Last week, the Modern Language Association’s Committee on the Status of Women published a report entitled “Standing Still: The Associate Professor Survey”, which details its findings about it’s assessments of Associate Professors at private and public institutions. Among the key findings are:
“On average, it takes women from 1 to 3.5 years longer than men to attain the rank of
professor, depending on the type of institution in which they are employed and
regardless of whether they are single, married, or divorced or have children.

Women on average and across all institutions report that they spend less time on research and writing (7.7 hours a week) than men do (9.7 hours a week), and spend more time on grading or commenting on student work (7.5 hours a week) than men do (6.0 hours a week).

Men report greater job satisfaction than women in almost all cases; women at the rank of both associate professor and professor feel less authority, autonomy, and control over
their work lives than men do. Women report very high satisfaction in only one of nine
categories: having the authority to make decisions about the content and methods in the courses they teach (85.9% report being “very satisfied”).”

Wow. None of this is a surprise, but the last part is particularly interesting to me. As a recently promoted Full Professor, the Associate Dean in charge of the Tenure and Promotion Committee for my college and a Professional Tenure Coach, I am very familiar with the “stuck in rank” phenomenon among Associate Professors, regardless of gender, but had not appreciated the disconnect between job satisfaction and gender that may play a role in the degree to which men and women seek promotion to Full Professor. It’s clearly not just that women are parents and men are not. It’s clearly not just that men get mentored and women do not. There is a more pervasive issue at play here, and I think it has to do with differences in how men and women are socialized to communicate. At the core of this is that men are more comfortable asking for and getting what they need, and can say “no” more easily than women.
One book (and now website) that does, in my view, a really nice job of discussing these differences and providing strategies for women seeking to develop stronger communication styles is Women Don’t Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide (http://www.womendontask.com/_. Although I hope things are changing, my experience has always been that assertive men are often viewed as “Strong, decisive, and clear-minded” and assertive women are viewed as “Aggressive, b*tchy, and pushy*. In the close halls of the academy, it only takes a few perceptions of one (male or female, for that matter) as difficult, non-collegial or entitled for some serious damage to be done to one’s ability to get a fair shake in the political world of the University. It does mean one cannot succeed, but if the wrong people get fed up with a faculty member, the path to promotion to Full can be rockier than it needs to be.
I wonder if the tendency of women to take on more and more, to have more porous boundaries between work and home, and to hesitate to say no contributes to their extended time in rank and to their reduced job satisfaction? As strong, smart women, we can take control of so many things in our lives, but when it comes to admitting that we don’t have additional capacity to take on more, we may have a hard time, and as a result, impede our own progress. Key here is for women (and men, for that matter), whether academic or not, to prioritize valuing their own time and energy as much as we value that of others. If we do that, we can more easily stay on track for promotion, feel satisfied and appreciated at home and work, and meet our goals for both.

There’s a lot of discussion at my university these days about “changing the faculty reward system” to better reflect modern faculty work. Our institution, like many around the country, is developing definitions of faculty work and tenure and promotion criteria which move away from the typical “Big Three” of research, teaching, and service toward integrated models of faculty activity. We all know that faculty don’t work in the solitary way they used to- they connect with each other, the community, corporate entities, and others to apply the knowledge and training they have to both address problems and expose students to that process. Gone are the days of the solitary biologist in the lab with the bacterial cultures, working alone to determine and manipulate growth curves. Today’s biologist is in the field with the environmental scientist, the chemist, and the public health researcher figuring out how the bacterium got there, why it’s growing where and how it is, and estimating its impact on the water supply. It’s interdisciplinary research, of course, but there more to it than that. It’s the service-learning class in which students are supposed to apply what they learn in their Sociology lectures to work they do in a shelter for battered women and children. These integrated activities are hard to quantify in the traditional Big Three frame, so clearly, we need to find a way to quantify and evaluate these “new” types of faculty work. As the Associate Dean who runs my college’s tenure and promotion process, and an interdisciplinary scholar in my own rite, I’m on board with this, but I have a deep, dark secret- I’m a Stanley Fish fan.

Although I agree that we need to modernize the way we see and reward faculty work, I have a deepening concern about our approach. Finally, I’ve named my unease, and it is akin to a theme laid out in Stanley Fish’s new book, “Save the World on Your Own Time.” When I utter Dr. Fish’s name in the halls of my university, it’s almost as if I’ve made a disparaging remark about someones mother, but there are fundamental aspects of his view that must be integrated into our discussions of faculty work. 

