Introduction

New strategies for a sustainable, successful professoriate. IntroductionThese are difficult times for faculty members, and for colleges that want them to thrive. The strain long felt by the underpaid, contingent instructors that institutions have increasingly relied on has spilled over, during the coronavirus pandemic, to those on the tenure track. Many professors are suffering from what has been called the “Great Faculty Disengagement.” They feel less connected to their institutions than they did before the coronavirus pandemic began. After more than two years of scrambling and contingency planning, and of worrying about their students’ mental and physical health, as well as their own, some faculty members feel underappreciated or, worse, exploited. For the most part, they are soldiering on, but they are depleted.That matters. Faculty members are essential to the health of an institution. They’re the ones who produce groundbreaking research, who nurture and train future faculty members, who make the daily connections with undergraduate students that propel them toward their degree.This report will describe the most pressing faculty-related challenges that higher-education institutions face, whether those come from outside or inside: Public skepticism and surveillance of what’s being taught in the classroom. Increased scrutiny of tenure. A lack of racial diversity.Some of those challenges have been made more acute by budgetary pressures. To combat the financial hardship brought about by the pandemic, many colleges had to make difficult choices, including eliminating or reducing benefits for faculty members, freezing salaries, encouraging retirements, and in some instances, terminating or not renewing faculty appointments. While many professors understand why such measures were taken, those decisions nonetheless contribute to the low morale that persists on campus. In general, it’s been a destabilizing time to perform the essential duties of being a professor: teaching, research, and service. Each of those roles has, for the past two years, become more difficult to carry out.However, in responding to the pandemic, many colleges have shown that they are capable of working quickly and being flexible. They instituted tenure-clock delays, for example, reduced committee workloads, or made new resources available to faculty members with caregiving responsibilities.Now, experts are urging administrators not to rest on the strength of those short-term fixes, but to be proactive. College leaders need to think about what they want their faculties to look like five years, 10 years, 20 years down the road. As you’ll read, some campuses are finding creative and bold ways to better support their non-tenure-track faculty members in their teaching and professional development. Some have been working to make their faculty workloads more transparent and measurable. Some are rethinking how to evaluate teaching in ways that are both more rigorous and more equitable.If the pandemic has a silver lining, faculty experts say, it’s that it further exposed all the ways in which the current, two-tier model of the faculty is not working. Covid-19 shone a spotlight on existing cracks in the system. That means now is an ideal time to consider what sorts of support it will take to build or maintain a vibrant faculty. The future success of your college or university depends on it.Return to Table of ContentsSection 1: The Professoriate TodayMuch has been written about the two-tiered system that has come to dominate faculty employment. Tenured and tenure-track professors enjoy a professional life not often available to contingent faculty members. The latter, some of whom have Ph.D.s and sought tenure-track appointments in a challenging academic labor market and weren’t able to secure them, now work in generally less stable and less autonomous positions than their tenure-line peers.College instructors without tenure outnumber those with it. Of the approximately 1.32 million faculty members across all institution types, about 24.7 percent were tenured, and 10.1 percent were on the tenure track in the fall of 2020, according to a Chronicle analysis of U.S. Department of Education data. The remaining 65.2 percent of instructors were off the tenure track or worked at colleges that don’t have tenure at all. The proportion of tenured or tenure-track faculty members at four-year public or private institutions was much higher than the proportion at two-year institutions, which also had a higher share of part-time instructors. At all institutions, nearly 39 percent of the faculty were part-time.There’s no single reason why the shift from a mostly tenured-stream faculty to an increasingly contingent one happened, write Adrianna Kezar and Daniel Maxey in Envisioning the Faculty for the Twenty-First Century. It resulted from a convergence of trends. One was fluctuating enrollment. “Hiring contingent faculty, particularly part-time faculty who are hired on a semester-to-semester basis, allowed departments to respond more rapidly to any fluctuations in the market, whether they were the result of budget deficits or changes in demand,” write Kezar, a professor of leadership and higher education at the University of Southern California and director of its Pullias Center for Higher Education, and Maxey, now chief of staff at the University of Colorado at Denver.At the same time, part-time appointments gained popularity in the 1970s at community colleges, in particular, as those institutions sought out faculty members who had work experience in vocational fields, like journalism or automotive mechanics, write Kezar and Maxey in a report for the Pullias Center, Adapting by Design. Those adjunct appointments spread to other institutions. As part-time faculty members grew in number across higher ed, it “increasingly became the norm” for tenure-track professors to teach more upper-division and specialized courses, while part-time faculty members taught “mostly introductory, liberal arts, and remedial-education courses,” they write.This rise of a bifurcated faculty system mirrors larger trends in the American economy. In general, temporary labor arrangements that don’t come with benefits have become much more commonplace. Boards of trustees and college leaders who came to higher education from the business world have encouraged and advanced employment arrangements with a focus on cost efficiency. As Kezar and two other researchers, Daniel T. Scott and Tom DePaola, argue in The Gig Academy: Mapping Labor in the Neo-liberal University, universities, in their need for highly trained workers, have produced “their own cheap work force” by expanding the number of doctoral degrees they grant even as they’ve limited the number of stable faculty jobs. In doing so, they have created “a system in which low wages and precariousness are standard terms of employment for the least and most educated workers alike.”Public colleges and small liberal-arts colleges, especially, have faced tough financial circumstances and a competitive marketplace. Even as many states restored cuts to higher-education funding that they made during the recession, overall spending when adjusted for inflation and enrollment, did not rise to pre-recession levels, the Pew Charitable Trusts reported in 2019. Covid-19 did not help matters. A survey of 46 states conducted by New American and the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association, last updated in 2021, found that while the effect was not universal, some states had “outlined sharp cuts to higher-education budgets for the upcoming fiscal year.”Today it’s becoming more difficult, especially for middle-tier institutions, “to raise the revenue and have the same commitment to faculty that they’ve had in the past,” says Eric Bettinger, a professor in Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education. In general, there’s “a lot of pressure on revenues right now for universities. There’s pressure not to raise tuition,” Bettinger says. “As you start to think about it, adjuncts as a means of controlling some of that have only become more attractive.”For the price of one tenure line, write Kezar and Maxey in Envisioning the Faculty, a college could hire several adjunct faculty members, “thus meeting the demands of increased enrollment.” And as many regional colleges anticipate the “enrollment cliff” — a steep drop in numbers forecast for 2026 — they may be especially wary of investing now in tenure-track faculty.At the same time, colleges face pressure to diversify their faculties, especially in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder by a police officer in 2020 and the ensuing racial reckoning. Students, in particular, have been demanding that their campuses hire more Black, Latino/a, and Indigenous faculty members. Many colleges have recognized the need for such efforts and devoted resources to them. Compared with two decades ago, today’s faculty is more racially and ethnically diverse. Still, it generally lags well behind the diversity of the student body. Between 1997 and 2017, the share of nonwhite undergraduate students increased by 17 percentage points, thanks in part to a rapidly rising share of Hispanic students, the Pew Research Center observed. During that same period, the share of full-time faculty members who are not white grew by 10 percentage points.Looking at federal data, Black, Hispanic or Latino, American Indian or Alaska Native, and multiracial faculty members are all underrepresented among tenured and tenure-track faculty, when compared with undergraduate students, according to a Chronicle analysis. Both white and Asian faculty members are overrepresented, compared with undergraduates. In general, the further up the faculty ranks you go, the fewer women and racial minorities you see. As of fall of 2020, women make up around 40.2 faculty and 50.6 percent of full-time tenure-track faculty.Faculty Composition MattersWho the faculty is, and how it’s structured, affects faculty fulfillment and productivity and can also affect student outcomes.Non-tenure-track faculty members, especially adjunct instructors who teach on the shortest-term contracts, often say they lack adequate pay, stability, and institutional investment. Adjunct faculty members, in particular, often don’t have access to avenues of professionalism that are available to tenure-line faculty members and are splitting their time among sometimes three or more institutions. Those faculty members also typically have much less input into the design of the curriculum and less time to devote to interacting with students. All of these factors combine to create, for many instructors off the tenure track, less-than-ideal working conditions.Analyzing the impact of faculty employment characteristics on student success is tricky. Each department and college exists in its own environment, with its own variables. However, a body of existing research suggests that the working conditions of contingent faculty members, particularly adjuncts, can shape students’ experiences and can have negative consequences. In short, as Kezar, Maxey, and Elizabeth Holcombe write in The Professoriate Reconsidered: A Study of New Faculty Models, the evidence suggests that the contingent model, particularly a heavy reliance on adjuncts, presents problems for first-year persistence, retention, transfers to four-year colleges, and graduation — particularly among first-generation and underprepared students. And they say an increasing reliance on contingent appointments does other damage, including lowering faculty morale and weakening governance.A small sampling of the prevailing research:A 2004 working paper looked at data from two- and four-year colleges to see whether increased use of faculty members off the tenure track influenced graduation rates. The study found an adverse effect on undergraduate students at four-year colleges, which was more pronounced for public institutions.A 2018 study that examined student and instructor data from two- and four-year colleges found that taking a course with a non-tenure-track faculty member was associated with higher grades for those courses but had negative impacts on subsequent course outcomes. Those negative impacts were more pronounced for students of contingent faculty members hired on temporary appointments than for those taught by instructors on long-term contracts.A 2020 study looked at six community colleges and found that students in course sections taught by part-time faculty members “tend to have better current course outcomes in both developmental and gateway courses but are less likely than their peers taught by full-time faculty to enroll in the next course in the sequence.” In that study, the authors surveyed part-time instructors at the six institutions and found that they tended to be less knowledgeable about academic and non-academic support available to students, which may have prevented them from “advising and engaging with their students as effectively as their full-time counterparts.” (For a more exhaustive summary, go to the Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success website.)The problem is not that non-tenure-track