• Our faculty are well educated, experienced teachers dedicated to providing quality instruction. They receive high praise from students and alumni for teaching excellence.
• Our faculty are, on the whole, sufficient in number to achieve our educational mission. Their academic, geographic, and cultural diversity has broadened. The proportion holding terminal degrees has increased, as has the proportion of women.
• University policies stress the importance of effective teaching and encourage scholarly activity. Support for scholarly activities and professional development is increasing; the new Center for Academic Excellence is a notable example.
• Our faculty are committed to professional development and scholarship, and they serve both the University and our community.
• Collective Bargaining Agreements have historically provided good salaries and benefits.
• Processes for recruiting faculty are thorough and based on evidence of effective teaching and on the potential for continual scholarship and service to the University.
• Processes for evaluating, tenuring, and promoting faculty are manifestly based on evidence of effective teaching, continuing scholarship, and service.
• The members of key committees are elected by and from the faculty, ensuring that the faculty address issues that directly affect them.
• The relationship between the faculty and the administration is positive.

Areas of Concern

• The diversity of our faculty needs further enhancement.
• Our focus on faculty scholarship requires greater support, including more access to grant information and more help with grant writing.
• Some faculty perceive service to the University and community as having limited weight in the promotion and tenure process.
• Peer and department chair reviews of teaching are not standardized across the University.
• It is very difficult to add faculty to respond to a changing environment.
• The process for new tenure-track faculty searches is time consuming, overly complicated, and prescriptive.
• There is evidence that academic advisement is not consistently effective, and some perceive that it has limited weight in the promotion and tenure process.
• Class sizes and advisee loads vary widely among departments.
• Graduate faculty do not always view their workloads as appropriate.

Recommendations

• Review the faculty complement to ensure that it is appropriate given our mission, resource capabilities, and evolving environment.
• Review the process for recruiting and hiring new tenure-track faculty, with an eye to identifying best practices, streamlining the process, recruiting and retaining faculty of color, communicating approvals in a timely fashion, and empowering departments to provide a faculty that is in students' best interests.
• Provide leadership and appropriate mechanisms for faculty to strengthen policies and procedures for evaluation, tenure and promotion, in accordance with the Collective Bargaining Agreement, so that criteria and expectations are inclusive, clearly defined, and consistently interpreted and implemented.
• Strengthen academic advisement by defining and communicating faculty and student roles and responsibilities in advisement, providing professional development that empowers faculty to advise students properly, empowering students to use the tools the University has provided, and identifying and promulgating best practices both within the University and elsewhere.

Suggestion

• Make it possible for faculty to risk exploring new teaching methods without fear of evaluation penalty.