At midcareer, many faculty members experience flagging enthusiasm for their work. The discontent is widely recognized, but on campuses, concerted efforts to help professors out of their doldrums have until recently been few.
But faculty members and others who are proponents of such programs say they are often inexpensive to start and their returns great. And the changes don’t have to be major ones.
Emphasize the positive, says Robin M. Queen, a professor of linguistics at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor who headed a committee on how to improve the experiences and productivity of associate professors in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts that delivered its report last month.
How to assist professors through the post-tenure blues.
Among its recommendations were some simple ones, such as to stop using the term “service.” The word is really a poor description of the heavy load of “governance” and “leadership” expected of professors once they reach associate rank, upon tenure. She says, “Using the word ‘service’ makes it sound like grunt work.”
Her committee built upon the work of one convened in 2009, which led to a broader conception of faculty accomplishment in promotions-and-merit proceedings. They now take account, for example, of associate professors’ differing balances of contributions to research, teaching, and governance. She says “a more holistic review process” now better captures the great variation in what faculty members do after tenure.
Michigan, as a vast institution of many parts, has a variety of programs to help keep professors on track post-tenure. It has, for example, LIFT: Leadership and Integration at Faculty Transitions, which offers a one-day retreat where deans and sometimes the provost join faculty members to develop and trade ideas on what directions the professors’ careers might next take, and what changes the professors think the institution should consider as ways to raise the performance of the institution.
The university offers LIFT through a larger program that was designed to help faculty more broadly and that was set up after a National Science Foundation Advance grant ended in 2007. In operation for 16 years, the NSF’s Advance program provides grants for efforts to increase the representation and leadership participation of women and minority faculty in STEM fields — science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
Several recipients of Advance grants have converted findings and programming into campus- or divisionwide offerings to help midcareer academics. The University of California at Davis, for example, has set up a forum on associate professors for discussion of such topics as merit and promotion, research collaborations, and dealing with abrasive colleagues and students. That was among recommendations from a survey of faculty satisfaction that Davis commissioned from Coache, the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education, based at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education.
Response has been impressive, says Maureen L. Stanton, Davis’s vice provost for academic affairs. Almost 70 people attended the forum’s first session, in 2014. “I was absolutely astonished,” she says. “It was clear we were addressing a need.”
The University of North Carolina at Charlotte used a 2006 Advance grant to reform tenure-and-promotions criteria so they took more account of the institution’s role in community-engaged research. Its Advance Faculty Affairs and Diversity Office offers such programs as a yearlong seminar for associate professors who are emerging as faculty leaders, along with a series of career-enhancement fellowships to help and encourage them to prepare for such positions. One mark of how much such programs have energized the associate-professor rank is that since 2006, the number of women in STEM leadership positions on campus has shot up by 23 percent, supported by a 14-percent jump in the number of women attaining tenure in STEM fields.
In the early stages of setting up midcareer programs, the University of Tennessee at Knoxville is following the lead of institutions like Davis, and is seeking to dispel the traditional view that when faculty members stall, “something is wrong with them,” says Matthew T. Theriot, interim vice provost for faculty affairs. He says he and colleagues are asking, instead, “How can we make these issues an opportunity rather than a problem?” He and associate-rank faculty members have, he believes, “a sense that it’s an idea whose time has come.”
It has arrived not only at large research institutions, but at liberal-arts colleges, too. There, even though midcareer faculty members may not be as troubled as their research-institution peers when unable to find much time for research, their workloads and resulting malaise can be just as severe.
That means it’s time to boost morale, says Karla A. Erickson, a professor of sociology at Grinnell College who runs programs geared toward doing just that, with titles like “Presentation of Scholarly Selves” and “Mechanics of Scholarship.” She confides that while many colleagues come to groups like those, others feel more comfortable in one-on-one sessions. This past semester, she met with 20 colleagues that way — a good portion at an institution with only 200 total faculty members. “I talked to people who are 60 and people who just got tenure,” she says.
Her goal in the activities, she says, is to create “an environment of curiosity and inquiry, about ourselves and what’s possible.”