instructors are not or cannot be effective teachers, say experts. On the contrary, they are often dedicated teachers who care about their students. And having instructors from professional fields who can bring in real-world experience and state-of-the-profession information can be a real boon to students. Rather, the problem is that colleges fail to support those faculty members.Bettinger and Bridget Terry Long, now dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, have examined the correlation between part-time instructors and student outcomes. After examining application and transcript data for more than 43,000 students at four-year public colleges in Ohio, the authors concluded that adjuncts “often have a small positive effect on student enrollment patterns, especially in fields related to particular occupations.” The results “can be reconciled with earlier findings on the negative impact of adjuncts by considering that although the use of adjuncts may lower overall student persistence … adjuncts may be effectively used in particular disciplines to encourage subsequent enrollments.”Describing his research to The Chronicle, Bettinger gives an illustrative example. He remembers “this incredible economist” that his department at another university once hired to be an adjunct instructor. The instructor had worked at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland during the savings and loan crisis of the late 1980s. Sure, Bettinger could give students an academic view of certain course concepts. But this sort of instructor “could give them such a real-life attestation to what can happen when there’s a perception that a bank won’t be able to fulfill its obligations.” The adjunct owned the room, says Bettinger. But when students who liked the instructor came to him for advice, his advice was often counterproductive because he didn’t understand the nuances of the major, Bettinger says. He was a great teacher, but “he didn’t mentor them in ways that would help them have a timely graduation and really get themselves ready for the job market, within the major.”In an ideal scenario, says Bettinger, not only would departments support adjuncts in their course development, but they would consider them “a part of their team” and provide resources for each one to be a “trusted mentor and confidante” for students.Students could also benefit from a faculty that better reflects undergraduate demographics. A 2019 study examined the impact on student performance of having a professor of the same race or ethnicity. The results indicated that “student-faculty racial/ethnic match, campus racial/ethnic composition, and campus racial/ethnic climate each predicted GPA, which predicted graduation.” The interaction between faculty and students, including informal contact, plays an important role in keeping students enrolled and satisfied with their experience, according to a report about retaining minority students.Students of color often look to faculty members of color for that informal contact, which is necessary to their learning and thriving but can also spread those faculty members pretty thin. Research has shown that, in general, women faculty members spend more time on teaching and service and less time on research than men; and that faculty members who are white spend less time on mentoring and diversity work than faculty members from racial minority groups. These activities “are vital to the functioning of the university,” reads an American Council on Education report on equity-minded faculty workloads, “yet are often invisible and unrewarded, leading to lower productivity and decreased retention.” The pandemic, which has “disproportionately affected the lives and careers of women and faculty from historically minoritized groups, makes calls for equity-minded workload reform critical.” A more diverse faculty would mean that that not fall to a small sliver of people.Return to Table of ContentsSection 2: Tenure Under ScrutinyMany faculty members have long considered the tenure system sacrosanct and essential to protecting academic freedom. Understandably, they have been alarmed by calls for reform. But those traditions developed long after the birth of American higher education.There was no institutionalized sense of academic freedom in the early years of American universities, John Karl Wilson, a scholar who has published widely on the topic, wrote in his 2014 dissertation. Administrators “had almost unlimited authority to dismiss professors, usually those who were deemed too radical in their public statements.”Within the first two decades of the 20th century, that changed. Several high-profile controversies at the University of Chicago, Stanford University, and the University of Wisconsin “all helped to provoke awareness of the threat to academic freedom and the need for academia to create an organization, the American Association of University Professors, that could defend it.”At Stanford, a professor named Edward A. Ross, who viewed whites as superior, opined in “blatantly racist terms” against the importation of Chinese workers to build railroads in California — something in which the Stanford family “had a strong financial interest,” writes Wilson. Jane L. Stanford, the university’s co-founder, objected to Ross’s views and ordered the president to fire him, which he did. Stanford then ordered another professor who had criticized the firing to either apologize or resign. Seven other Stanford professors resigned in protest. The “fact that Ross’ views should have been condemned along with his dismissal doesn’t change the fundamental issue of academic in his case,” writes Wilson.The AAUP defined academic freedom in its 1915 Declaration of Principles as composed of three elements: “freedom of inquiry and research; freedom of teaching within the university or college; and freedom of extramural utterance and action.” It was then that the AAUP also “began its crusade for tenure,” writes Wilson. The organization argued that tenure was necessary because “men of high gifts and character” needed “the assurance of an honorable and secure position.”Outside the academy, these ideas were met with ridicule. In 1915, writes Wilson, The New York Times described academic freedom as “the inalienable right of every college instructor to make a fool of himself and of his college by … intemperate, sensational prattle about every subject under heaven … and still keep on the payroll or be reft therefrom only by elaborate process.”Before long, notions of academic freedom and tenure became entrenched in American higher ed. The 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure — jointly written by the AAUP and what is now the Association of American Colleges and Universities — established the modern conception of tenure, and has been widely adopted into faculty handbooks and collective bargaining agreements throughout the United States. That statement asserts that tenure — defined as freedom of teaching, research, and extramural activities, combined with economic security — is “indispensable to the success of an institution in fulfilling its obligations to its students and to society.”It’s a commitment to those values, tenure defenders argue, that established U.S. higher education as a global powerhouse, and that, even in its beleaguered state, continues to allow American institutions to thrive. “If the United States is to retain its global advantage in instructional and research innovation over the next decade, U.S. institutions of higher education will need a stable academic labor force that can commit to excellence,” reads a 2015-16 report from the AAUP. “The best way to achieve this is through the conversion of contingent appointments to tenure-eligible positions.”However, for as long as tenure has been around, it’s had its critics. They say it’s a means of protecting “driftwood” or “deadwood” instructors who no longer pull their weight, that it prevents institutions from being nimble and reacting appropriately to enrollment fluctuations. In recent years, especially as political polarization in America has reached a fever pitch, that scrutiny has intensified.Take recent comments made by Dan Patrick, the lieutenant governor of Texas. The University of Texas at Austin’s Faculty Council had recently approved a resolution defending the faculty’s right to teach about critical race theory, among other topics. Patrick said at a February 2022 press conference that the council, a “small group” of professors, did not understand that “we are the ones who pay their salaries. The parents are the ones who pay tuition. And of course, we’re going to have a say in what the curriculum is.”“Hiding behind this academic-freedom argument,” Patrick said, “just doesn’t work.” He said he would seek to end tenure for all new hires. For professors who already have tenure, “the law will change to say teaching critical race theory is prima facie evidence of good cause for tenure revocation.”Patrick’s comments and proposal were swiftly denounced by the AAUP and other faculty groups. “The resulting damage to the reputation of the UT system as well as to the recruitment and retention of faculty and students in the state, if Patrick’s threat is fulfilled, will be devastating,” the AAUP said in a statement.It’s unclear if Patrick’s proposal will be successful. Still, his argument is reflective of a broader anti-tenure sentiment that’s been promoted by Republican lawmakers in various states. In South Carolina, for example, a legislator put forward an unsuccessful bill that would have eventually done away with tenure. The lawmaker told The Chronicle that he wanted to replace the “lifelong guarantee” of employment with “a contractual agreement that is comparable to what other sectors of American life have.”Critics From WithinLawmakers aren’t the only ones questioning tenure. Experts inside the academy have also criticized the institution, though they draw a firm distinction between their critiques and those influenced by partisan politics. They point out that colleges often leave criteria for earning tenure opaque, which can disadvantage women and minority faculty members, in particular. Faculty members have talked for years about the immense stress of working to achieve tenure, as well as how devastating it can be not to get it.Patrick said at the February press conference that he talks to university leaders and regents across Texas, and that though “most of them” won’t say so publicly, "they think that tenure has outlived its time.”Whether or not that’s true, some higher-ed leaders have also expressed doubts that the institution will serve colleges well into the future. Tenure is expensive, compared with nontenured positions, and doesn’t allow colleges to shrink departments with low enrollments as quickly as they’d like. A 2016 survey of chief academic officers conducted by Gallup and Inside Higher Ed reported that 67 percent of respondents believed tenure remained important and viable at their institutions, but 61 percent said they’d favor a system of long-term contracts over tenure. A 2015 survey of various higher-ed stakeholders published in The Professoriate Reconsidered found that while just 9 percent of tenure-track faculty members were drawn to the idea of phasing out tenure for multiyear renewable contracts, provosts, accreditors, and governing boards found that idea much more attractive.At least one college decided that instituting tenure, rather than shying away from it, would be beneficial. Chatham University, in Pittsburgh, Pa., which had eliminated tenure in 2005 in favor of multiyear contracts, recently decided to reinstate tenure. In getting rid of tenure, the university had wanted to reduce the stratification between faculty members on the tenure track and the many clinical professors it hired graduate courses in health science.But it found that not being able to offer tenure made it more difficult to attract professors, Linda MK Johnson, a member of the faculty committee that recommended a tenure system to Chatham’s Board of Trustees, told The Chronicle. When recruiting, “you always feel like you have to apologize a little bit at the beginning: ‘I’m sorry, just so you know, we are not an institution that grants tenure,’” Johnson said. Retention was also an issue. Some professors “would use Chatham as kind of a teaching postdoc, where they would get a couple of years of experience to make them better candidates for a tenure-track position.”Exceptions like Chatham aside, a profession dominated by tenure-line positions focused on the triad of research, teaching, and service is unlikely to re-emerge. More and more, college leaders and higher-ed experts are thinking about what it would look like to ensure the essential work of a college or university without tenure, and whether that’s possible. “When I think about tenure, it’s such an abstraction,” says John Warner, an author and longtime contingent faculty member at various institutions. “My mind always goes to, What is the work? What’s the labor? What are we trying to achieve here, and what are the structures which allow that work to happen? What are the protections necessary to do that? Is that tenure? I mean, tenure became a