What Colleges and Universities Want in New Faculty
by Kathrynn A. Adams

3. Academic Life
New faculty members must learn and adjust to the unique “academic life” of their institutions. This life is defined by the particular emphasis and expectations that each institution has for teaching, research, and service, in the context of the institution's overall mission. In the current climate of decreased funding for higher education, downsizing the number of full-time faculty, increased workloads, and reduced availability of funds for research, new faculty consistently report being overwhelmed by the variety of demands placed on them and surprised by the lack of collegiality at their institutions. Junior faculty members have vividly described their difficulties in adjusting to the “freedom to work all the time” and to the “professional alienation” they have experienced in their tenure track positions (Boice 1992, Newman 1999, Olsen 1993, Tierney 1997, Tierney and Bensimon 1996). In contrast to the focus on research in graduate school, teaching and work with students often consume most of the new faculty members' time. They typically have little energy or time left to establish their research programs. Although teaching, research, and service are listed as the criteria for tenure, the specific standards and weighting of them seem unclear to new faculty. Moreover, new faculty have constant fear that whatever they accomplish will not be enough to earn tenure.

In addition, many new doctorate recipients today are hired in positions that did not exist when their graduate mentors were junior faculty. During the 1990s, the majority of appointments to full-time faculty positions involved jobs that were not on the tenure track (Finkelstein and Schuster 2001). Although some of these appointments mimic the expectations of tenure-track appointments, many of these positions focus on teaching rather than the traditional triad of teaching, research, and service.

Faculty work has long included responsibility for some aspects of governance of the institution, usually in the form of a faculty senate and associated committees. Committee service is usually required of all faculty, although new faculty may be spared assignments in their first semester or year. Time commitments for committee work may range from minimal to several hours a week; some committees are neutral, while others are politically powerful.

Most graduate students are aware of departmental politics, but they are unfamiliar with faculty decisions by powerful committees that may affect areas as diverse as curriculum, personnel, and budgets. New faculty must expand their outlook from the focused environment of graduate study to encompass the faculty role in issues such as broader curriculum revision, working conditions, and distribution of financial and physical resources. Such faculty decisions typically involve political land mines that new faculty may want to avoid. Committee work will be one way colleagues outside their department can get to know them as well as a way of establishing their presence on the broader campus.

Since service seems to count little toward positive performance reviews, new faculty are unsure about how to judge the importance of multiple requests for service that are usually made by senior faculty and administrators. Faculty of color are especially vulnerable to such requests, given their additional responsibilities of serving as role models for minority students and as institutional representatives for issues related to race or ethnicity. Similar “extra” expectations occur for new female faculty in disciplines that are non-traditional for women. They also often find themselves carrying extra service commitments in part because of stereotypes about their “innate” abilities to counsel students and organize departmental social events. Likewise, at smaller institutions faculty are expected to participate in community events that frequently occur at night or on weekends. They are sometimes surprised both by the impact their institution's mission has on the overall curriculum and by the assumption that they will support the mission in their teaching and research, a task many feel unprepared to do. The variety of demands requires the ability to balance them in ways seldom anticipated when they were in graduate school.

Recommendations to Graduate Faculty
Doctoral training currently focuses almost exclusively on building competence in an academic discipline and the research skills necessary to make significant contributions to the field. This singular focus does not match the career goals of most students who plan to seek academic positions nor the real situation they find at hiring institutions.

Graduate faculty and administrators have an obligation to learn about the reality of academic life in different types of positions at a variety of institutions. Knowledge about the multiple responsibilities of new faculty would enable graduate faculty to design programs that provide additional experiences relevant to the responsibilities their graduate students will face as new faculty. For example, graduate students should be involved in discussions about the benefits and potential pitfalls of participation in faculty governance, the implications of a term position for their career, the potential impact of joining a department as the only female or person of color, etc.

Currently, all graduate students have a research mentor; they may need additional mentors to learn about the various other aspects of academic life. Faculty from a variety of institutions (including research universities) could serve as consultants to graduate programs, presenting sessions on academic life and expectations of faculty at their institutions. Graduate students could “shadow” these faculty at their home institutions for several hours, for a day or even a week, experiencing first hand the myriad responsibilities faced by faculty in non-doctorate awarding institutions.

Optimally, graduate students would visit more than one type of institution so that they could see differences and similarities across campuses.