August 1, 2007 The One-Two Policy Punch - Be Sure to Consider Importance and Effectiveness
Research pressures cause greatest angst in survey of nearly 7,000 early-career faculty> Download: COACHE Survey Highlights 2007 [PDF, 403K] A new report by the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education (COACHE), a research project based at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, has revealed that junior faculty place a high degree of importance on institutional policies and practices in terms of how they affect career success. However, junior faculty expressed less satisfaction with the effectiveness of those policies and practices.The comprehensive report highlights trends across the 77 colleges and universities that participated in the Tenure-Track Faculty Job Satisfaction Survey in either 2005-06 or 2006-07. Overall, the survey of 6,773 tenure-track faculty discovered that policies such as: an upper limit on teaching obligations; travel funds to present papers or conduct research; informal mentoring; and an upper limit on committee assignments are considered most important by early-career faculty to their success. This finding held true for males, females, white faculty, and faculty of color. Junior faculty of all groups rated financial assistance with housing as the least important policy. However, as compared to male faculty and white faculty, female faculty and faculty of color, respectively, found institutional policies significantly more important for their success. ...
Still, opinions differed on many points. "White faculty, female faculty and faculty of color strongly diverged over which institutional policies they found most effective," said Cathy Trower, COACHE Director. "This suggests that a one-size-fits-all, 'we've got that policy on the books, so we're done' attitude doesn't cut it in the competitive environment of recruiting and retaining top faculty talent."
"We see female faculty and faculty of color expressing significantly less satisfaction in regards to how well they 'fit,'" said Trower. "Issues of inequity, in regards to how junior faculty members are treated within each department and how immediate supervisors evaluate their work, seem to be contributing to this problem. Without changes aimed at correcting these feelings of dissatisfaction, it is likely that colleges will continue to struggle to retain men and women of color in all disciplines and white women in fields in which they have been historically under-represented, like science and engineering." [For the complete news release and report, go to:
http://gseacademic.harvard.edu/~coache/reports/20070801.html ]
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