List of Recommendations
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The University-wide conversation on faculty responsibilities and rewards
topics should continue and be expanded to the departmental level, with a
view toward taking action on the principal recommendations identified in
the final section of this report during the forthcoming academic year.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The periodic meetings with department chairs in Recommendation
#3 also be used for assessing each faculty member's progress toward
meeting the expectations and achieving the goals agreed to at the
previous meeting with the chair. Ordinarily, the most recent of these
reviews should serve as the basis for allocating salary increases at the
departmental level at the times they are appropriated by the state
legislature.
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At the option of the faculty member, or in the event of two consecutive
departmental recommendations for zero merit salary increases, the chair
should appoint an ad hoc faculty committee to undertake a more
detailed
developmental review of the faculty member's performance. This review
would have three possible outcomes: (1) a conclusion that the previous
negative merit assessments did not adequately reflect the faculty
member's performance; (2) proposed measures to improve faculty
performance; or (3) proposed changes in the balance of the faculty
member's responsibilities to bring them into better alignment with
his/her abilities and the unit's needs.
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Assessment of teaching effectiveness should be expanded to place greater
emphasis on learning outcomes. As a step in this direction, departments
should be encouraged to experiment with the use of teaching portfolios on
a limited basis, with emphasis on documenting student learning in a
single class and how the instruction fostered that learning.
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Faculty responsibilities should be codified in a way that makes the
existing variations more explicit and encourages greater flexibility in
assessing the balance of teaching, research, and service. Each
department and each college council should review its own criteria for
promotion and tenure, with a view toward ensuring balance and
flexibility, and avoiding unrealistic expectations of junior faculty.
Greater emphasis should be placed on the quality and impact of a faculty
member's teaching and/or research contributions and less on quantitative
statistics derived from student evaluations, publication counts, and
level of contract/grant funding. Interdisciplinary activities should be
encouraged and special efforts taken to properly evaluate contributions
that may span disciplines.
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The University and the Colleges should explore additional ways of
recognizing and rewarding outstanding teaching and mentoring of students.
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Consideration should be given to establishing an additional rank above
the level of full professor (and a counterpart rank for senior lecturers)
that would recognize outstanding contributions to the University,
including teaching excellence. Promotion to these broadly available new
ranks would be based on a comprehensive collegial review of the faculty
member's contributions and it would be accompanied by a prescribed salary
increase.
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Arrangements should be explored to enable chairs of departments with
little or no revenues from indirect cost returns to respond quickly to
pressing and/or unanticipated faculty needs. Even if the amount of money
allocated for these purposes cannot be large, the mere existence of such
a category would be welcomed by the faculty, particularly in units that
are almost entirely dependent upon the state budget.
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Renewed efforts should be undertaken to establish a reserve for the
purpose of ensuring salary continuation for research faculty and WOT
faculty in the event of a temporary lapse in the funding from their
research grants.
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The University should utilize a portion of its endowment and/or work with
the local banking community to develop a program of subsidized
low-interest mortgage loans designed to make it more feasible for newly
hired faculty to afford to purchase homes.
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The University should explore the feasibility of setting up a child-care
facility.
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One of the criteria for assessing the effectiveness of college and
department leadership should be the degree to which it promotes faculty
collegiality and sense of belonging within their respective units and
substantive interdepartmental and intercollege contacts between faculty.
Training and mentoring of deans and department chairs should reflect
these goals.
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The Provost should appoint a faculty committee to advise him on matters
related to faculty rewards and responsibilities that transcend college
boundaries and such other matters as he might seek its counsel on. The
terms of reference of this committee should be delimited in such a way as
to ensure that it complements, rather than attempts to supersede, the
various college councils.
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Faculty should be encouraged to instill in larger numbers of
undergraduate students an appreciation of the mission of the University
of Washington, as one of the nation's premier research universities.
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The University should develop a coordinated strategy for involving
faculty, students, and staff in its effort to increase the public
awareness of the role of higher education in today's society and the
unique mission of the research universities among institutions of higher
learning.
