TCAC
Full Report Index
This coming fall, 50% (plus or minus 7%) of the regular faculty at UW Bothell and UW Tacoma will be untenured. Given the relatively high percentage of untenured faculty at UW Bothell and UW Tacoma and the institution building which attends the rapid growth and change of these new campuses (vide supra), the untenured faculty must bear a significant portion of the institution building. As exciting and compelling as institution building is, there are still only 24 hours in a day. Another significant portion of those 24 hours is consumed by the important commitment the faculty have to being very good to excellent teachers in their current courses. Finding the necessary hours for making reasonable progress on scholarship and research and for developing new teaching skills for the future has become an issue of chronic persistence. Clearly, the medium and long-term effects of this situation, if it remains chronic, will be negative for students, for the professional development of the individual faculty members and, therefore, of course, for the Three Campus University of Washington.
These negative effects are readily predicted: students five to ten years from now will not have professors quite as up-to-date and knowledgeable as desired, and the professors themselves will be immensely frustrated and deeply disappointed with the lost professional growth they know they should have experienced but did not, both in their development as teachers and as scholars. Even worse, some faculty will elect to leave or radically reduce the time they devote to institution building rather than short change their development as teachers and scholars. Those that leave will take with them a priceless reservoir of experience and maturity of enormous benefit to the growing campuses. Further, any significant exodus of faculty will induce obvious problems with the attendant recruiting of replacements. For those who radically reduce the time they devote to institutions building, other faculty will have to take up the slack (and do less teaching and scholarship) or, alternately, inadequate progress then will occur in growth and development of the campus.
Why some faculty with tenure might seek to reduce the time devoted to institution building is apparent. They are looking for more balance in their work vis a vis teaching, scholarship and service, i.e., more balance than they experienced in the earlier years at UW Bothell and UW Tacoma. In those years they needed to and did perform extraordinarily well in institution building. In fact they spent many, many hours at that task, inevitably at the expense of other worthy work in our academy. Having wholeheartedly seized and embraced the responsibility of the initial institution building, they now seek to establish a more equitable and sustainable mixture of service, scholarship and teaching, which routinely will result in their experiencing continuous professional development in all three areas-teaching, scholarship and service-not just one or two. Not only is this situation desirable for the individuals involved but it also serves the institution and, most importantly, its students for the reasons outlined above.