sort of shorthand for that, but I don’t think there’s anything magic about tenure as it exists or as we conceive of it now, that it is the only way to achieve those things.”Uncoupling Academic Freedom and TenureAt least one college’s model suggests that tenure is not the only way. Jay Roberts, provost at Warren Wilson College, a private liberal-arts college in Swannanoa, N.C., thinks the conflation of academic freedom with tenure is unnecessary. At Warren Wilson, faculty members are hired on what Roberts describes as a “1:1:1:3:7” system. For the first three years, a new faculty member works on one-year renewable contracts. That period is meant to be developmental. The faculty members are given lots of feedback, says Roberts, and it’s “very unusual for us to move off of a candidate” in that time period “unless something is egregiously wrong.”In the midst of the third one-year contract, a faculty member puts together her portfolio to secure a three-year contract, which brings with it “all the rights and privileges of tenure within that contract time frame,” like the protections of academic freedom and against arbitrary dismissal, Roberts says. As the expiration of that contract approaches, the faculty member — now in her sixth year at the institution — can apply for her first seven-year extended contract, which comes with “the most robust review,” akin to that of a tenure review, says Roberts. Every contract after that is seven years long.Before arriving at Warren Wilson, Roberts came from an institution with tenure. He’s “agnostic” on it, he says, but having a system of extended contracts, as opposed to tenure, does come with certain advantages. For one thing, it enables an institution to be a little bit more nimble. “I’m not having to say, to a board, that this in a 30- to 35-year decision we’re making about a line in Viking studies,” for example. This system also offers more professional development and evaluation than a tenure system, Roberts says. Also, in a traditional tenure system, Roberts says, it can be a challenge to keep people wanting to develop and grow in their teaching and scholarship once they’ve reached that associate professor hurdle. “They could, if they wanted to, essentially just be done.”However, Roberts noted, a skeptical faculty member looking at this system would see a point of “vulnerability” for professors. They’d point out that when faculty members go up for a review, it could be influenced by factors outside of academic freedom — by financial matters or by politics, for example. Roberts also noted that an absence of a tenure system does not eradicate imbalances between a two-tiered faculty. Warren Wilson also employs adjuncts and lecturers. “We have the same kinds of tensions around that that any other institution would have,” Roberts says, including, “are we paying a living wage for these folks?”Ultimately, “this question of, how do we balance the value of academic freedom … with a curricular universe that is in a constant state of expansion, alongside the real practical realities of financial constraint?” is a real struggle, Roberts says.Return to Table of Contents Section 3: Graduate Education and the Support of TeachingThough the proportion of tenure-track jobs and the nature of what it means to be a faculty member have changed over time, many graduate programs are still set up to produce the faculty of yesteryear. A fundamental question right now, for humanities Ph.D. programs in particular, is whether they should shrink graduate cohort size. The pro-shrink argument goes like this: The supply of Ph.D.s for tenure-track jobs in academe doesn’t align with the demand. To right that alignment, you have to cut the supply. Supporters also argue that it’s unethical for graduate programs to continue admitting more students than the academic job market can support. Admitting fewer students would mean money could be invested in creating tenure-track jobs or increasing funding for graduate students, argues Benjamin V. Allison, a Ph.D. student in history at the University of Texas at Austin.“By using the savings from cutting the number of graduate students to finance the hiring of more tenure-track faculty, universities could drastically alleviate the supply side of the problem while also increasing demand,” Allison writes, “inching the job market closer to a healthy supply-demand relationship.”Yet critics of that argument express caution. It assumes that although tenure-track job postings “are cratering now, they will eventually stabilize at a level where supply could realistically match demand,” writes Greg Afinogenov, an assistant professor of history at Georgetown University. “But what if they don’t?” Even as enrollments in graduate humanities programs hit a record low, they may exceed available opportunities: There’s little evidence that the trends that brought about the gradual depletion of tenure-track jobs will reverse anytime soon.Meanwhile, the smaller and more restricted a department becomes, the more likely it will recruit conservatively, says Katina L. Rogers, an education consultant who wrote the book Putting the Humanities Ph.D. to Work: Thriving in and Beyond the Classroom. Faculty members in charge of admissions will think, “If we’re only admitting X number of people, let’s make sure we get the people with the highest GRE scores, the strongest academic pedigree that we can,” Rogers says. That would work against the goal of widening the net for graduate students in order to diversify the next class of academics.The number of tenure-track jobs is much less important, says Rogers, than how prepared departments are for the students they admit. Questions like: “Do they have the faculty members who can support those students intellectually? Are they able to offer those students funding to support their studies?” are all valid ones to ask when considering the ideal size of the department, Rogers says. “But I don’t think the question of tenure-track jobs is the right question to be asking because I don’t think that those two logics are connected.”Rogers and many others have advocated for reforming humanities graduate training to broaden notions of scholarly success and better prepare students for meaningful careers outside academe. One way to do that is by reimagining the dissertation. “Projecting a one-size-fits-all model of success and expecting a one-model-fits-all form of the dissertation will not serve well the interests of humanities doctoral students who benefit from preparation for diverse professional environments and diverse career trajectories,” writes Sidonie Smith, a professor emerita of English and women’s and gender studies at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and a former president of the Modern Language Association, in her book, Manifesto for the Humanities: Transforming Doctoral Education in Good Enough Times.As part of a grant funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, Syracuse University, with the help of Rogers, put together a website that collects examples of creative, nontraditional dissertations — like a graphic novel or a documentary film — and interviews with the scholars who produced them. The site also shares guidelines for how to plan and evaluate such projects. Many programs recognize that their students are not moving into academe, says Glenn Wright, director of programs at the Graduate School at Syracuse University. So rather than have them write a traditional dissertation, programs could decide to “let them do something that is going to be a more legible product, more valuable them, given their actual career goals.”It’s one part of a larger effort to increase the visibility and the perceived relevance of a humanities Ph.D. for people outside the academy, Wright says. “We’re trying to get to a space where it’s more like Ph.D.s in other fields, where the Ph.D. is seen as a relevant credential for something besides an academic position,” Wright says. The dissertation was a “clear area” to make headway on that goal, because you’re going to get “way more traction” with a mobile app, or a documentary, than something that’s published on ProQuest and accessed by 10 people, Wright says.Ivan Gonzalez-Soto, a Ph.D. student in the interdisciplinary humanities graduate group at the University of California at Merced, plans on writing a traditional dissertation along with a condensed, graphic-novel version. Through that illustrated work, he's trying “to reach more people back home” and also reach “a younger version of myself, who wouldn’t have been interested in reading hundreds of pages of this history of the area,” he says in a video interview linked on the Next-Generation Dissertations website.Revising AdvisingBut graduate advisers are known for encouraging their students to follow in their footsteps, which can make it challenging for those students to break the mold. That’s one reason some reformers like Rogers propose using mentorship clusters rather than a single adviser per student. There could be a shared group of relationships between several professors and several students, Rogers says. It’s beneficial to the faculty members, in terms of workload. And it’s also good for the students. Because an adviser’s opinion carries so much weight, it can feel to the student like she has to do exactly what her adviser is recommending, Rogers says. In truth, academics never agree on anything.“As soon as you have a couple of people in the room expressing different nuances of the same opinion or different opinions altogether,” then it gives the student “a bit more agency in determining what path they’re going to follow.”There’s a great need for strong mentoring right now. Throughout the pandemic, graduate students have gone through trauma, stress, and loss — either the loss of a loved one or the loss of a research site or the loss of funding, says Jessica McCrory Calarco, an associate professor of sociology at Indiana University who wrote A Field Guide to Grad School: Uncovering the Hidden Curriculum. All of that precarity “creates a need for better mentoring,” which is difficult when faculty and staff members are dealing with their own hardships. One thing a professor can do to help is be as flexible as possible and, in some cases, ratchet down expectations for the amount of work students need to complete. For example, Calarco says the number of readings on her syllabus is smaller than it was pre-pandemic.Some faculty members might hesitate to rethink their courses, their assignments, or how much support they need to offer their graduate students. To do so would sacrifice rigor, they’d argue. Calarco asks those professors to consider that “when students are overtaxed, when they’re being asked to do more than what is reasonable, and when faculty are trying to do more than what is reasonable, the quality of the work that we’re going to produce is almost certainly going to go down. And the quality of engagement … is going to be lower.”New Approaches to TeachingMany scholars also argue that doctoral training should focus more on teaching students how to become good teachers, themselves — something that’s been long ignored in favor of a focus on their potential as researchers. “Graduate curricula reflect institutional priorities, and teaching has never ranked high on the list,” writes Leonard Cassuto, a professor of English at Fordham University who co-wrote The New Ph.D.: How to Build a Better Graduate Education. “What we do on the job as faculty members is, not surprisingly, also what we teach our apprentices to do.”The Center for Excellence in Teaching at the University of Southern California, for example, established a Future Faculty Teaching Institute, intended to help USC graduate students and postdoctoral fellows “pursue excellence” in their teaching. The institute is made up of 14 modules that cover topics like strategies for developing an inclusive learning environment and best practices for course design.In tandem with those sorts of efforts, there’s for years been a growing reconsideration of how the academy evaluates teaching. Student evaluations of teaching are ubiquitous. Yet various studies have found them to be a problematic tool. In general, they can be biased against women faculty members and faculty members of color, influenced by outside factors such as what time of day a course meets, and they don’t actually gauge how much students have learned in a course.