What obligations do faculty members have to their institutions beyond their disciplines and departments? It’s a question that is sure to get a lot of play as higher education institutions deal with the pressures brought about by increased scrutiny from outside constituents and other factors such as changing student demographics and a shift from a faculty-focused to a learner-focused orientation. Academic Leader recently spoke with Marietta Del Favero, professor of educational leadership, counseling, and foundations at the University of New Orleans, about faculty investment in their institutions and the factors that encourage and inhibit it.

Del Favero notes that the literature does not have a consistent definition for faculty investment. She refers to “investment” in this context as “the extent to which faculty are engaged in, and proactively contributing to, the collective concerns of the institutional community… [which] involves social activity related to institution-building, which may be related to, but is often apart from, one’s individual scholarship.”

The concepts of academic duty, academic community, and faculty socialization all play into faculty investment. Academic duty is an ambiguous term that refers to the responsibility a faculty member has to his or her discipline, students, and institution. “Some will say academic duty means that if I do my teaching and research the way I’m supposed to, and I produce good work, I am fulfilling my academic duty. Others will say, you have a duty beyond the disciplinary boundaries,” Del Favero says. Academic community refers to faculty coming together for a common purpose, one related to the collective good of the institution. Socialization is the process by which faculty get to know their institution and what is expected of them.

New Expectations

The expectations and levels of faculty investment vary widely among institutions, but in general, faculty at liberal arts institutions are more focused on campus issues than are faculty at research institutions, whose primary allegiance is with their disciplines, Del Favero says. Regardless, changes in higher education in general will likely affect faculty investment regardless of institution type.

The accountability movement has placed increasing pressure on faculty to do things beyond the teaching, research, and service faculty were expected to do 20 years ago. “Society is demanding more of institutions, and with those increased demands are implications for faculty work,” Del Favero says. “An example is the whole notion of co-curricular learning. It used to be that the faculty were responsible for what goes on in their classrooms. Now there is pressure from the student affairs side of the house to involve the faculty in various kinds of programs and activities that they would consider important to the development of the whole student. We’re beginning to see how students learn and how they experience success and appreciate that psychosocial factors are important to their success.

“Increasing diversity of society also has made our classrooms more diverse, which is calling for greater attention to how we teach. That’s certainly not a bad thing, but it’s calling us to have to rethink how we teach. … I think increasing diversity has changed the kind of work faculty do. It’s demanding different things from us.”

The growth of distance learning and interdisciplinary programs has also gotten faculty to look beyond their disciplines and make more contributions to the institution. In many cases, involvement in these programs is expected; however, faculty members sometimes get mixed messages when it comes to the value of participating in activities outside their disciplines.

Obstacles

Contributing to these mixed messages are faculty reward systems and the socialization process. As institutions seek more investment by their faculty members, one of the obstacles they will face is the ambiguity of their faculty reward systems. “The reward system is very problematic because depending on how faculty members’ contracts read—and often such contracts are not very specific—they don’t really spell out what is expected, particularly in the service role,” Del Favero says.

A faculty contract might call for fifty percent research, forty percent teaching, and ten percent service. “But they’re still pretty vague,” Del Favero says. “Junior faculty come in and say, ‘Gee, what does this mean? I’ve got a ten percent service obligation, but then senior faculty are telling me to try to limit my service and get my research going.’”

In many cases, a junior faculty member will err on the side of caution and follow the prevailing culture in the department and focus primarily on research, Del Favero says.

As mentioned earlier, academic community plays a role in faculty investment in the institution. One trend in higher education that harms this sense of community is the increasing use of adjunct instructors. “When you have a large proportion of contingent faculty—at some institutions it’s more than half—you lose that sense of belonging, that sense of community,” Del Favero says.

In addition, adjuncts are typically hired to teach, not to engage the full complement of roles full-time faculty engage in. When adjuncts are used excessively in place of full-time faculty, service workloads are often unreasonable for the full-timers, Del Favero says.

Rewards

Getting faculty to invest in their institutions cannot be a top-down endeavor. Faculty need to take the lead in changing the reward system and culture to reflect the importance of faculty investment, Del Favero says.

The faculty reward system “needs to be totally revamped,” Del Favero says. One solution would be to incorporate Boyer’s matrix of talent, which consists of four types of scholarship:
• Scholarship of discovery—the traditional type of research involving the pursuit and discovery of new knowledge
• Scholarship of integration—interpreting and connecting original research across various domains
• Scholarship of application—applying research to practical problems
• Scholarship of teaching—includes pedagogical research and the advancement of teaching

By creating a reward system based on this matrix, faculty could emphasize one or more types of scholarship more than the other types, resulting in faculty doing the things they are best at and have the most interest in. “It’s the notion that not everybody has to be invested equally in each type of scholarship, but that a matrix of talent will ensure that institutions are better served. Such appreciation for a broader valuing of faculty contributions opens the door for valuing of faculty investment in their institution, Del Favero says.

The Boyer model, first proposed in 1990, has grown in popularity. “It has a lot of promise in helping us understand what faculty do. The model also legitimizes the various kinds of work that faculty do, particularly when their particular scholarship does not fit into the traditional categories of research and teaching. They’re using their expertise to advance knowledge in other ways,” Del Favero says.

Culture

Traditionally, graduate students are taught to value their disciplines and research, and receive little if any instruction in teaching or service. Increasingly, search committees are asking faculty candidates to give presentations about their teaching in addition to their research, “which is certainly a good thing,” Del Favero says. “I see things loosening up quite a bit there, but when you’re socialized in graduate school that [search committees] are interested only in your research, then you’re not going to go before a search committee and talk about how you might make contributions to the institution.”

In addition to having a reward system that values faculty investment in their institution, making faculty investment a requirement—such as a tenure requirement to serve on at least two campus committees—will not likely result in the best outcomes for the institution or the faculty member. Ideally, faculty investment in the institution will spring from a real sense of loyalty and a commitment to the collective good of the institutional community. Such a sense of community is rooted in the institutional culture. Investment behavior in such cultures is modeled by senior faculty, which in turn sends the message to junior faculty that investment in the institution is valued, Del Favero says.

Send your comments to partingshot@magnapubs.com.

Contact Marietta Del Favero at mdelfave@uno.edu.

This article first appeared in Magna Publications' newsletter Academic Leader. If you are an academic dean, provost, academic vice-president, department chair/head or have any role in academic leadership, then Academic Leader is for you! But don't take our word for it--try it free for 3-months and make the decision for yourself!