When academic departments try to determine how to encourage, assess, and reward faculty-service activities, they are joining a debate that has been playing out in academe for decades.
In the early 1990s, for example, 15 academic societies and associations took part in the National Project on Institutional Priorities and Faculty Rewards. Sometimes heatedly, representatives tried to define good scholarly, teaching, and service work, and agreed that each discipline should establish its own criteria.
So in 1996, the Modern Language Association, for its part, issued a report, “Making Faculty Work Visible,” that recommended recasting the three traditional categories of faculty work into just two: intellectual work and academic-and-professional citizenship. The latter — encompassing activities like service on campus and professional committees, conference organizing, journal editing, and formal and informal mentoring that advance institutions or disciplines — should be much better recognized and rewarded than in the past, the MLA stated.
As was the case with statements made by other national groups, the MLA report didn’t have much effect. Faculty members from underrepresented groups, and women, have repeatedly been found to bear a disproportionate faculty-service burden — by the U.S. Department of Education in 1988, by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in 1990, and, in 2013, by the National Women’s Studies Association.
At a campus level, department chairs commonly rank faculty service as among their thorniest challenges. And change comes slowly, as Andrew Furman, a professor of English at Florida Atlantic University, can attest.
In a 2004 opinion essay in The Chronicle, written during the first of two stints as chairman of his department, Mr. Furman lamented becoming so busy with faculty service that, to keep up, he had to scamper around campus and send emails marred with truncations like “terrif” — from an English professor!
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.
Now, looking over his 20 years at Florida Atlantic, he sees only limited improvement, and believes that an old saying remains true: 10 percent of faculty members perform 90 percent of a department’s service work. “It’s really hard to distribute service evenly when you have faculty members who shirk service, or who certainly don’t value service, because they think it’s not going to get them tenure,” he says.
“I’ve been on both sides of the table,” he says. So he knows it’s no fun when, for example, “at a department meeting the chair asks, ‘Who wants to take minutes?,’ and everybody looks around at each other.”
Various forces have shaped his department’s and his university’s service landscape. Florida Atlantic is pushing to become a more prominent research institution, and that effort, he says, has concentrated power at upper levels of management, leading to faculty doubts about the value of their service contributions.
At the same time, higher education finds itself under growing pressure, from inside and outside, to demonstrate greater accountability. A few years ago, during Mr. Furman’s second stretch as chair, his department underwent a review as part of the university’s regional-accreditation process. “Talk about service work! It was crazy. All this assessment of courses and programs and whatnot, it’s very onerous.”
The department’s egalitarian spirit has made some colleagues feel empowered to say no to committee work, Mr. Furman says. In addition, “practiced incompetency” has long disrupted faculty-service ecosystems, he says, as “artful dodgers” willfully demonstrate that committees are better off without them. Then administrators must call repeatedly on their most dependable faculty citizens — who, in his experience, generally tend to be the strongest scholars, too.
All in all, he says, little has changed in his department since he wrote in 2004 that “the faculty members to whom I would like to extend research leave time are the last faculty members whom I can spare.” Service on the department’s Faculty Evaluation Committee, the Undergraduate and Graduate Studies Committees, the Writing and Creative Writing Committees, and several others still taxes Mr. Furman and his colleagues. Adding to the burden, in recent years the department has had high turnover, spreading its remaining members even more thinly. But the attrition, he says, has left laggards with nowhere to hide.
Another positive note: The department has made the criteria for service more rigorous by specifically itemizing what counts. The department chair has discretion to grant more credit for quality and difficulty of service, and to offer teaching reductions and small stipends to “service heroes” — those who labor long and hard on certain department committees, even if those awards provoke grumbling about favoritism.
It’s no fun when at a department meeting the chair asks, ‘Who wants to take minutes?,’ and everybody looks around at each other.
Senior members are now required to do more service to ensure that junior professors “don’t do more of the heavy lifting because they feel they can’t say no.”
That creates a quandary: Who will do all the committee work while the department’s six open tenure-track slots wait to be filled? Like colleges around the country, Florida Atlantic is hiring more and more contingent faculty members — part- or full-time employees who are ineligible for tenure, and who, nationally, far outnumber those in the tenure system. “We try not to burden them with service, because their teaching assignment is so large,” says Mr. Furman. However, he adds, “Now, I think that for reasons of enfranchising nontenured faculty, and also for distribution of the burden, some kind of modest service assignment is appropriate.”
Around the country, administrators do quite commonly invite contingent faculty members to take part in service activities. The work affords them recognition and a greater sense of academic community. But if it is uncompensated, it probably exploits them, and in any case few contingent faculty members have time for it, says Maria Maisto, president of New Faculty Majority, a national coalition for adjunct and contingent faculty.
Because the contingent-faculty model needs to change, she argues, those who push for reform, both on campuses and nationally, deserve greater recognition.
“Advocacy itself,” she says, “is a form of faculty service.”
Peter Monaghan is a national correspondent for The Chronicle. Email him at pmonaghan3@mac.com.
