowing more teaching on recall, or subsidizing faculty housing.
  • Offer poignant anecdotes - backed by sound research - in support of appropriations requests to the legislature.

As the Collaborative's research on actual departures and retentions unfolds, we will be updating partners with information from high-performing institutions.

Additional resources

Visit the COACHE website for information about the COACHE Faculty Retention & Exit Survey, which explores the causes, costs, and conduct of retention efforts for faculty who have received outside offers.

The following studies of faculty mobility have been particularly influential in research and in practice:

Daly, C. J., & Dee, J. R. (2006). Greener pastures: faculty turnover intent in urban public universities. The Journal of Higher Education, 77(5), 776-803.

Gardner, Susan K. (2013). Women faculty departures from a striving institution: between a rock and a hard place. The Review of Higher Education, 36(3), 349-370.

Jayakumar, U. M., Howard, T. C., Allen, W. R., & Han, J. C. (2009). Racial privilege in the professoriate: an exploration of campus climate, retention, and satisfaction. The Journal of Higher Education, 80(5), 538-563.

Johnsrud, L. K., & Heck, R. H. (1994). A university's faculty: identifying who will leave and who will stay. Journal for Higher Education Management, 10(1), 71-84.

Johnsrud, L. K., & Rosser, V. J. (2002). Faculty members' morale and their intention to leave: A multilevel explanation. The Journal of Higher Education, 73(4), 518-542.

Jons, Heike. (2011). Transnational academic mobility and gender. Globalization, Societies and Education, 9(2), 183-209.

Kaminski D. & Geisler B. (2012). Gender survival analysis of faculty retention in science and engineering. Science, 335, 864-866.

Matier, M. W. (1990). Retaining faculty: a tale of two campuses. Research in Higher Education, 31(1), 39-60.

O'Meara, K. (2015). Half-way out: how requiring outside offers to raise salaries influences faculty retention and organizational commitment. Research in Higher Education, 56(3), 279-298.

O'Meara, K., Fink, J. & White-Lewis, D. (2017). Who's looking? Examining the role of gender and rank in faculty outside offers. NASPA Journal about Women in Higher Education.

O'Meara, K., Lounder, A., & Campbell, C. M. (2014). To heaven or hell: sensemaking about why faculty leave. The Journal of Higher Education, 85(5), 603-632.

O'Meara, K., Niehaus, E., Bennett, J. (2016). Left unsaid: The role of psychological contracts in faculty careers and departure. The Review of Higher Education, 39(2), 269-297.

Rosser, V. J., & Townsend, B. K. (2006). Determining public 2-year college faculty's intent to leave: an empirical model. The Journal of Higher Education, 77(1), 124-147.

Smart, J. C. (1990). A causal model of faculty turnover intentions. Research in Higher Education, 31(5), 405-424.

Weiler, W. C. (1985). Why do faculty members leave a university? Research in Higher Education, 23(3), 270-278.

Xu, Y. J. (2008). Gender disparity in STEM disciplines: a study of faculty attrition and turnover intentions. Research in Higher Education, 49(7), 607-624.

Zhou, Y., & Volkwein, J. F. (2004). Examining the influences on faculty departure intentions: a comparison of tenured versus nontenured faculty at research universities using NSOPF-99. Research in Higher Education, 45(2), 139-176.