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Where are the faculty leaders? Strategies and advice for reversing current trends.

Article Excerpt
FACULTY MEMBERS who work directly to advance the institutional mission of teaching, learning, and at some institutions, research, represent the core human resource of higher education. They are the stewards of campus leadership and decision making. While the faculty role has changed over time, leadership has remained critical to innovation in teaching, advances in knowledge, and alteration to many campus policies and practices. But as several recent publications attest, this leadership role is threatened by a number of current trends. Most notably, Schuster and Finklestein (2006) decry the rise in part-time and non-tenure-track appointments, increasing standards for tenure and promotion, the rise of academic capitalism, and heavy service roles for women and people of color. Wergin (2007) argues that these new factors further hinder faculty leadership by adding to the challenges posed by the faculty socialization process and the tenure system.

"Academic capitalism" refers to the growing trend whereby individual faculty members derive supplementary income from grants and outside contracts. This trend increases faculty autonomy and leads to the partial privatization of faculty work and research (Fairweather 1996; Slaughter and Rhoades 2004). While it is more prevalent in the sciences and in research universities, this trend is present in various disciplines and across all institutional sectors. Increasingly, new faculty members are being socialized to view involvement in external activities as more important than campus involvement.

At most institutions--excepting community colleges and some liberal arts institutions--far greater weight is placed on publication than on virtually any other criteria used to make tenure and promotion decisions. The current publication standards for tenure are more than triple what they were in the 1970s (Schuster and Finkelstein 2006). Service and leadership are being given short shrift, and assistant and associate level faculty members are being encouraged to focus exclusively on publication.

The sharp rise in the number of part-time and non-tenure-track appointments also negatively affects faculty leadership. Faculty in these non-traditional appointments often have other full-time jobs, may work at several different universities, are generally not compensated for service or governance--and, indeed, are often actively excluded from these processes (Schuster and Finkelstein 2006). For these reasons, it is difficult for these faculty members to become invested and involved in campus-specific issues and organizational leadership. Less than half of today's faculty hold tenuretrack appointments, and the majority are not expected to undertake leadership roles; the long-term impact on higher education is certain to be dramatic.

The tenure system itself negatively affects faculty leadership in the early years. Tenuretrack faculty may exercise leadership before they are awarded tenure, but they do so at great peril. They are often afraid to discuss their work, and they have to create partnerships with senior faculty in order to evade resistance and create protection. The lack of participation in leadership activities during the pretenure years may inhibit faculty participation later, as these faculty members will not have formed the habits or developed the skills. Faculty socialization also tends not to facilitate leadership development. In graduate school, students work independently in the library or the laboratory. After years of training and working independently and autonomously, faculty may find it difficult to engage in the types of activities that are required of grassroots leaders, such as creating a vision, developing networks, and organizing multiple people.

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The challenges to faculty leadership posed by these trends are significant, but they are not insurmountable. Recently, we conducted a study of bottom-up...

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