“It’s difficult to measure teaching effectiveness, so instead we measure student opinion, and we don’t measure it very well, and we pretend that they’re the same thing,” Philip B. Stark, a professor of statistics at the University of California at Berkeley who has studied student teaching evaluations, said at a 2018 presentation.It’s the “omnibus, abstract questions” that “tend to be most malleable” and subject to biases, Stark said. A question like, “Overall, how effective was the instructor?” is an “invitation” for biases to drive the answer.Those evaluations have a tremendous impact on hiring, promotion, tenure, and contract-renewal decisions, especially for non-tenure-track faculty members whose main responsibility is teaching. Some universities are thinking through ways to de-emphasize student evaluations in those decisions, ensure those evaluations provide useful feedback, or revise their teaching evaluation systems altogether.Recognizing the various issues that plague student ratings, the University of Oregon developed what it says is a “holistic new teaching evaluation system that does more than simply replace problematic evaluation instruments.” That system now includes something called a midway student experience survey: Student feedback is sought partway through a course and is available only to the instructor, intended to help them make adjustments or clarify expectations with students. The student course evaluations once distributed at the end of a semester were replaced with a student experience survey that “asks concrete questions about specific teaching practices, and inquires about student contributions to their own learning.” The university also enables faculty members to flag discriminatory or demeaning comments for possible redaction, to be reviewed by a committee.Oregon has also amped up its peer review of teaching. For one thing, the institution’s Teaching Engagement Program created a form to help faculty members think through course observations. The template provides guidance for what is professional, inclusive, and research-informed teaching, such as providing “readily available, coherently organized, and high-quality course materials.” Overall, the university’s changes regarding teaching which have been led by the university senate, “have sought to make sure that teaching evaluation is about something rather than just ‘I know good teaching when I see it,’” Lee Rumbarger, associate vice provost for teaching engagement, told The Chronicle in an email.The University of Southern California is also in the midst of a yearslong process of reimagining and revamping how teaching is evaluated and rewarded. (Read more on Southern California's support for effective teaching here.) Some faculty members have been wary of the changes. Ginger Clark, an associate vice provost for academic and faculty affairs, says she’s heard arguments that the university is going “to lose good faculty” — either current employees or potential hires — who think the institution is expecting them to focus more on teaching as opposed to research.But actually, says Clark, “a tremendous number” of major research universities are now looking “to completely overhaul their teaching,” partly because universities are hearing from students that the institution can do better. “And they can’t argue that,” Clark says. “We can do better.”Return to Table of Contents Section 4: Challenges From Outside the Ivory Tower As much as the professoriate is being rethought from within academe, off-campus forces are also reshaping and, at times, challenging what it means to be a college instructor today.Political partisanship is nothing new in higher ed. Controversial views and scholarship have always drawn criticism. Sen. Joe McCarthy, for example, claimed that Communists were infiltrating schools and colleges via the faculty. “Countless times I have heard parents throughout the country complain that their sons and daughters were sent to college as good Americans and returned four years later as wild-eyed radicals,” he wrote. Colleges during that period often launched investigations into professors thought to be subversive. Between the late 1940s and early 1950s, more than a hundred faculty members were fired from their jobs, writes John Karl Wilson, an academic-freedom scholar. Many more were “intimidated into silence.”While professors have long been accused of being left-leaning indoctrinators, recent public-opinion polls show that view has gained traction. “Americans see value in higher education,” but there’s “an undercurrent of dissatisfaction — even suspicion — among the public about the role colleges play in society,” according to the Pew Research Center. Those views are “increasingly linked to partisanship.” Nineteen percent of Republicans and those who lean Republican who responded to a 2018 Pew survey said they had no confidence at all that professors act in the public interest. In a different Pew survey, Republicans and those who lean Republican were significantly more likely to think higher education was going in the wrong direction, and 79 percent of those who did said that professors bringing their political and social views into the classroom was a major reason why.Recently, Republican lawmakers have fanned the flames of this discontent by turning critical race theory, a specialized approach to legal thought that has informed other academic fields, into a bogeyman. Republican lawmakers in their descriptions have distorted the field, critical race theorists say, misleading the public into believing that students are being taught, for example, that all white people are inherently racist and should feel guilty about it. Those lawmakers have introduced an onslaught of proposed and enacted legislation attempting to restrict what can be discussed on college campuses or in the classroom, especially as it relates to race and racism.According to the AAUP, in 2021, educational “gag orders” were introduced in 26 states, and in eight, some versions passed, though most dealt exclusively with K-12 education. The next year saw a huge ramp-up. At one point, the AAUP identified more than 120 pending “gag orders,” 47 of which target higher education. The language of these bills varies, though in general, they ban teaching of or training in ill-defined “divisive concepts.” Of those 47 bills, the AAUP noted, 26 include punitive measures.Many higher-ed organizations have argued vigorously against such bills as antithetical to what universities are supposed to be about: free inquiry and meaningful, informed dialogue, without censorship. These bills “seek to substitute political mandates for the considered judgment of professional educators, hindering students’ ability to learn and engage in critical thinking across differences and disagreements,” reads a 2021 joint statement by more than 70 groups. Some faculty senates have launched their own forms of resistance by passing versions of a resolution circulated by the African American Policy Forum. The draft resolution states that the senate rejects “any attempts by bodies external to the faculty to restrict or dictate university curriculum on any matter” and calls upon the institution’s president and provost to affirm the same.Such a contentious political environment makes it even more difficult for some faculty members to feel secure doing their jobs, experts say, and could lead to departures. Consider the 2021 Nikole Hannah-Jones debacle, in which trustees of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill initially refused to act on the tenure committee’s desire to offer tenure to the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. In the aftermath, a few prominent professors and administrators of color announced that they’d taken jobs elsewhere. Many worried the campus’s racial climate would lead to more departures.It was not the only instance in which professors felt stripped of decision-making power. Republican officials had already in some states mounted an offensive against Covid-safety protocols, and public universities were expected to comply. Professors within the University System of Georgia, for example, were not allowed to require masks in their classrooms. Several faculty members quit their jobs over Covid safety issues. Some professors saw hypocrisy in their institutions’ insistence that their decisions made a priority of employees’ health even as they did not allow those employees to teach from home unless they met certain criteria.The somewhat adversarial relationship between the faculty and administration can generally be healthy, says Michael S. Harris, a professor of higher education at Southern Methodist University. But two years into the pandemic, there seems to be “a fundamental distrust.” And “that’s a really hard place to come back from,” Harris says. It’s not a problem you can fix with a committee.Often professors have felt undermined not by politicians or policy but by a public that seems eager to find fault. Having some kind of public persona is an inescapable part of the job for many faculty members. That exposure can benefit the professor and her university in myriad ways — it introduces her research to a global audience and can cement a scholar as a top expert in her field.However, being public has its downsides. Professors sometimes contend with online outrage that quickly can become a digital harassment campaign. Various platforms have emerged that surveil faculty speech and conduct. The Professor Watchlist, a project of Turning Point USA, exists to “expose and document college professors who discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.” The conservative news website Campus Reform often publishes articles based on professors’ social-media comments and their perceived liberal bias.Those Campus Reform articles are sometimes picked up by bigger media outlets like Fox News and can lead to a deluge of hateful calls and emails to the professor, and even death threats. In a survey of 213 faculty members who’d been the subject of a Campus Reform story, conducted by Trinity College researchers and the AAUP, 40 percent said they’d received threats of harm, including physical violence or death. One respondent said that even though most of the negative comments they received did not contain threats, the “sheer number of them felt overwhelming.” “I had to change my cellphone number because of the constant threats and negative phone calls,” said another.There was “little quantitative difference” by gender, race, or ethnicity among respondents who had received threats of harm, but there was a large difference based on reported sexual orientation, the report found. While around 36 percent of respondents who identified as straight received threats, that was true for about 64 percent of those who identified as gay, lesbian, queer, or “other” sexual orientation. Institutional reaction to the harassment varied, according to the survey. About 45 percent of respondents said they received support from their administrations, and some respondents said they had wanted a more public display. “Silence has its own politics to it — it says to those attacking me that the university doesn’t consider my safety or even my value as an employee worth defending,” said one faculty member.Institutions can support their faculty in a number of ways, says Devon Greyson, an assistant professor in the School of Population and Public Health at the University of British Columbia. The goal of a harassment campaign is to threaten someone’s position, whether that means getting that person fired or forcing that person to become lower profile. So immediately issuing a public statement of support for that scholar is a great first step, Greyson says.At least a few colleges have created thorough plans for what to do when a professor is targeted. The University of Iowa provost’s office created a “content neutral” guide to support faculty members “across a wide spectrum of views and areas of research,” including “conclusions related to social issues” and controversial scientific methods such as the use of stem cells or animals in research.The guide outlines suggested courses of action for the individual faculty member, the department chair, communication-staff members, the college’s administration, and the university’s central administration. It advises the harassed faculty member not to delete any messages because they might be useful in identifying the harassers or pressing charges, but says that person may want to find someone to review and sort incoming messages and voicemails.Advice for department chairs includes ensuring that department staff members who might have to answer harassing phone calls have a script response in hand, and know how to preserve phone messages. Chairs are also told to support faculty members who feel that a component of their identity — like their race, gender, or their sexual orientation — is part of the attack by consulting with various offices on campus, like the Division of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. College leaders are instructed to develop a public message that “defends academic freedom, the importance of faculty safety, and the development of learning environments in which difficult issues are discussed and dissected,” to be used as a template should these incidents occur.It’s important for universities to have a proactive rather than reactive response, experts say. Greyson, whose pronouns are they/them, said the first time they were targeted online, they were surprised at how quickly they wanted to shut down their Twitter account. “If you haven’t been through it, it’s easy to think, ‘Oh, you know, it’s just a random online threat. No big deal,’” Greyson says. But it can cause a faculty member to become much more reluctant to engage in public scholarship. Then, not only are those voices no longer “enriching our public discourse around the topics for which they’re experts,” Greyson says, “but also their career doesn’t get furthered in the same way that people who