Academe needs a new way of evaluating faculty work (opinion)

In the face of internal disenchantment about faculty recognition and reward systems, as well as external threats questioning the value of faculty work and tenure altogether, higher education needs a new approach to understanding, evaluating and recognizing what faculty do more than ever before. I propose what I’ve identified as the integrated teacher-scholar model, or ITSM. It frames faculty activity as reflecting the traditional classifications of teaching, research and service but contrasts significantly with the current productivity-focused models that view such activities as separate and even competing.

Recent articles by Deborah Cohan and by Joya Misra, Dawn Culpepper and KerryAnn O’Meara have articulated thoughtful concerns about the state of faculty evaluation and its implications for the tenure system, providing openings for rethinking what it means to be a faculty member with the privilege and opportunity to earn lifetime job security. Those concerns are the unintended pitfalls of the current models: requiring voluminous documentation to prove that the faculty member is doing everything required and leaving activity that doesn’t fall neatly into a well-recognized category as uncounted or invisible labor.

The integrated teacher-scholar model, which I developed with feedback from my colleague Jack Mearns, takes a quite different approach. I’ll illustrate with a thought experiment. Imagine you are tasked with evaluating the academic contributions of faculty member named Socrates, who states in his personal reflection statement for tenure that his work entails “posing difficult questions to the citizens of Athens in the marketplace and discussing possible answers with them.” As evidence of his productivity, he points to the number of followers he has, how his ideas are discussed in important public meetings and how some of his students are now taking on students of their own.

How would you evaluate this work? Is it teaching? Is it knowledge creation or research? Is it public service?

Obviously, the answer is “All of the above.” And while this little thought experiment is tongue-in-cheek, it makes the point that our best work seamlessly integrates the creation of knowledge with its dissemination and its application—in other words, research, teaching and service.

Rather than reducing faculty activity to widget-like outputs in a zero-sum bean-counting system based on three isolated domains, the ITSM model encourages faculty members to think of their work as always having the potential to make meaningful contributions in multifaceted ways. Even colleges and universities that subscribe to the so-called balanced teacher-scholar model—which emphasizes that productive faculty do good work in all areas (especially teaching and research)—imply that faculty work occurs in separate domains that need to be “balanced.” This premise can have the perverse unintended consequence that faculty members sometimes feel like they should avoid doing “too much” of one or the other—usually service and teaching.

For example, a faculty colleague once shared that their dissertation adviser had advised them not to apply for a teaching award because it would look bad for their tenure application by implying they weren’t “serious about research.” Such an approach is reflected in the astute recommendation that Misra and her colleagues have given to faculty of color to disregard the advice to “just say no” to service opportunities that frequently align with their personal values and scholarly commitments as teachers and researchers. Why? Because rejecting these opportunities “reduces the agency and engagement of faculty of color while also potentially foreclosing opportunities for them to combine research, advising and leadership work.”

Contemporary faculty members and administrators want and need an evaluation system that differs from the productivity model that emerged in the post-WWII boom—one that eventually morphed into a sometimes mindless and often dispiriting quest to simply amass publications, grant dollars, credit hours and other countables. By broadening our focus to the positive impact of scholarly contributions to higher education’s mission to discover, disseminate and apply knowledge, we can make faculty evaluation processes much more meaningful. They can become opportunities to facilitate faculty career development rather than burdensome gauntlets that smack of hazing rituals. Moreover, concentrating on impact would make it easier for nonacademicians to understand the benefits of what faculty actually do, thereby enhancing our ability to demonstrate the value of tenure, and faculty work in general, to society.

At Illinois State University, we were evolving toward such an approach in discussions of the value of a variety of integrated activities, such as publicly engaged scholarship, community engaged teaching activities and use of pedagogical techniques based on empirical research. These discussions bore fruit with explicit recognition of such activities in the most recent update of our faculty evaluation policies.

A More Efficient and Humane System

The integrated teacher-scholar model encourages faculty members to think deeply about their identities as scholars and the varied ways in which their work has a positive impact—on the accumulation of knowledge, on the development of students, on the improvement of society. The quotidian details of their activities might not change much—they’ll still teach their classes, explore the archives, mentor their students, analyze their data, chair theses and dissertations, serve on committees, consult, and so forth. But now they can help their colleagues “follow the thread” (a wonderful phrase Cohan adopted from the poet William Stafford) and frame a scholarly career in developmental terms—one that emphasizes the impact of their contributions rather than requires the enervating enumeration of academic widgets to be piled in front of tenure and promotion committees.

The ITSM’s holistic approach lends itself to a more efficient and humane selection and evaluation system, because individual faculty can articulate how their work integrates the mutually reinforcing goals of teaching, research and service rather than feeling forced to classify activities as representing one or the other of these. In contrast to the “just say no” approach, this shift increases the agency and engagement of faculty, creating opportunities for them to plan their work activities in proportion to their intended contributions or impact.

This, in turn, allows faculty members to present their dossiers for evaluation in the context of a narrative that makes sense of their career development in light of scholarly goals, while highlighting contributions that too often are considered unclassifiable and thus become “invisible labor.” Moreover, an advantage of the integrated teacher-scholar model for faculty in their roles as peer evaluators is that it shifts their mind-set away from cataloging their colleagues’ activities to understanding the actual impacts that those activities can make.

Reimagining how faculty evaluation is conducted and developing policies and procedures to support the new model will have start-up costs. But the benefits of a more humane and valid system, one that recognizes and values the gamut of outcomes of faculty work, are well worth it, as Cohan has argued. Some of her suggestions are particularly appropriate in this regard—for example, developing and using rubrics can guide holistic judgements so that they are sufficiently reliable and valid for performance evaluations.

The transparency created by developing rubrics that allow for professional judgment while providing consistent and explicit definitions and guidelines would be a boon to us all. Fortunately, methodological tools for producing reliable and valid assessments of qualitative information are available from my own field of psychology, not to mention education, the scholarship of teaching and learning, sociology, and several other social sciences. We can use them to complement and contextualize more quantitative indicators of impact, which we’ll continue to employ, as well.

Many faculty members and administrators are looking for ways to refine and reform current faculty evaluation and tenure systems, in part because external threats to tenure are increasing. By developing a system in which faculty members and their peer evaluators focus holistically on developing a career that follows a thread of meaningful, impactful contributions, we can create institutional cultures in which faculty thrive and feel as though evaluations are conducted fairly. While an integrated teacher-scholar model will not solve every problem associated with faculty evaluation and tenure, it will create a more equitable approach that will better serve faculty, intuitions and society in the 21st century.