Recognizing and Supporting Faculty Work

By Carol Geary Schneider, in Liberal Education (Fall 2006)

In the President’s Message from the latest issue of Liberal Education, Carol Geary Schneider notes a “surprising omission” from the report of the Spellings Commission on the Future of Higher Education. Apart from one brief mention, “faculty do not figure at all in the commission’s vision for higher learning in America,” she writes—this despite the widely recognized fact that “faculty stand at the center of the academic enterprise.”

While President Schneider endorses the commission’s call for “a new era of innovation in pedagogies, curricula, and technologies,” she says that “the commission overlooked entirely the results of faculty—and staff—creativity.” AAC&U has documented this creativity—which has led to the development of innovative educational practices like first-year seminars, learning communities, and service learning—in reports from the Greater Expectations initiative and in other publications. By failing to recognize such work, the commission has lost an opportunity to build “support for more active, hands-on, and public-spirited forms of learning,” she says.

Schneider also notes, however, that “the future is not bright for the nation’s new and future faculty.” The growth in part-time faculty appointments and in nontenured full-time appointments threatens to undermine “faculty roles, academic freedom, the mutual commitment of faculty members and institutions, the attractiveness of the academic career, and the amount of interaction between faculty and students,” she writes. To achieve long-term goals for higher education, colleges and universities must “make a new investment in the quality and vitality of the nation’s faculty.”

Carol Geary Schneider’s President’s Message is available online.