are always quoted papers are getting furthered.”That chilling effect was reflected in the AAUP report. Some targeted faculty members reported changing their behavior in the aftermath. Of those who received threats, 38.6 percent said they curtailed their social-media presence, while 12.1 percent said they made changes to their teaching.Return to Table of Contents Section 5: The Faculty of the FutureThe current political and economic climate, as well as the continuing Covid-19 pandemic, means that many colleges are staring down large-scale existential challenges. In that environment, it can be difficult to make a priority of reimagining aspects of faculty work and faculty life at your institution. But experts say now is the time to do so. For one thing, it’s overdue. The last time there was a “major rethink” of faculty roles was with the publication of Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate, by Ernest L. Boyer, in 1990, says Adrianna Kezar, a professor of leadership and higher education at the University of Southern California. Boyer argued in his book for expanding the traditional definition of scholarship to not only include “scholarship of discovery” but other types of knowledge-seeking, like the study of teaching and learning.The two-tiered faculty model has been shown to undermine the mission of higher education, but a return to one that’s dominated by tenure-track positions is unlikely to occur.What’s more, that model has its own issues that have gone “unaddressed for decades,” write Kezar, Daniel Maxey, and Elizabeth Holcombe in The Professoriate Reconsidered: A Study of New Faculty Models, “such as the incentive system that typically does not reward teaching.” Also, the tenure and promotion processes at some institutions can be mired by “opacity,” says Holcombe, a senior postdoctoral research associate at the Pullias Center for Higher Education at USC.There’s sometimes “a lot of discretion” involved in what it takes to rise up the ladder, Holcombe says. “This is just anecdotal, but anybody could tell you a story of somebody that got tenure who they’re like, ‘How did that person get tenure?’ and then somebody else who got denied that had so many things that seem like they should be valued and considered.”One possible barrier to any broader reimagining of the academic work force are the stakeholders themselves. Faculty members and administrators often assume that their views about what the future of the faculty should be are perpetually at odds with one another. Professors can think that administrators want to do away with tenure altogether, while administrators see faculty members as resistant to considering any alternative.Kezar had heard this notion — that even broaching the topic was a no-go because it’s so polarizing. “I just thought, OK, well, I’m a researcher. That’s an empirical question. Let’s ask people.” What she, Maxey, and Holcombe found from their survey — which collected the views of faculty members, administrators, board members, accreditors, and policy makers at a range of institutions — was a good deal of agreement. The survey asked the 1,553 respondents to consider the attractiveness of a plethora of potential attributes of a future faculty model. The findings “dispel the pervasive myth that there is a tremendous and impassable gulf between groups’ views,” says The Professoriate Reconsidered, published in October 2015.Areas of “strong agreement” included:the need for more full-time faculty.the idea that all faculty roles should include some scholarly component.the value of fostering more collaboration among the faculty.the attractiveness of allowing differentiation of roles focused on teaching and research.developing a more complex view of scholarship.Other points of concurrence included adding teaching-only tenured positions to the faculty, and allowing neighboring institutions to create shared, full-time faculty positions.There was very strong agreement on ensuring that all faculty members have the same rights and protections with regard to academic freedom. A strong majority of respondents agreed that providing all faculty members equitable compensation for performing the same duties and allowing all faculty members to be involved in shared governance were attractive ideas.Kezar and Holcombe both remember being surprised about the degree of concurrence. Though the myth that there’s an impassable gap between faculty and administrative views still persists, Holcombe says, “if we dig down into some of the specifics of what the job actually entails, and what it could look like, and what it should look like, we can find these broad areas of agreement.”Faculty members and administrators did disagree about some areas of possible reform. Those included phasing out tenure, providing termed tenure, and having faculty members more closely align their work to department and institutional needs, rather than their personal or professional goals or interests. Only 9 percent of tenure-track and tenured faculty and 25 percent of deans surveyed saw the phasing out of tenure in favor of multiyear, renewable contracts as an attractive proposal, compared with 51 percent of provosts and 68 percent of governing boards.It’s clear that faculty members still want tenure to be a major part of a future faculty model, says Kezar, while other stakeholders say they want to give more job security and to ensure academic freedom but think that can be done through long-term contracts. A lifetime-employment commitment now, Kezar points out, is quite different from a lifetime commitment when tenure was first developed. For one thing, people live much longer than they used to, and there’s no longer a mandatory retirement cap. Kezar says she’s an advocate for trying to keep the ideals ingrained in tenure — like having academic freedom, participating in shared governance, and having job security. But “you can do that and not have a lifetime guarantee of employment.”Considering any major change to the faculty role, there will “surely be logistical complexities,” the report says. Despite the level of agreement, there were “big gaps” between what people saw as an attractive idea and what they saw as feasible, says Holcombe. “People just perceive that there’s no common ground. They perceive that none of these things are possible. But actually, everybody thinks it’s really interesting and appealing.”Changes to ConsiderKezar thinks colleges and universities may be in a period of “substantial rethinking” of the faculty role. For one thing, the pandemic has “really made people on campuses recognize … the value of faculty” in a way they hadn’t before. Below are transformative ideas that experts are urging colleges to consider if they haven’t already.Giving more resources to non-tenure-track faculty.Many colleges have begun providing more and better resources for faculty members who aren’t on the tenure track: professional-development opportunities, longer contracts, and inclusion in shared governance, for example. By doing so, colleges are treating those instructors as a long-term investment, rather than a short- to medium-term and ultimately disposable hire.The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, for example, started an Equity-Focused Teaching program for lecturers. The program runs from May to December and can accommodate up to 25 lecturers, says Victoria A. Genetin, an associate director focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion at the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching. The program is designed, in part, to help participants make substantial changes to a course and to boost their confidence and skill set.Applicants are asked to submit a syllabus for the course they want to focus on hope to make. Program participants are required to have a consultation session with a center staffer or do what’s called a midterm student-feedback session, where student feedback is solicited and shared only with the instructor. They attend a kickoff workshop in May and three teaching circles in the fall. At the end of the program, they submit an annotated syllabus that highlights the changes they made to their course and a short reflection of other shifts they’ve made to their teaching that might not be visible on said syllabus.The teaching circles, in particular, help build a sense of community among the participants, which Genetin says she’s heard is especially rejuvenating right now, when faculty members are feeling overextended. She remembers one participant who reported that the program “rescued me from the cynicism and burnout that I had been feeling.” Upon completing the program, all lecturers are given a $1,000 stipend, which Genetin stressed is important because it acknowledges how much work it takes to redesign and reimagine a course.Revising policies and standards for the tenure track.Experts are also urging colleges to make tenure-track positions and policies and processes around those positions more flexible — whether that means further expanding the sort of scholarship recognized for tenure and promotion, or rethinking how tenure-track faculty members are evaluated altogether.A few years ago, the sociology department at California State Polytechnic University at Pomona re-envisioned its tenure process. Why? Whenever professors in the department would broadcast an open position, and a potential candidate learned that the first two years came with a 3:3 teaching load, meaning three courses taught per semester, which then turned into a 4:4, “the energy plummets,” writes Anthony C. Ocampo, a professor of sociology in The Chronicle Review. The department realized that a heavy teaching load was “colliding with applicants’ research ambition they decided to revise the language of their tenure and promotion guidelines. A colleague developed a rubric that “expanded the definition of what counted as one scholarly work.”"Our motivation … was the high teaching load,” Ocampo writes, “but we soon came to see it as a way to reimagine what junior-faculty life could be if untethered from the brutal ‘publish or perish’ ethos.” Ocampo says he isn’t arguing that departments everywhere do exactly as his did. Rather “use it as a template to reimagine a system that rewards research progress while remaining flexible enough for the very serious professional and emotional difficulties faculty members face, especially in a moment like this.”Equity experts have long advocated for a general restructuring of how faculty members are evaluated. They posit that the current evaluation system is often rigid and opaque, too focused on quantitative measures, and does not account for the contextual differences among both the colleges and the faculty members themselves.These issues are especially pressing when available evidence suggests that the pandemic has generally been more destabilizing for the faculty careers of women, people of color, and people who are caregivers. For example, a 2021 study found that faculty members who have children younger than 5 completed fewer peer-review assignments, attended fewer funding-panel meetings, and submitted fewer articles as first authors during the pandemic than faculty members with older children or no children. Faculty members of color, who often mentor marginalized students, have keenly felt the pandemic’s impact.Three University of Massachusetts at Amherst researchers studied the array of ways colleges shifted their evaluations of faculty work in response to Covid-19, like offering to delay evaluations for tenure and encouraging faculty members to write pandemic-impact statements. Those were “crucial, short-term adjustments,” says the paper, published in Gender, Work & Organization. Yet they’re insufficient, the researchers write. They propose “a more transformative approach.”Take tenure delays. Though seen initially as a helpful response to the pandemic, they could lead to inequitable outcomes, the scholars write. “If certain faculty — for example, caregiving women — are more likely to delay their tenure decision year, their salary will be disadvantaged relative [to] those faculty who did not need to delay their decision year.” However, a few universities, like the University of California at Irvine, that are offering tenure delays are also backdating the faculty member’s pay to the original tenure date, which will “mitigate these long-term effects on pay.” A “radical reform,” the authors write, would be to create “a new tenure clock altogether,” one that allows professors to choose when they want to go up. Candidates could even choose their best six years to be evaluated, for example, leaving years that were less productive out of the calculus.