Dear Colleagues,
I hope your semester is going well. It’s hard to believe that Thanksgiving is next week!
Over the past several months, the Voiland College leadership team has been working on a faculty responsibilities document intended to provide some guidelines for balancing research, teaching and service activities. A fairly large subset (~25%) of the tenured faculty has extensively reviewed the draft document and offered many edits, comments, and suggestions. The document was then extensively revised to address their comments and include most of their edits. We are now providing you a link to the document (still in draft form), for your additional comments or suggestions. Please find the faculty responsibilities guidelines draft.
We hope to accomplish the following with this document: (1) the document is based upon the premise that everyone in the Voiland College endeavors to be fully engaged, committed, and valued for their contributions to the overall mission and goals of WSU and VCEA; (2) the guidelines in it provide some flexibility so that individual faculty members make different, but equally valuable, contributions based upon their interests and skills; and (3) with this, we ensure that everyone who is fully engaged feels valued and understands the importance of the contributions that s/he personally makes.
For the faculty in the School of Design and Construction, this document is not completely applicable, and a corollary document should be developed for faculty in that School. Moreover, this document has not been reviewed by faculty at campuses other than the Pullman campus, and may require some (hopefully minor) editing to reflect the urban campus context.
The intended result of this document for faculty who are outstanding researchers with large research groups and significant external funding is that their teaching loads will be lighter without their being penalized by having to buy out their time in order to work on their research. Conversely, for tenured faculty who are interested in teaching more, adopting new technologies or pedagogies, or otherwise advancing our teaching mission, their research expectations will reflect their higher emphasis on teaching-related activities.
This document is NOT intended to provide guidelines for tenure and promotion, which remain unchanged. Expectations for tenure at land-grant universities and among our peer institutions are based upon research productivity, peer-reviewed scholarly work, advising graduate students, as well as teaching well. Similarly, for promotion to full professor, expectations among our peers are based upon establishing a national or international reputation for one’s scholarly work, garnering competitive, external research funding, publishing with one’s students in the peer-reviewed literature, and advising graduate students including those pursuing the terminal degree offered. For more information on tenure and promotion guidelines and criteria, please visit the Tenure and Promotion webpage on the Voiland College website.
This document is also NOT intended to be rigid or formulaic, but rather provides guidelines along with flexibility to the chair or director to work with individual faculty members on developing individual responsibilities for each person that, collectively, advance the department or school, college, and university in its mission and aspirations.
We are seeking reactions and comments on this document from the VCEA faculty, and once it has been reviewed by you, we will finalize the document and post it on the website.
Thank you for all your hard work for the Voiland College of Engineering and Architecture and for Washington State University!
Sincerely,
Candis Claiborn
Professor and Dean