From the Dean: Challenges and opportunities
In Monday’s College meeting, I alluded to some challenges that we will face this year. I discussed these in depth with department heads on Monday, and Stacey Neuharth-Pritchett shared information with program coordinators on Thursday. I am now providing a brief overview of these items for everyone. We will continue to have discussions about these matters with College leaders, Faculty Senate, and other relevant groups as the year progresses.
Workload: To meet the University’s tri-partite mission of teaching, research, and service, the Provost has determined that the standard workload for tenure-track faculty should be 50% instruction, 45% research, and 5% service. Our current model is 40% instruction, 40% research, and 20% service. In the Provost’s model, service is defined as institutional service. In our current model, service encompasses institutional, professional, and community service. Thus, under the Provost’s model, we would move many of our professional and community service activities back under teaching and research (which is where they were when we had 0% service time just 3 years ago). One possible outcome of this new model is that we revisit some of our service expectations by looking at committee size and the need for “representation” of all nine departments (or all programs in a department) on committees to reduce the service load to be covered. One important implication of the Provost’s model is that a unit of instruction (a 3-hour course) is 12.5% of total workload, which means we will need to build that percentage into future grant budgets as in our current model, a unit of instruction is 10% of total workload. The Provost has also indicated that all faculty should teach a minimum of two 3-credit courses per year, even if they have grant funding, which the overwhelming majority of our faculty are already doing. Using the tenure-track allocation as a starting point, we will need to determine effort allocation for all other tracks of faculty. This is a conversation we have started but will now need to accelerate. This also gives us an opportunity to look at how we account for workload such as program, field, and graduate coordination. The Office of Academic Programs has prepared comprehensive data for each department to aid in these discussions. We do have the option to ask the Provost to consider a different allocation of workload in specific disciplines based on a benchmarking study of our peer and aspirant institutions.
Budget: Our primary source of budget is state revenue generated by the courses we teach, which is returned to us using a formula based on how many credit hours we teach. The formula has always included an incentive for tenure-track faculty teaching undergraduate courses. To further incentivize tenure-track faculty to teach undergraduate courses, the Provost has revised the model to create “tiers” of instruction with undergraduate instruction by tenure-track faculty returning $275 per credit hour, undergraduate instruction by lecturers, instructors, and clinical faculty returning $200 per credit hour, undergraduate instruction by graduate teaching assistants returning $175 per credit hour, and undergraduate instruction by part-time faculty returning $150 per credit hour. Graduate instruction still returns $300 per credit hour, regardless of who is teaching. There is an additional $25 incentive for undergraduate instruction in the summer, regardless of who is teaching. Currently, 25% of undergraduate credit hours are taught by tenure-track faculty, 32% are taught by career-track faculty, 36% are taught by graduate assistants, and 7% are taught by part-time faculty. For graduate credit hours, 59% are taught by tenure-track faculty, 28% by career-track faculty, 1% by graduate assistants, and 12% by part-time faculty. Andy Garber and I are still looking at the financial implications of this model. These university-level changes, our enrollment patterns, and our staffing of courses have direct implications for the resources that we have. Some thoughtful ways of maximizing our course enrollments, looking at course rotations, and considering the viability of low-enrollment courses could increase our budgetary resources.
DEI and HR policies:
Per direction from the University System of Georgia:
- Recruitment procedures shall be free of ideological tests, affirmations, and oaths (including diversity statements)
- Hiring, promotion or tenure decisions must be purely based on the Institution’s ability to achieve its mission and strategic priorities in support of student success, and
- The screening process should not extend beyond the stated mission and values of the Institution and the functional expectations of the departmental unit
Any positions currently posted are being reviewed to ensure compliance, and HR will be providing a handbook to guide our future searches. We are holding off on sharing our usual faculty and staff hiring handbooks until we receive the HR handbook.
Reading: All educator preparation programs will need to review their curriculum in light of new rules from the Georgia Professional Standards Commission regarding the science of reading, ensuring our teacher candidates are prepared to help children learn to read and to assist older students who are struggling with reading in a disciplinary context. Our immediate tasks are to do a self-assessment for each program to see where we meet and where we fall short of what is in the rules and then to develop an action plan to close any gaps through curriculum revision and professional development. We are fortunate to have several faculty members with expertise in reading/literacy/dyslexia who are prepared to create some modules that faculty can use for their own background information and that teacher candidates and leadership candidates can use to deepen their understanding.
I realize this is a lot of change coming at us all at once, but I am confident that we can work through each of these areas together and find ways to continue to do the high-quality teaching, research, and service that we value.