“For faculty facing work interruptions due to heightened care responsibilities for children, older, or sick or disabled family members, tenure delays take pressure off the immediate context,” the study says. “Yet, tenure delays also may not be flexible enough for those faculty whose intensive care responsibilities will continue or whose research will remain upended by the pandemic for longer periods, including the community-based research [that] faculty of color are more likely to do.”Or take pandemic-impact statements. It’s not enough just to ask faculty members to write them. Scholars also need tools and workshops to support them in writing and evaluating these statements. Some institutions, like Purdue University and the University of Wisconsin, have provided training for evaluators to avoid bias in assessing the impact statements. The University of Delaware trained department chairs “with an emphasis on strains for caregivers, particularly single-parent faculty and faculty of color,” according to the paper. The University of Massachusetts at Amherst encouraged faculty members to write statements not just chronicling the negative impacts of the pandemic but also the ways in which they had made unique contributions during it.Another framework the authors ask colleges to consider is evaluating faculty based on a framework called “achievement relative to opportunity.” If a scholar “has a strong record of teaching, research, and service, but their research record reflects pandemic-related shutdowns,” that scholar’s case might not be delayed if their colleagues recognize that they “would have met the criteria if not for the pandemic.”Many administrators and faculty members worry that changing how faculty members are evaluated in light of the pandemic’s impact “might weaken standards of excellence,” the authors write. However, the sort of “comparative logic” that universities often employ in evaluations has always been “kind of crazy,” says Joya Misra, one of the authors and a professor of sociology and public policy. Misra remembers last summer being asked to assess someone on a 4:4 teaching load and compare them with professors at Ivy League institutions, where the teaching load is much lighter.The impact of the pandemic, as horrible as it’s been, has the potential “to really do something beautiful to the academy,” says Misra. “If we can actually treat people more holistically, as human beings, as a result of this terrible period,” that could be “a positive thing that would come out of this.”Reassessing workloads.Now is also time, some experts say, to examine faculty workloads, even though doing so can be a tall order. For one thing, satisfaction with workload “is one of the key factors in both faculty productivity and faculty retention,” researchers write in a recent report titled Equity-Minded Faculty Workloads: What We Can and Should Do Now, published by the American Council on Education. “In higher education, our goals and missions are accomplished by people, not machines. We count on faculty engagement and energy, and thus cannot have sizable portions of that resource diminished.” Plus, workloads were already inequitable before the pandemic, have become more so because of the pandemic, and may only get worse over time.In that report, researchers detail their findings from the Faculty Workload and Rewards Project, funded by the National Science Foundation Advance program, in which they worked with 51 academic units at 20 public universities to “establish equity-minded workload reform.” Through that project, researchers identified six conditions linked to equitable workloads. Among them are:transparency — that departments “have widely visible information about faculty work activities available for department members to see.”credit — that departments “recognize and reward faculty members who are expending more effort in certain areas.”accountability — that departments “have mechanisms in place to ensure that faculty members fulfill their work obligations and receive credit for their labor.”Among the myriad ways detailed in the report to improve workload equity is to conduct a workload audit. A template provided asks questions like, “Are there planned rotations for time-intensive administrative, service, or teaching assignments, as possible?” and, “Can faculty members bank, or otherwise do more of one work activity, and get credit to do less of another?” (The full more detail about possible interventions, is here.)“Given how exhausted and overloaded so many feel now in higher education,” said KerryAnn O’Meara, a professor of higher education at the University of Maryland at College Park and co-author of the report, in an email, “the best approach is likely lasering in on one particular aspect of workload that a department knows is causing harm, look at existing data on it, and consider a policy or practice they might put in place to address it, and get it passed through shared governance. Then, if there is some success, they might build from it, and take on the next issue, having made some traction.”Exploring Other ModelsFor even broader-scale rethinking, several models have been floated by experts as alternatives to the status quo. For one, M.D.-granting medical schools have been “in the vanguard of innovative pathways of faculty appointments and promotion for more than 30 years,” writes William T. Mallon, senior director of strategy and innovation development at the Association of American Medical Colleges, in a chapter in Envisioning the Faculty for the Twenty-First Century. Over time, as so many faculty members were hired for patient care, and to a lesser extent, education, “the traditional appointment and tenure system” proved “too inflexible.”“Many clinical faculty members were under great pressure to meet clinical productivity standards — expectations that made it difficult if not impossible to simultaneously meet academic productivity standards. Something had to give.” A multitrack system “allowed medical schools to appoint and promote faculty members with different career foci” — such as different proportions of time spent on research, training, and clinical care — and recognize “that a one-size-fits-all approach was neither realistic nor wise.”Also, he writes, a handful of medical schools have introduced flexible tenure track, which is “akin to the undeclared major for a first-year undergraduate student.” A new first-time faculty member, after arriving at the institution, is given some time before deciding whether to choose a tenure-eligible track. That gives the faculty member time to decide how they want their career to unfold.One model that Kezar and her colleagues asked about in their stakeholder survey is a consortium arrangement. Several nearby institutions could, for example, jointly hire a faculty member who would otherwise be hired only part-time. Though the groups surveyed agreed that consortium agreements were an attractive approach, most doubted their feasibility. Said one provost in a survey comment, “The competitive nature of our higher-education climate makes partnering with other universities difficult. When we have done this in the past in two graduate programs, the results were so negative that we dissolved the agreements, with all parties happy to do so.”However, though rare, consortial arrangements already exist. Most faculty members who work at one of the institutions in the Five College Consortium, in western Massachusetts, were hired by those campuses directly. But the consortium does have joint appointments, in which multiple campuses participate in the hiring process and share the cost. About 35 faculty members were on such an appointment in the 2020-21 academic year — 10 of whom were tenure-line and about 25 of whom were full-time lecturers, writes Kevin Kennedy, director of strategic engagement, in an email. The consortium also facilitates faculty “borrows” in which an instructor gets the chance to teach at another campus in the consortium. Such a program allows a department to address staffing needs, and also draw on expertise from other colleges. The consortium facilitates about 20 exchanges a year, Kennedy says.One model that has gained traction in higher ed is providing more clearly defined career pathways for teaching-focused faculty members, says Holcombe, the senior postdoctoral research associate. Though teaching has long been generally less valued than research, the pandemic demonstrated that it “is really the core” of academe, she says. The value of faculty members as teachers became especially clear.The University of California system offers an appointment track — referred to as “lecturer with security of employment” or more commonly as “teaching professor” — where the primary responsibility is teaching. The track functions similarly to a tenure track. According to the system’s policy, an instructor at the level of lecturer with “potential” security of employment — or an assistant teaching professor — is hired on a maximum two-year contract, for no more than eight years. Lecturers in this series are evaluated on teaching excellence, which is weighted the most heavily, along with some professional and/or scholarly achievement and activity, and university and public service. Once an instructor is promoted from a lecturer with “potential” security of employment to a lecturer with security of employment, that instructor is on an indefinite appointment.A study published by the American Enterprise Institute examined the effectiveness of what it calls tenure-track teaching faculty at a large public institution in California, compared with their tenure-track research faculty and contingent lecturers. The researchers looked at 1,075 courses taught by 592 research faculty members, 48 teaching faculty members, and 442 contingent lecturers. They concluded that all faculty designations were equally as likely “to spur students’ interest in pursuing subsequent courses in fields of study outside their intended major. However,” they noted, “students who take an introductory course in a field outside their intended major are 2 percentage points more likely to enroll in a subsequent course in that field if the initial course is taught by teaching faculty.”“It could be,” the researchers write, “that tenure-track teaching faculty use instructional strategies that stimulate interest in a field or, at minimum, provide students with a relatively enjoyable classroom experience.” They posit that a dual tenure-track system could bring a variety of benefits to an institution.“The new teaching faculty position may lead adjuncts and lecturers to stable employment opportunities, increased compensation and benefits, and better working conditions,” they write, while at the same time allowing research faculty members “to focus on scholarship and publishing research with the time that would otherwise be spent teaching courses.” And those teaching faculty members could serve as “pedagogical leaders in their respective departments.”Return to Table of ContentsCase Studies: Colleges That Are InnovatingCritics say that when it comes to the faculty work force, colleges are hidebound by traditions that no longer serve the public. But innovative colleges are making changes meant to help faculty members advance institutions’ missions while flourishing professionally. They are listening to faculty concerns and involving them in the process. Paving new career paths for professors off the tenure track. Writing job protections into renewable contracts. Providing more robust evaluations of and support for teaching.Colleges believe these strategies, featured in the pages ahead, will support and retain dynamic faculties without the drawbacks that critics — including those among the professoriate — see in the current model. The colleges are building a faculty for the future.CASE STUDY: Stability for Faculty Off the Tenure TrackThe University of Denver has enacted a host of reforms to better support full-time non-tenure-track faculty members. The institution’s work has been years in the making.In 2015 the university’s Board of Trustees approved a Faculty Senate-backed plan to create various new full-time lines for instructors off the tenure track. Before, most lecturers at DU worked on one-year contracts with slim opportunities for promotion. Now, those faculty members could be hired on multiyear, renewable contracts. At the time, 173 lecturers on one-year contracts, and a total of 278 non-tenure-track positions, were moved into these new lines, says Kate Willink, vice provost for faculty affairs. They now had more stability and clearer pathways for career advancement.Making those changes took a tremendous amount of work and collaboration. After they were enacted, the question became, “If you make that kind of big change, what kind of organizational learning do you have to … undergo to catch up to that commitment?” says Alison Staudinger, director of faculty development and career advancement.Willink elaborates: “It’s wonderful and important to create these series.” But what really matters, in the long run, is “How do we make sure that we provide the developmental and growth opportunities for them to thrive over their careers?”At DU, answering that question meant creating concurrent, overlapping initiatives. For example, the Faculty Senate created an ad hoc committee to better understand the experiences of non-tenure-track faculty members at the institution, which eventually compiled a report on what had been learned. The Faculty Senate and the office of the vice provost for faculty affairs began holding annual panels on promotion for faculty members off the tenure track. In 2020 the Faculty Senate passed a motion to change the nomenclature for full-time faculty members who are off the tenure