Between the three pillars of faculty work — research, teaching, and service — the most lamented is service. Academics hear that word and immediately think of boring meetings, rambling colleagues, and rising anxiety. Emails go unanswered and assignments ungraded while we sit and sit and sit. What is the point of this meeting, again?
As faculty members, most of us are required to do service work for our departments, colleges, or fields, and sometimes for our local communities. What service looks like depends on the institution, but formal service — the kind we get credit for — often involves committees or task forces with specific charges. Then there is informal, often-invisible service — advising, mentoring, assessment, program development, and a host of other things — that rarely counts in promotion-and-review processes yet provides a sense of accomplishment absent from most formal service.
Unlikely as it may seem, it is possible to find similar satisfaction from reviewing personnel files, revising the faculty handbook, and other formal service assignments. How? By following these five tips:
Know your options. Even at my small liberal-arts college, with its 2,200 students, we have 47 standing committees filled by a faculty of approximately 250. To further complicate matters, department chairs are not required to meet their service obligations via committee assignments, and pre-tenure faculty members are barred from about half of the committees. When I began my tenure-track position, I was unfamiliar with the breadth of opportunities and relied on a governance subcommittee to assign me to service. That was a mistake. I ended up spending countless hours talking in circles and working on unfulfilling projects.
Committees have varying levels of prestige, power, and workloads. At my college, for example, our faculty executive committee is the most prestigious service group, with a lot of power and the most work. Its weekly meetings often extend into evening phone calls and weekend paperwork. Conversely, the summer-sessions committee meets just three or four times a year and has minimal clout in a faculty member’s annual review.
As in most aspects of your career, a little research about service options goes a long way:
- Make sure you know what kind of service counts in your review versus the type that is considered either “voluntary” (something that you want to do because you are interested in the charge but that doesn’t satisfy institutional requirements) or “additional” (something that you are asked to do beyond your formal committee assignment but that isn’t recorded by the institution, such as participating in an admissions open house or teaching a mock class for prospective students).
- Inquire about how and when people are assigned to service, because much of it happens behind the scenes or through negotiations between faculty members. You can’t influence a decision if you don’t know when it’s being made.
- Although service is rarely valued as much as teaching and research, you should still be as involved in service decision-making as in other areas of your work. After all, too much service can bleed into the time you have for teaching and research.
In choosing service work, remember your long-term career goals. Whether you are working toward becoming a full-time, tenure-track, tenured, or full professor, remember that your application package will need to present a coherent narrative about who you are as a scholar, teacher, and campus citizen. Identify service opportunities aligned with your teaching and research interests.
I confess that I did that unknowingly: I realized only during my third-year review that all of my service was related to diversity and inclusion. For example, in my first year on the faculty, I joined the Diversity and Equity Advisory Board (formal service), the college-access committee (voluntary service), and the campus-climate committee (additional service). The following year I became an adviser to the Black Student Union (voluntary service) and joined the financial-aid appeals committee (formal service). After my third-year review, I felt comfortable asserting my professional expertise in areas beyond diversity and inclusion, so I lobbied to be on the assessment committee (additional service) and the curriculum executive committee (formal service). When writing my service statement for tenure, I was able to demonstrate the reciprocal nature of my teaching, research, and service.
If you do not choose your committee, you can still create a role for yourself within it that allows you to share your expertise, gain specific skills, or both. Rather than assign formal roles (e.g., secretary), most committees divvy up tasks among the members. Even if you are early in your career, don’t hesitate to step up and assume responsibility. People will remember your willingness to work and your contribution to the committee when it is time to solicit letters for your review.
Take advantage of service assignments to learn more about how your campus functions and to acquire new skills that you wouldn’t normally gain from research or teaching. For example, my position on the financial-aid appeals committee opened my eyes to inequities in admissions processes and taught me about institutional budgeting. That experience was valuable when I later assumed leadership positions as department chair and director of multiple campus centers.
As I look toward a possible career shift into administration, my application will include knowledge and skills that other faculty candidates may not have.
Do service work that is meaningful to you. Don’t join a committee simply because it will look good on your CV or because you think it will be easy. You want to do something that matters so it doesn’t feel like a waste of time. Who will benefit from your work? What will change? How can your service next year build upon what you do this year?
While many campus committees are not action-oriented, nothing prevents you from proposing future action. My time on the Diversity and Equity Advisory Board was challenging because we were only an information-gathering body for the college president, without the authority to actually do anything. But in my sixth year as a faculty member, when I served on this board again, I was a department chair, so I knew firsthand how frustrating it is when people bring you problems without any proposed solutions. So, although it was not our official charge, I asked the committee to consider presenting both information and recommendations to the president.
There was immediate enthusiasm for the idea. We eventually proposed a faculty exit-interview process (none existed), a makeover of web pages communicating our diversity efforts, and a plan to align diversity programs between divisions. Not all of our proposals came to fruition, but what mattered more was that we felt as if we’d done our part to better the institution. We also set a precedent for that committee as a proposal-generating body. It feels good knowing that I contributed to policies and practices that outlasted my time on the committee.
Use service to build your social capital. The importance of service is not just the work itself but the relationships you form. Service is often the only mechanism to meet people outside your department. In academe, it is vital to build a positive reputation that speaks for itself because so many serious decisions are based upon people and not policies. Especially at small colleges where the culture is very relational, people should recognize your name and know what you do.
Try to choose a committee that operates across the campus and, if possible, one that includes staff members and student members. It is great to work within your department, but privilege opportunities to meet new people beyond its confines. Search committees are incredibly time-consuming, but they are one of the most efficient and structured relationship-building mechanisms. The nature of the work means that you will spend a lot of time conversing with people rather than simply sitting side by side in a conference room.
When you are up for review, you want people to have substantive comments about your value to the institution rather than just “we were on a committee together.” Service is an easy way to make your presence known.
Do more than the minimum. I know this advice is sacrilege to overworked academics, but the truth is: Doing the bare minimum is rarely good for your career in higher education.
In my first two years at my college, I was a postdoc with a reduced teaching load and no service requirements. I was expected to publish my dissertation and establish a research agenda. I did those things, taught my classes, and joined committees of interest. I did not intend to remain at the college, so my motivation for engaging in service was not about creating long-term relationships — but enough of a relationship with people to request letters of reference. When I started on the tenure track at the college, I was grateful to have made those connections because I already had social capital to cash in for classroom assignments, research collaborations, and mentoring.
Your goal here is to establish a service portfolio that (a) doesn’t eat up too much of your research and teaching time and (b) enhances your overall marketability if and when unexpected career opportunities arise. In practice, that might mean participating on a committee in your first year, even if newly hired faculty members are not expected to do service. In that situation, choose high-reward, low-investment assignments (such as advising a student group) and avoid time-consuming, low-reward work (like curriculum design and program assessment — you’ll be doing plenty of that post-tenure).
Sure, there will be days when service just feels like a burden. But by following these suggestions, you may be able to turn it into an opportunity. You just have to be strategic about it.
