Faculty

Roles and Responsbilities

Scholarship in Public: Knowledge Creation and Tenure Policy in the Engaged University (pdf)
This Imagining America report proposes “concrete ways to remove obstacles to academic work carried out for and/or with the public by giving such work full standing as scholarship, research, or artistic creation.”  Emerging from the work of the Tenure Team Initiative, among whose 19 esteemed members are AAC&U President Carol Schneider and AAC&U Senior Scholar R. Eugene Rice, the report is a toolkit for those eager to change the culture surrounding promotion and tenure in the “new academy.” 

Reconsidering Faculty Roles and Rewards: Promising Practices for Institutional Transformation and Enhanced Learning (pdf)
This report, produced by the Consortium for the Advancement of Private Higher Education (CAPHE), summarizes results of a three-year CAPHE program, funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, called Faculty Roles, Faculty Rewards, and Institutional Priorities. Through the program, twenty-two colleges and universities received grants to explore ways to clarify emerging new relationships between institutional mission and priorities and faculty roles and rewards, and to examine the process of wholescale institutional change. The report identifies the following issues and strategies for improving student learning: Learning and Assessment; Redefining Scholarship; Faculty Development; Faculty Evaluation and Rewards; Governance, Communication and Decision-Making; and Instructional Technology. The Consortium for the Advancement of Private Higher Education is an operating unit of the Council of Independent Colleges.

Associated New American Colleges (ANAC)
ANAC is an association of small to mid-sized comprehensive colleges and universities dedicated to the integration of liberal and professional studies. These institutions are committed to teaching and learning, a collegial ethos that is student and value centered, a flexible professional model that emphasizes the faculty teacher scholar, and an integrative institutional model that blends the highly personalized qualities of liberal arts colleges with the diversity of large universities.

ANAC is currently in Phase II of its Faculty Work Project. Faculty and academic administrators will collaborate to analyze and articulate underlying principles that are tailored to support faculty in the work their institutions most need of them and to design a menu of strategies for effective implementation of such policies and practices.

The Project on Faculty Performance and Compensation
The Project on Faculty Performance and Compensation seeks to examine how the work of faculty is evaluated, how it is rewarded, and how it can be improved. The ultimate objectives are to:

• develop a system of performance-based compensation that is aligned with the priorities of the university;
• develop a system of performance-based compensation that provides incentives for individual and organizational performance;
• create rewards other than salary raises;
• define performance and quality in ways that are consistent with the nature and purpose of academic work in professional schools. 

The project's activities encompass publishing works on the state of the practice, including different forms of rewards; creating a Web site on the topic of faculty performance and compensation; and developing models of faculty performance and compensation that realistically reflect institutional goals and priorities, accommodate the multiple roles of faculty, facilitate professional development, and inform decisions about workload.

AAC&U offers these resources only as possible models of interest and has not submitted each of them to any substantial peer or quality review. If you have questions about any particular resource, please contact the institution sponsoring it directly.