track. Instead of being referred to as “non-tenure-track,” they would now be referred to in all relevant university documents as “teaching and professional track” faculty. The new term points to those instructors’ expertise rather than naming what they don't have, Staudinger says.The university also funded a mentorship model created by and for teaching and professional faculty. DU is undertaking a study of those instructors who are mid-career, says Staudinger. Many of them are Faculty Senate leaders, or have spearheaded curricular reform, or do “amazing research,” says Staudinger. “The study is trying to understand, How did that happen? … What were the pivotal experiences or mentorship support that they had that got them to that place? And how could we provide more of those supports for others?”Practitioners at DU emphasize that in order to know where you’re going, you have to have a thorough understanding of where you are. In 2020 the university appointed Laura E. Sponsler, a clinical associate professor of higher education, to serve as resident-scholar for teaching and professional faculty. Sponsler’s new role was to think through how best to support those instructors, as well as to educate the university community about the contributions those faculty members make, and share best practices.With various initiatives underway, Sponsler was charged by the provost’s office with gauging how much progress DU had made, and where there was room to grow. So she worked with university partners to collect available data on teaching and professional faculty and then analyzed the information using two common frameworks for creating a respectful faculty culture. Those frameworks identify key elements that contribute to a respectful culture. Sponsler also led a group of colleagues to come up with a scorecard to help visualize how institutionalized these areas were at DU.All five elements — collegiality, professional growth, flexibility, academic freedom and autonomy, and employment equity — were present at DU, but their presence varied among units. She wrote a white paper highlighting institutional strengths, for example that most teaching and professional faculty said they had received professional development funds, as well as challenges, such as a lack of clarity for many in job descriptions and expectations. Based on her findings, Sponsler also came up with recommendations for each category. To further the area of “employment equity,” for example, department chairs should be provided with continuing professional development to educate them about the role of instructors on the teaching and professional faculty lines.Both the white paper and scorecard are something other campuses could adapt. (DU’s website has more information.) While writing the white paper, Sponsler solicited feedback from deans, associate deans, vice provosts, and the Faculty Senate. So “it became this process where many, many people had eyes on it and it became a shared language. And I think that shared language is part of our success,” Sponsler says.Now, that common language has been adapted by many people at DU. When Sponsler has worked with individual units, people have talked about elements included in the white paper and asked things like, “Do we have clear role definitions?”“To me, a great joy, as the author of this, is I hear people using my words back to me,” Sponsler says, and “not necessarily knowing that I’m the one that wrote that.”CASE STUDY: A Path to Tenure for Teaching FacultyIn 2021 Worcester Polytechnic Institute, a private university in Massachusetts, approved a tenure track for teaching faculty, with a goal that 40 percent of the college’s full-time teaching-faculty members would be on the new track by the fall of 2023. WPI expects to appoint 15 teaching-faculty members to the track per year, for three years — the first cohort was announced in September 2021 — and those instructors have up to six years to make their case for tenure. To get on the track, instructors apply and are ultimately selected by Winston (Wole) Soboyejo, the provost.WPI also, in 2021, approved a policy that provides full-time teaching faculty members who are not placed on the new tenure track with multiyear, secure contracts that include just-cause protections within each term and a reasonable expectation of reappointment. That these contracts do away with at-will employment “was a real testament to the value of the faculty,” says Destin Heilman, a faculty member in the department of chemistry and biochemistry who is now on the teaching tenure track. And WPI also extended full faculty-governance participation to full-time teaching-faculty members who are on these secure contracts.This triad of reforms took years of debate, negotiation, and collaboration. People at WPI stress that such fundamental changes could not have happened without buy-in from the administration, the Board of Trustees, and especially the faculty. Faculty members and administrators at WPI had been concerned with the working conditions of instructors off the tenure track for years before 2021, and had enacted various reforms, such as creating standard titles and promotional criteria. In 2018 the faculty began to think even more boldly. A task force of equal parts tenure- and non-tenure-track faculty convened to consider reforms. The panel’s inclusion of non-tenure-track faculty was crucial. That way, the proposals created “weren’t being drafted for the teaching faculty, but with the teaching faculty,” says Heilman, who co-chaired the task force.One daunting challenge was that each of the three main constituencies involved — tenure-track faculty, non-tenure-track faculty, and the administration — had different concerns, and each had to be taken seriously, says Mark Richman, the current secretary of the faculty. Regarding a possible tenure track for teaching, current tenure-line professors thought of tenure as “a reward for doing scholarship,” Richman says. They were afraid that resources would be shifted away from research toward teaching at a moment when the institution was trying to raise its research profile. While non-tenure-track faculty members were most concerned with job security and being enfranchised, they were less keen on achieving tenure, initially. “They were uneasy with the tenure process, because they weren’t that familiar with it,” Richman says. And the administration was concerned with “institutional flexibility” and budget constraints.Another challenge, says Heilman, was that tenure-line faculty members on the task force had to be convinced that “a lot of folks weren’t going to be interested in tenure.” Those off the track wanted to participate in faculty governance and have more equitable arrangements, but tenure “was a pressure, an expectation that they hadn’t had before.” That’s why WPI eventually landed on an approach with more than one option.One particularly “tough nut to crack” was writing the tenure criteria for teaching faculty, Richman says. It had to be realistic, based on the excellent work that teaching faculty already do, yet also somewhat aspirational. Plus, some tenured and tenure-track faculty were skeptical that the criteria for tenure based on teaching could be rigorous. “We had to persuade them,” says Kristin Boudreau, a professor of English. “That meant a lot of meetings listening to them about their anxieties and concerns and then also showing them these criteria and going back and forth.”“It was really this interesting challenge,” Heilman says, of “going to the teaching faculty and saying: ‘Is this reflective of what you’re doing? Is this something you feel as if you can do? It’s pushing the envelope a bit, but it’s not expecting too much?’ And then going to the tenure-track faculty and saying: ‘Is this something that pushes the envelope enough? Is this expecting enough?’”Eventually, Worcester landed on criteria that thread that needle. Faculty members on the teaching track to tenure are evaluated in three categories — teaching practice, continuing professional growth and currency, and service. Professional growth is defined as “developing knowledge, acquiring skills, and/or accumulating experiences that enhance WPI’s educational mission and visibility,” and currency means “making intellectual contributions to and remaining active in professional communities both within and beyond WPI.” Because being recognized for contributions beyond the college’s walls is important to the tenure process, the university created some “modest funding” to allow each person on the tenure track to go to conferences and build that external recognition, says Soboyejo, the provost.The entire process was “a three-year exercise in listening very carefully to one another,” says Richman. Ultimately, those endless conversations bore fruit. When the tenure-line faculty voted on creating a new tenure track for teaching — which was later approved by trustees — it passed by an overwhelming majority.And there’s still more work to do. None of the new cohort have gone up for tenure yet. Richman and Boudreau recently led a training session for department heads and deans, to discuss how the new tenure criteria should be interpreted. “You can write things down” but it “takes a little time to normalize, and that’s what we’re in the process of doing now,” Richman says.To gauge the success of the new tenure track, WPI will be looking at a variety of factors, including the number of successful tenure cases over the next three to 10 years, feedback from faculty members accepted onto the track, and innovations in teaching and learning that those faculty members make.CASE STUDY: Support for Effective TeachingA body of research suggests that students’ end-of-semester evaluations can be a deeply flawed, unreliable metric through which to gauge effective teaching. Several years ago, the University of Southern California’s then-provost, Michael W. Quick, learned about that research, says Ginger Clark, an associate vice provost for academic and faculty affairs, and said, essentially: “We now have knowledge that student evaluations are very prone to bias. How can we justify continuing using them as our primary measure?”That’s when a shift started to take place. The university began to ask: What would it look like to invest seriously in evaluating teaching excellence?USC landed on a multifaceted approach that uses peer review as its primary tool to evaluate teaching effectiveness. More and more universities across the country are landing in similar places, says Clark. Student input is still solicited, but it’s no longer the main mechanism by which teaching is evaluated, and the questions have been retooled to ask students more about their learning experience than about their instructors.Starting down this road, the university faced a couple of obvious challenges. First, Clark and others considered what it would mean to start using peer review of teaching without providing faculty members under review with additional support to help them meet those more rigorous criteria. That didn’t seem fair. Second, they realized USC’s incentive structure would need to change. Otherwise, Clark says, “research is still going to be king. That didn’t seem right.”The plan became Define, Develop, Evaluate, Reward. The university needed to define the criteria for excellent teaching, which took a lot of time. That’s because the pedagogy of dance is quite different from, say, engineering, says Clark. “It was a challenge to come up with a list of criteria that would fit for everyone, but that wasn’t so general and vague that it was meaningless.”Ultimately, they arrived at a definition that, among many other things, says an excellent instructor “models and expects respectful and appropriate behavior in all professional interactions” and “provides specific, regular, and timely feedback tied to performance criteria.” Schools used those criteria as jumping-off points to develop their own, more specific ones.With great teaching well defined, the Center for Excellence in Teaching developed a host of resources to help faculty members at all stages of their careers live up to that definition. The center created training programs that serve graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, and faculty members at all stages of their careers. The Future Faculty Teaching Institute, for example, is designed for graduate students and postdocs.