Academic departments and colleges are adopting a variety of measures to make faculty committee service more attractive, rewarding, and productive.
Reduced teaching loads and extended time to satisfy tenure-and-promotion requirements in return for sterling committee service appeal to many academics. So does a month of summer research funding. Also well received is rotating membership on committees whose work is labor-intensive, such as tenure-and-promotion and disciplinary committees.
Those are among the findings documented by KerryAnn O’Meara, a professor of higher education at the University of Maryland at College Park. She directs a project, funded by the National Science Foundation, aimed at making faculty workloads and rewards more equitable, especially to female scholars in STEM fields and the social sciences.
The project grew out of research that has demonstrated that women and members of underrepresented minority groups spend significantly more time than male and white peers on academic service, including committees, mentoring, and even teaching.
Serving on faculty panels is often seen as a thankless task, but colleges can make it more rewarding by agreeing on goals and spreading the work fairly.
While Ms. O’Meara and her colleagues are focusing on the STEM fields in the North Carolina, Maryland, and Massachusetts higher-education systems, their findings apply to many academic disciplines. Inequities, which reduce job satisfaction and increase attrition, often arise because faulty assumptions and prejudices about faculty service get replicated in decisions about who does what and who gets asked to do what, Ms. O’Meara says.
The required adjustment, she says, is to say “OK, even if women are sought after more as advisers, or are being asked to write more letters of recommendation or be on more committees, and even if they’re volunteering for that service, and even if a lot of complex things work together that are not all under our control, we as a department are all going to try to fix this by making it our problem.”
Research institutions confound such efforts by telling faculty members that their service is crucial while at the same time rewarding only research, grants, and perhaps teaching, she says. In that “ambiguous situation,” confusion reigns over what level of service is appropriate. “People’s biases emerge in a sort of perfect storm.”
Then, as research has shown, when calls for service go out, most volunteers are women and others influenced by socialization based on such factors as gender, race and ethnicity, and age. (In the context of faculty service, researchers refer to gender socialization using such terms as “academic mothering” and “institutional housekeeping.”) When administrators come to count on those who commonly volunteer, “there are consequences of that, often invisible, sometimes not, like people’s careers being stymied,” says Ms. O’Meara.
That effect is magnified, she says, by another academic prejudice: Service volunteers “are doing the sort of work we don’t associate with the star faculty member, and that can devalue their other work, too.”
How to fix the problem? In a word: transparency, says Ms. O’Meara.
Transparency about who’s doing what ‘can serve as a coaxing -- I don’t want to use the word ‘shaming.’'
Studies in social psychology show that people are less frustrated with job arrangements such as service obligations when they know they will be treated fairly, she says. So, for example, satisfaction increases if every department member knows that a scholar who lands a large research grant can then teach one course fewer or serve on one committee fewer. While secrecy and fear of favoritism cause dissatisfaction, she says, revealing what everyone is doing, and what they get for their effort, allays perception problems.
Laying cards on the table “also forces some people into a kind of reckoning,” she says. “It can serve as a coaxing — I don’t want to use the word ‘shaming’ — when you come to a department meeting.”
Resistance is inevitable because some people benefit from inequities. But, says Ms. O’Meara, “the hope is that enough people who are in charge of creating the system will coax, persuade, have some moral authority to move the group in the direction of fairness.”
When she and colleagues consult with departments, they offer training in how to recognize and confront implicit biases — to learn, for example, to say calmly at a department meeting, “Let’s slow down the way we’re divvying work out, and change things.”
Happily, reports Ms. O’Meara, when people in the project’s targeted departments learn of possible remedies, “one of the first things they say is, ‘They’re so simple.’
“This isn’t brain surgery.”
Peter Monaghan is a national correspondent for The Chronicle. Email him at pmonaghan3@mac.com.