Promoting a Communal Faculty Spirit

We’re in the midst of our startup exercises for the 2010-11 academic year. Over the past couple of days, we’ve had the Fall Faculty/Staff Workshop, an annual tradition in which the faculty and many of the staff come together to discuss issues for the upcoming year, particularly those that have large strategic implications for our operations.

This year our two biggest projects are getting though our site visit from our accreditor, the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools, in early November, and carrying on with our comprehensive analysis of faculty workload and its relationship to student engagement and other aspects of academic quality at the institution. The HLC visit is actually the less daunting of these, because, while it’s a high-stakes process and one that’s taken a lot of preparation over the past two years, it also has a clear terminal date. When the site team leaves, we’ll essentially be done, except for any institutional response to the team’s report and any corrective action we end up having to take. I’m not worried about those possibilities.

The workload/engagement/academic-quality issue is actually vastly more complicated. One of the things I’ve come to understand over my academic career is that virtually nothing in higher education is as simple as it may appear, or as one may wish it to be. We are all entangled in networks of entrenched interests, established ways of doing things, longstanding curricular preferences and practices, and so on. Each institution has its embedded history, legends, and lore, and contains people who remember past initiatives and their failures, or who are seeking retribution for a long-ago slight.

One of the great things about our practice of having a fall workshop, though, is that it gives faculty members an opportunity to articulate some of those issues, and brings people together in a nonlegislative activity that can lead to genuine dialogue about the future of the institution. For the last couple of days we’ve looked at both projects and discussed them at length formally and informally. While we will surely have disagreements about how to proceed, we all start with pretty much the same information, which is a good foundation for further discussion.

Another great aspect of this workshop is that it introduces our new faculty members to the life of the university. Our New Faculty Academy is a yearlong program (its intensity tapers considerably over the year, however) to acquaint new colleagues with the university’s policies and practices, and to help them develop a cohort group of people who are facing many if not all of the same dilemmas. This program starts the day before the fall workshop, and then the new faculty members join the faculty and staff as a whole for the workshop, where they are formally introduced.

As I’ve said before, we have a pretty good communal spirit here, and one of the primary reasons, for that, I think, is that we take great care to bring new faculty members into our discussions, and put them on a solid footing with their colleagues, very quickly. We start the year by coming together in a working session to discuss the large issues facing the university. The new folks get to see how the place works, at least in a preliminary way.

The year is beginning, and we’re off to a good start.