Dr. Fish says many things in his new book, many of them provocative and controversial (BTW, I highly recommend the book to the thinking academic-  it is one of the most invigorating and sometimes maddening reads I’ve had in a long time).  The particularly germane kernel from the book is that faculty work must still be scholarly “faculty” work, not social work, political work, or personal work without clear and definite connections to real, rigorous scholarship.  Faculty work, done on behalf of the university, as innovative and interdisciplinary as it might be, must still be rigorous, scholarly, and deeply grounded in the discipline(s) in which we teach and do research, even as we cross boundaries and venture beyond the walls of our labs and classrooms.  The focus of the conversation regarding “valuing modern faculty work” has shifted from this fundamental tenet of making faculty scholarship, clearly and broadly defined in terms of rigor and quality, accessible and meaningful in the larger context of society, to essentially finding ways to accept any activity faculty decide to undertake and name as “scholarship” as a valued activity in the tenure and promotion process.  We are on the brink of becoming overly-inclusive in what we accept as valued faculty work; unless we are deliberate and careful, we will find ourselves utterly unable to objectively measure the scholarly performance of faculty members, or to meaningfully discriminate among them for tenure and promotion.  If we’re not gutsy enough to insist on rigor and objective measures of scholarship in these new definitions, we will become the stewards of institutions in which it is difficult to delineate tenured faculty members from community activists, social workers, clergy, politicians and journalists.

In our enthusiasm to value diverse and innovative faculty activities, we must not lose sight of the fact that all activities are simply not created equal.  There must be a measuring stick, a rigorous, empirical, scholarship-based measuring stick, that assesses the value and quality of the work faculty undertake. For the sake of illustration, I offer 2 examples of a “service-learning course”. The contrast here reflects the variability in implementation of approved courses that I’ve observed in the name of “diverse faculty work” in my own college:

CASE #1: Dr. Smith’s section of an approved Psychology service-learning course combines in-class work focused on generating research questions from peer-reviewed primary literature, with a service learning component in which the students volunteer in a battered women and children’s shelter while they are gathering observational data to test hypotheses generated in class. Students then examine the dataset, address the hypotheses they generated, and complete research papers and presentations based on their data and the literature.

CASE #2: Dr. Doe’s section of the same approved Psychology service-learning course takes a different approach. Students meet in class to talk about their expectations of what will happen and how they will feel when they go to the shelter to work. When they return to the classroom, they write “reaction papers” about their feelings and experiences and class discussions focus on what they think the causes of the Sociological challenges faced by the people in the shelter might be, and how they as citizens might help to solve them. They write a final paper based on these discussions and their reaction papers.

Case #1 demonstrates a scholarly approach to a service learning course, and Case #2 does not. As we expand or view of what faculty work is and should be, it’s critical that we learn the lesson illustrated by these cases; that not all “innovative, creative, and integrative” faculty activities are created equal. It’s great to find ways to value the great work faculty do that crosses and blurs the boundaries of the training I, for example, received 20 years ago, but there must still be a real, definable, scholarly anchor for valuing and evaluating these activities, and that is the part of the conversation that’s missing right now.

For tenure and promotion to retain their value, they cannot be entirely customizable, “one-size-fits-all” propositions, adaptable to the self-defined scholarship of each faculty member.  Tenure and promotion are not and cannot be a feel-good exercise.  We must tenure only active and highly competent scholars, innovative or not, and to assess their acheivements, including those that cross boundaries and mix things up a bit, using hallmarks of true scholarship that are accepted and defensible to our peers and society.  

For higher education to evolvein the way we dream it will, we must create a balance between creativity and quality in faculty work. The challenge is to be flexible enough to appreciate and value innovative and high quality work, but also to be bold enough to set a high bar for our faculty to make sure our students have the experience they deserve.

There- I’ve said it.

This morning I’m sitting in the airport preparing for a Council of Colleges of Arts and Sciences (CCAS) Personnel Development workshop for Deans. I’ve been really looking forward to this chance to get together with old and new colleagues to discuss, struggle with, and hopefully find some possible strategies foe dealing with several increasingly thorny faculty development, retention, and engagement issues. The folks running the workshop asked us to put forward a couple of case studies we wanted used as discussion points for the 2 day meeting, with the goal of increasing the likelihood that each of us participating could come away with more than the realization that others are facing similar problems, but rather with some action steps to try to move things forward.

