4.2 Faculty Responsibilities
Included on this page:
The university discharges its responsibilities to the state and to its
students through its various departmental units and programs, most of
which are organized within colleges. The units, in turn, discharge most
of their responsibilities through their faculty. Hence, the
responsibilities of an individual faculty member are the outcome of a
sequence of negotiations between the provost and the deans, between deans
and department chairs, and between the chairs (or their designates) and
the individual faculty members within their units. That duties are
negotiated, rather than assigned, at each level reflects the fact that
most of the university's teaching and research expertise resides at the
level of individual faculty and many of the ideas that shape the
university percolate up from them through the various layers of
institutional organization. Within the context of these negotiations,
the departmental units provide the most immediate sense of group identity
for the individual faculty member within the larger university structure.
Medium-to long-term strategic planning at the departmental level is
needed to ensure that the responsibilities of individual faculty members
are in the best interests of the university as a whole and that they are
making best use of the resources available to the unit, not least of
which are the time and effort of the faculty. Regular collegial
examination of goals and strategies can lead to important discussions and
discoveries about the priorities of individual faculty. It can also help
individual faculty members to identify more closely with the unit and
stimulate them to undertake strategic planning of their own within the
context of the plans of the unit. The communication and discussion of
these plans between units can also impart a stronger sense of purpose to
the individual departmental endeavors and provide a venue for discovering
commonalties of process, implementation, or experience. Most university
units already engage in strategic planning in faculty meetings and
retreats and in connection with formal departmental reviews, which are
usually conducted at ten-year intervals. However, there is relatively
little sharing of plans and experience between units.
Recommendation 2: Departments should be encouraged to
expand their respective strategic planning efforts focused on the
changing career goals, competencies and learning styles of students,
trends and projected changes in state and federal funding, and new
developments in the disciplines, with emphasis on the ~5-year time scale.
We believe that a widespread sharing of the ideas derived from these
exercises would be valuable in its own right and would serve to promote a
greater sense of synergy and cohesiveness among university programs.
The department chair bears the primary responsibility for ensuring that
the departmental teaching and service responsibilities are distributed
fairly among the faculty members and for dealing with the career
development concerns of faculty and staff. According to the Faculty
Code, annual meetings with chairs are mandatory for junior faculty, and
all faculty members have the opportunity to meet annually with their
department chairs. In many departments this has become a custom. These
meetings serve to connect unit responsibilities with individual faculty
responsibilities both inside and outside the unit. In effect, they serve
to establish individualized agreements which provide an objective basis
for merit reviews of faculty performance. As need arises they can also
serve as occasions for providing advice or mentoring or for addressing
performance issues. The Committee believes that this practice should be
regularized throughout the campus and that special training or mentoring
should be available to support chairs in dealing with this important
aspect of their jobs.
Recommendation 3:
University faculty should be required to meet periodically (once a year
for junior faculty and once every two years for senior faculty) with their
department chairs to negotiate their teaching, research and service
duties, both within and outside the unit. These negotiations should take
into account the changing interests and abilities of the faculty member as
well as the changing needs of the unit and the university as a whole, as
reflected in the planning activities discussed in the previous
recommendation. To avoid the possibility of misunderstandings, this
agreement should be kept on record. The meeting format, the items for
discussion at the meeting, and the degree to which the chair consults with
other faculty in this process should be determined individually by each
unit. The meetings can be scheduled so as to spread the chair's workload
through the biennium. Chairs of large departments should have the option
of enlisting the help of other senior faculty in discharging this
responsibility.
In effect, this recommendation would serve to regularize what is
currently a "best practice" in many departments. It would serve to
recognize (and in some units expand) the role of the chairs. It is
essential that chairs have access to the resources they need to perform
this role.
Recommendation 4: Department chairs should have access
to training or mentoring, as needed, in facilitating strategic planning,
in negotiating responsibilities, and in promoting the career development
and morale of faculty in their units.
In a similar manner, the Committee believes it would be useful to
regularize meetings between chairs and the dean of their respective
colleges and deans with the Provost at least once each biennium to
discuss the unit's long-range goals and its progress toward achieving
them and to negotiate performance expectations for the forthcoming
biennium.
Faculty on the Bothell and Tacoma campuses are required to devote a
substantially larger fraction of their time to institution-building
(hiring new faculty, recruiting students, curriculum development) than
most faculty on the Seattle campus. These additional service
responsibilities place a heavy burden on junior faculty preparing for
tenure and promotion reviews, in which a meritorious record of service is
no substitute for scholarly achievements. Failure to allow sufficient
time for scholarly work can impede the professional development of
faculty members and, in time, degrade instructional quality. This
problem can be addressed by providing additional released time for
faculty with particularly heavy service responsibilities and by providing
staff to assist with student recruitment and faculty hiring during
periods of intensive program development and institution building.
Recommendation 5: Combined teaching loads and service
responsibilities of faculty on the Tacoma and Bothell campuses should be
maintained at a level that allows reasonable time for scholarly work
commensurate with the standards on those campuses.
On all three campuses, women and (to an even greater extent) minority
faculty bear a disproportionate share of the responsibility for
counseling and mentoring students and for addressing societal inequities.
To a greater degree than their white male faculty counterparts, they are
"on stage" when they are teaching, they feel an obligation to be
accessible to students with special needs, and they are expected to serve
on committees both inside and outside the university. In certain cases,
these augmented responsibilities may be of such great benefit to the
university and so demanding of the faculty member's time as to warrant
consideration in negotiating the faculty member's workload.
Recommendation 6: In negotiating faculty duties, a
faculty member's special responsibilities for student counseling and
mentoring and committee service should be taken into account to ensure
that he/she has adequate time available for scholarly work.
