Mid-Career Faculty Support and Renewal:
Institutional Obstacles, Culture and Publicity,
Chrys Rodrigue, Chair, Geography, 2001-2007
Grant-Writing Teams, and FAD Report Editing
Leadership Forum for Chairs, Pyramid Annex, CSULB
10 November 2007
The RTP process is supposed to allow universities to have a long, close look at new colleagues to ensure they can contribute effectively to the universities' teaching, research, and service missions. There is a negative incentive, the fear of not making tenure, which in many institutions becomes a sort of six year hazing. In a few institutions, such as CSULB, there is a positive incentive, too, an atmosphere of helpful mentoring and conversation.
Mentoring is built into the union contract, to be sure, but there remains a tension between hazing and mentoring, between carrots and sticks, and the balance falls in different places along that continuum in different campuses and departments, even within the CSU.
I have been on four CSU campuses since 1980. I was a lecturer for nearly 10 years in two departments at Northridge and one semester at LA. I was tenure- track at Chico, earning tenure and both promotions there before swapping jobs with someone to come here. I have seen quite a range in how the RTP process is handled. Two of the other campuses are definitely more on the negative incentive plan; CSULB spends a lot more effort in hiring the best people up front and then mentoring them to a successful conclusion.
What I would like to discuss is how someone who has survived the process makes the transition to senior level responsibilities. A more hazing approach typically creates burned out new associate professors who may figure they've paid their dues. They may emerge actively hostile to other faculty and be that much less inclined to support the departmental or campus mission. Even with respectful and kind mentoring, the RTP process is pretty exhausting and the best-intentioned new associate professors may find their energies depleted afterwards.
Reïnforcing this post tenure crash is the change in the structure of incentives here. The reduction in teaching load goes away, and people are supposed to maintain research momentum in the face of increasing teaching responsibilities and the augmentation of service responsibilities that come with tenure.
It becomes more difficult to secure internal sources of reassigned time: SCAC has expressly prioritized junior faculty, to support their development of the record necessary for tenure and promotion. SCAC also always comes down to a question of how to spread limited resources around to benefit the largest number of people, and that inevitably puts the more expensive associate professor and full professor at a substantial disadvantage. And time spent applying for SCACs to get time to do research is time deducted from research.
My successor, Vin Del Casino, ran a little thought-experiment that I think is pretty instructive. Imagine that writing a SCAC takes only four hours. In the College of Liberal Arts alone, where there are typically 180 applications or so, that translates into 720 hours of faculty time, or more than 1 FTEF for over four months! Now, consider that each of these 180 applications is read by a committee of seven. Let's say that it takes each reviewer about 15 minutes to whiz through and rank each proposal. That's another 315 hours or another 1 FTEF for close to another two months of work! And these are very conservative time estimates, as any of you know who've written or reviewed SCACs. Just in the one college, the University is investing 1 FTEF for six months each year in writing and reading SCACs.
Now, to that gloomy picture of relentless SCAC apps, add the diminished probability of a tenured faculty member getting one of these. This is a drag on maintaining the productivity of associate professors. It is, unfortunately, a structural and institutional constraint, over which chairs have little to no influence. We can't help our colleagues with this kind of problem, other than through the efforts of the chair advisory group communicating this issue to the Senate and Academic Affairs and trying to improve the SCAC process to make it less counterproductive.
So, what can chairs do to support new associate professors in maintaining their research activity and the associated grant activity? There is a way that chairs can influence the transition, and that is through their effect on the department's culture. To be sure, chairs do not have the power to reverse a truly screwed up departmental culture. There is quite a bit they can do to blunt problems, however, and move the culture in a positive direction that can support the motivated associate professor in making a surprisingly difficult transition.
The chair can use his or her "ceremonial function" to positive effect. Promote the living dickens out of anything that anyone in your department does -- and set aside any preferences or subdisciplinary biases you may have in this area. Be an equal opportunity hustler. Faculty are deeply motivated by being recognized by those who they feel have earned a professional opinion. We like our names up in lights, at least to that select audience, and chairs are in a position to fire up the kliegs and spotlight anyone who does anything showing professional advancement.
Campaigning a department like this builds trust among faculty, who know that their accomplishments will be noted and shared. It also builds a positive incentive toward maintaining professional currency and contributing to one's discipline. In a more tacit sort of way, it also draws attention to those who are doing things and conspicuously away from those who aren't, without shaming the less productive into complete shutdown and hostility.
Something else that can be done is providing logistical support for team grant-writing in the department or between departments. The chair can get on Carolyn Dersch's list of grants and cut and paste relevant calls to particular faculty from time to time. If someone seems interested, the chair can set up regular meetings for grant development, regular grant-writing parties. One sure shot way for a lot of people to be doing a lot of research work is to be involved in a major grant that requires many people's involvement. The reporting requirements of grants pretty much demand team publications, and these can stimulate smaller labor of love projects that eventuate in sole authorships, too. A classic example is our own Geoscience Diversity Enhancement Project, which brought together geographers, geologists, and archaeologists and created several publications and several more conference presentations and really raised the profile of CSULB in those disciplines. We have a mix of junior and senior faculty involved, all of us publishing together - and keeping the more senior of us chugging right along. It even got me to do research in geographic education, in which I'd been hitherto not particularly interested.
One thing I found out I could do as chair to support research or service activities was close examination and editing of the FAD reports. Our department has several lab type classes, which generate odd little extra fractions of FTEF, usually about 1.3 WTUs. Virtually every department has directed and independent studies and may have thesis units, too. All of these often create faculty weighted teaching loads in excess of 12.0. Different departments have different customs for handling these, ranging from just writing them off as losses out of hide to storing bits up by one person to be turned into released time for that person later. With the coöperative culture in Geography, I started bundling those up from one person to the next. All of those bits and pieces went to someone somehow in reducing their teaching load. I just made darned sure that I was as equitable as possible, so that the units were used but didn't consistently exploit one person for another's benefit. No-one had to do four courses the last two or three years of my chairship, and everyone's FADs came out pretty much 12.0. I would give weird things like 1.3 units of released time, which, no doubt, drove the College office nuts, but everything was accounted for, and everyone, whether full, associate, or assistant, had some time to do research. And a lot of research and a lot of grant activity come out of that little department, which is a regular little indirect generator.
Talk: 11/09/07
First put online: 11/10/07
Last revised: 11/10/07
Maintained by rodrigue@csulb.edu