Needless to say, I thought of way more than 2 case studies, but only submitted 2, that are currently near and dear to my heart from both a faculty development standpoint, but also from an organizational management and faculty engagement standpoint, especially for our non-tenure-track faculty. Curious to see what others think about these:

CASE #1: PROFESSOR DEADWOOD WAS AN ACTIVE, ENGAGED SCHOLAR WHEN SHE WAS A JUNIOR FACULTY MEMBER, BUT SINCE RECEIVING TENURE AND BEING PROMOTED TO FULL PROFESSOR SEVERAL YEARS AGO, SHE SIMPLY SAYS “NO” WHEN ASKED TO STEP UP AND SERVE HER DEPARTMENT, COLLEGE, AND UNIVERSITY. DISCUSSIONS WITH HER DEPARTMENT CHAIR, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR GOODFRIEND, ABOUT DINGING PROFESSOR DEADWOOD IN HER MERIT REVIEWS HAVE BEEN FRUITLESS, AS CHAIR GOODFRIEND DOES “NOT WANT TO MAKE WAVES” IN THE DEPARTMENT, AND SO SHE CONTINUES TO GIVE PROFESSOR DEADWOOD VERY HIGH ANNUAL REVIEWS DESPITE HER COMPLETE DISENGAGEMENT. THE DEAN’S OFFICE IS CONSIDERING INCLUDING THE DEGREE TO WHICH CHAIRS USE THE ANNUAL MERIT PROCESS TO “MOTIVATE” SENIOR FACULTY TO TAKE ON THE SERVICE LOAD THAT IS EXPECTED OF THEM, BUT IS CONCERNED THAT SUCH A POLICY WILL BE SEEN AS MICROMANAGEMENT.

CASE #2: THE NON-TENURE TRACK FACULTY ON OUR CAMPUS ARE SEEKING A SERIES OF TITLES THAT WILL BETTER REFLECT THEIR ACTIVITIES AND WILL HAVE RANK ASSOCIATED WITH THEM. FOR EXAMPLE, CURRENTLY OUR COLLEGE HAS INSTRUCTORS AND SENIOR INSTRUCTORS (ALL ONE-YEAR CONTRACTS), WHO CONTRACTUALLY DO TEACHING, AND ARE NOT REQUIRED OR ENCOURAGED TO DO RESEARCH OR SERVICE. THE REQUESTED NEW TITLES WOULD INCLUDE “ASSISTANT, ASSOCIATE, AND FULL” RANKS AND REVIEW OF RESEARCH, TEACHING AND SERVICE, BUT STILL WOULD BE ATTACHED TO ONE-YEAR CONTRACTS AND PROMOTION WOULD NOT BE ASSOCIATED WITH A PAY RAISE. THE CONCERN IS THAT IN THE PAST, OUR COLLEGE HAS BEEN SUCCESSFULLY SUED BY NON-TENURE-TRACK FACULTY WHO CLAIMED, THAT ALTHOUGH THEIR CONTRACTS DID NOT REQUIRE THEM TO DO RESEARCH AND SERVICE, THE FACT THAT THEY CHOSE TO DO THAT SHOULD MAKE THEM ELIGIBLE FOR TENURE. ALTHOUGH THE COLLEGE VALUES IT’S NON-TENURE TRACK FACULTY A GREAT DEAL, THE LEGAL ISSUES SURROUNDING THE CURRENT DISCUSSION ARE WORRISOME.

These struggles are major ones in academia, where title and rank are not necessarily accompanied by large monetary support, and where there is essentially no accountability for poor behavior or lack of partiticipation once a faculty member is tenured. Moreover, mid-level administration is constrained, largely, by its upper levels (here is a place where business and academia come together), and even innovative ideas that may be useful in engaging faculty and other colleagues that are not tied to money, but rather, have prestige or recognition of seniority associated with them, require extensive vetting, legal consideration, and sometimes, end up being analyzed away through committees, budget analysis, and compliance audits.

Having said all that cynical stuff, I am still excited about this conference, because for me, half the fun of my job is trying to find solutions to problems like these that *will* work and will not get us into hot water (warm water, fine, but not hot water). Flexibility in thinking and possibility-driven discussions have to happen, even if 90% of them don’t result in something workable. I hope to come home with some flesh for the bones of the ideas I have and some insight from others dealing with situations like those I describe above. Sooner or later, we have to find solutions to these problems, even if they are small steps that start to shift seemingly intractable problems.

Hope springs eternal!!

My Associate Dean Colleague, Tammy Stone, and I wrote this Op/Ed piece for Inside Higher Ed on the need for RTP guidelines to cross boundaries between research, teaching, and service.  Curious to know what you think:  http://www.insidehighered.com:80/views/2008/09/03/read