November, 2007

Academic Leader - November, 2007 - Full Issue PDF
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Encouraging Faculty Scholarship at the Comprehensive University: What’s the Chair to Do?
By Gibson Darden, EdD
Faculty members at comprehensive universities have unique challenges. As opposed to those at primarily teaching or research institutions, faculty members at comprehensive universities must themselves be comprehensive, or balanced in their productivity (see Henderson, 2007). That is, they must be better than average at teaching, service, and scholarship. In my experience as a department chair, the most challenging area for faculty to achieve and maintain is scholarly production. This article provides strategies for department chairs to promote scholarship among the faculty at comprehensive universities.

The Right to Know: Graduation Rates Explored
By Bob Cipriano, PhD, and Richard Riccardi
With the costs of attending a university escalating exponentially, it is logical to assume that it is in the best interest of students (and their parents) to graduate as quickly as possible. The reality, however, is far removed from this enviable goal. We began to wonder if there was a correlation between the high percentage of part-time faculty and the very low graduation rate.

Enabling Quality Improvement Where Faculty Live: Change Through Access, Academic Audit, and Alignment
By Larry Gould, PhD, C. B. Crawford, PhD, Jeff Briggs, EdD, Glen McNeil, MS, RD/LD
Affecting quality improvement at the departmental level is a substantial challenge for higher education administration. Planned quality improvement has often been reprioritized to make room for budget necessities, and at the same time ad hoc change is sometimes resented and unsettling. Cultural change, which quality improvement requires, must be orchestrated through effective planning, thorough communication, visionary leadership, and strategic embedding within the deepest layers of each unique culture.

Improving Documentation for Promotion and Tenure
By Jeffrey L. Buller, PhD
At most colleges and universities, the documentation that faculty members submit when applying for tenure or promotion is so massive as to be burdensome at the same time that it is often unhelpful to the review committee. The result of this practice is that candidates spend weeks or even months amassing materials, and then promotion and tenure committees have incredible masses of documentation to read. If you ask about this excessive documentation, most committees issue statements along the lines of “We read every single document submitted to us.” Nevertheless, even that response poses a problem. Either the committee is being disingenuous and not doing what it claims to be doing (thus probably missing important information as it skims through multiple volumes of material) or it actually is reading every word submitted to it (thus spending time reading thank-you notes, multiple copies of nearly identical course syllabi, and duplicates of information that already appears in the candidate’s curriculum vitae, when its members could be devoting that time to teaching and research). In other words, all too many tenure and promotion systems today require candidates to spend far too much time amassing far too much information for committees to review far too little in a process that is far too cumbersome. Is there any alternative?

Academic Department Chair: Advertisement and Summary of Responsibilities
By Margaret F. Karsten
Wanted: Chairperson for large academic department populated with rugged individualists