“The reality is, being a T.A. is excessively different than being an instructor of record,” says Ingrid Steiner, associate director of faculty development at the center. It’s “apples and oranges.” Yet when Ph.D. candidates apply for faculty positions, many will be asked for teaching demonstrations and a teaching philosophy statement. “So, how can we better support students in an educational journey,” Steiner says, “and also provide them confidence, as well as some support, when they go out on the market?”According to Steiner, professors who’ve gone through the Faculty Fellows Leadership Institute — which helps senior faculty members become teaching leaders in their schools — have said the program not only helps them advise their peers, but also has bettered their own teaching practices.The next step — evaluate — meant building out what peer review of teaching should look like in practice. At USC, it can — but is not required to — take the form of classroom observation. Faculty can also be evaluated on their syllabi or teaching statements, for example. The center created peer-review tools and templates that schools and departments could adopt, edit, or toss out altogether to create their own.The final step of the plan — reward — will take more time. It means thinking through how schools at USC can change incentive structures to demonstrate to faculty members that “we do care about teaching and we want to see these behaviors in the portfolios you submit for merit and promotion,” Clark says. Each school — through a shared-governance process — is creating a teaching-excellence plan that is now in various stages of completion. The provost office’s job “is to make sure everybody is making forward progress,” Clark says.The provost’s office has been reviewing regular updates to salary-increase and promotion criteria submitted by the schools and checks to make sure that peer review is the primary measure of teaching excellence, and that schools are given feedback. This year, faculty-governance committees are making recommendations to the provost on visible changes in USC’s reward structure, so that the university’s value of teaching is reflected. Charles F. Zukoski, the current provost, is also looking at ways to change the incentive structure to reward teaching excellence in a more robust way, and Zukoski and the president added positions to the center to extend its reach across the university.Clark and her colleagues entered into this effort well aware that this “is a long game,” she says. It’ll take years before these reforms have “sunk down into the roots of the university.” And Clark has a list of things she wishes she had done differently. A piece of advice for other colleges: Don’t just rely on existing governance structures to reach the faculty but actively seek out conversations with as many faculty members as possible, and clearly communicate the motivation behind any reforms.Start with the hard questions, Clark says: “Does teaching matter here? Does the university care about educating students? How do we know that we’re good teachers? Is it just a feeling we have? Would we accept that evidence for our research?”For evidence that teaching excellence is becoming more institutionalized, university leaders will look for, among other things, more robust and regular peer-review teaching data submitted for tenure and promotion, and more USC faculty members nominated and awarded national and international teaching awards and grants.CASE STUDY: 3 Options for Evaluating TeachingPrior to 2014, adjunct faculty members at Harper College, in Illinois, were evaluated through observation by administrators who sat in on a class session. The instructors were provided with a written report and met with the observer to discuss strengths and weaknesses.That singular method proved ineffective for several reasons. For one thing, the administrators who conducted the classroom observations weren’t necessarily versed in the content of the course they attended. Sometimes their observations made little sense to the instructors. If that feedback felt incongruent with what was actually happening in the classroom, especially since the observation period was so short, that could be difficult for some instructors to accept. “Observations can be really powerful for growth,” says Michael Bates, dean of teaching, learning, and distance education, but “when you walk into someone’s class and they’ve never seen you before, you’re not familiar with their discipline — there’s some limit to what impact that can have.”So Harper College decided to revise the evaluative process to be more inclusive and produce helpful feedback. Today, adjunct faculty members have two alternatives to a traditional classroom observation, which they can still choose but which is now conducted by department chairs rather than by administrators with less discipline-specific knowledge.One alternative is what’s called a goal-based self-evaluation. This option allows the instructor to identify a goal they want to pursue, like adopting or creating open educational resources for their course to reduce textbook and material costs for students. Instructors fill out a form outlining their goal-based project, then meet with someone from the college’s Academy for Teaching Excellence at the start of the semester to discuss strategies. At the end of the semester, instructors submit a report describing the project’s results and what they learned, and material they’ve developed, like new lesson plans or assignments.Or, faculty members can choose what’s called a reverse peer observation, in which they view another faculty member’s class session. Then, they fill out a reflection in which they describe, based on what they observed, how they might modify their own instructional methods. The Academy for Teaching Excellence oversees that option as well, sharing both with the appropriate chair and dean.Robert Allare, an adjunct faculty member in history, says the reverse peer observation gave him an invaluable window into his colleagues’ classroom practices. “I grabbed a lot of my best ideas as an instructor by observing my fellow teachers, because there’s a bunch of them that do a lot of cool stuff that I would have never, ever thought of,” he says. For example, he started conducting classroom “simulations” in which students pretend to be, say, Nathanael Greene, a general in the American Revolutionary War who was raised a pacifist Quaker. The student playing Greene is provided with a script, and Allare then interviews the student as if Greene was applying for the general post, “to get the point across that he’s really not equipped for this position that George Washington is going to put him in.” That sort of activity gets students more involved than does covering the same information on PowerPoint slides, Allare says.Ruth Moser, an adjunct faculty member in biology, chose the goal-based self-evaluation. She wanted to improve the accessibility of her course for all students and used Ally, a course content tool in Blackboard. The tool analyzes course documents for accessibility barriers that might confront students with dyslexia or visual impairments, such as a photo without a written description, and offers guidance for how to reduce those barriers. Moser says she’d had classroom observations conducted before and found them to be “really more of a passive process,” in contrast to the very active goal-based evaluation.Data collected by Harper after the two new options were offered indicate that adjunct faculty members gravitated toward them. Over the first two years those alternatives were available, the percentage of adjunct faculty members who chose the traditional method of classroom observation decreased to 23 percent from 46 percent. The reverse peer review, in particular, has been welcome, with some instructors saying it helps them feel like part of a larger community. Harper also found that a higher percentage of instructors who chose an alternative evaluation reported that it had led them to make a change in their classroom practices than did instructors who went through a traditional observation.Bates remembers getting resistance from some of his administrative colleagues who saw teaching evaluations as ways to ensure quality instruction and thought more collaborative options risked losing some of that. It took about two years, but after seeing the results, Bates remembers one skeptical colleague telling him, “This is better than I thought.” If administrators think they need to observe a class, that option is still available.Reflection is something many adjunct faculty members don’t do a lot, because “they’re constantly on the treadmill going all the time,” says Allare. “You know, What’s the next class? What’s the next task? … But I think this forces us to reflect, and it also gives us the opportunity to engage and use other tools in our toolkit” that they didn’t even know were there.Return to Table of ContentsA Final WordThat the two-tiered faculty model needs fixing is not a new idea. For years — decades even — experts and higher-ed observers have warned against academe’s growing reliance on contingent faculty members, especially part-timers who lack adequate pay and stability. Too often those instructors are left to fend for themselves with little evaluation or support. Ultimately, experts say, a reliance on instructors who aren’t well-supported by their colleges can harm students. Right now, many students need not just a well-prepared lecture but informed mentorship and guidance to make it to graduation day.Meanwhile, the tenure track, as it currently exists, can overemphasize research, to the detriment of teaching. A mostly one-size-fits-all timeline to tenure is too rigid, some experts argue, and the expectations around earning tenure can be ambiguous, to the detriment of women and faculty of color.The pandemic did not create these problems. But it did further expose them. Covid-19 has, for example, “cast a light on the structural inequities related to tenure and promotion that exist for women faculty, caregivers, and faculty of color,” write three University of Massachusetts at Amherst scholars in the journal Gender, Work & Organization. “The pandemic has heightened baseline inequities embedded in evaluation standards for academics,” they write, “but these structural issues will persist long after the immediate crisis has passed.”Which is why now is as good a time as any for colleges to take on fundamental questions about faculty members: In what conditions are they expected to do their work, and how much do those conditions differ between faculty tiers? How are they evaluated, and is the process equitable? What support is being offered to instructors, and is it enough? What future model of the faculty would best serve those instructors, and the institution, and how can we get there?“It does really feel,” says Michael S. Harris, a professor of higher education at Southern Methodist University, “like we can’t keep relying on contingent labor the way we are, we can’t keep relying on [faculty] loyalty to an institution” when lots of professors learned in the last two years that “you can be loyal to the institution, but the institution is not going to be loyal back.”A real reckoning over faculty working conditions and expectations seems to be in order. “We’re at a place where just kinda going back to normal … it’s not going to be enough,” Harris says. “If we could really snap our fingers and go back to February of 2020, I don’t think people are going to take that arrangement anymore.”Return to Table of ContentsFurther Reading“Adapting by Design: Creating Faculty Roles and Defining Faculty Work to Ensure an Intentional Future for Colleges and Universities,” by Adrianna Kezar and Daniel Maxey (Pullias Center for Higher Education, University of Southern California, 2015)“Do Tenured and Tenure-Track Faculty Matter?,” by Ronald G. Ehrenberg and Liang Zhang (National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, August 2004)“Does Contractual Form Matter? The Impact of Different Types of Non-Tenure-Track Faculty on College Students’ Academic Outcomes,” by Florence Xiaotao Ran and Di Xu (The Journal of Human Resources, May 4, 2018)Envisioning the Faculty for the 21st Century: Moving to a Mission-Oriented and Learner-Centered Model, edited by Adrianna Kezar and Daniel Maxey (Rutgers University Press, 2016)“Equity-Minded Faculty Workloads: What We Can and Should Do Now,” by Kerryann O’Meara, Dawn Culpepper, Joya Misra, and Audrey Jaeger (American Council on Education, 2021)“Faculty Support and Guidance” (University of Iowa’s Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost, June 10, 2021)The Gig Academy: Mapping Labor in the Neoliberal University, by Adrianna Kezar, Tom DePaola, and Daniel T. Scott (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019)“Higher Education at a Crossroads: The Economic Value of Tenure and the Security of the Profession” (American Association of University Professors’ Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession, 2015-16; Academe, March-April 2016)“Instruction Quality or Working Condition? The Effects of Part-Time Faculty on Student Academic Outcomes in Community College Introductory Courses,” by Florence Xiaotao Ran and Jasmine Sanders (AERA Open, January 20, 2020)Manifesto for the Humanities: Transforming Doctoral Education in Good Enough Times, by Sidonie Smith (University of Michigan Press, 2015)The New Ph.D.: How to Build a Better Graduate Education, by Leonard Cassuto and Robert Weisbuch (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021)“Next Generation Dissertations: New Approaches to Humanities Scholarship,” website project of Syracuse University and Katina L. Rogers“The Professoriate Reconsidered: A Study of New Faculty Models,” by Adrianna Kezar, Daniel Maxey, and Elizabeth Holcombe (Pullias Center for Higher Education, University of Southern California, 2015)

Building a Faculty That Flourishes

New strategies for a sustainable, successful professoriate.

Introduction