The Professoriate

Reconsidered
A Study of New Faculty Models

Adrianna Kezar, Daniel Maxey, and Elizabeth Holcombe

The Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success

University of Southern California

This study was made possible by the generous support of the TIAA-CREF Research Institute
 The authors gratefully acknowledge the research grant awarded by the TIAA-CREF Institute to support this work.
The TIAA-CREF Institute helps advance the ways individuals and institutions plan for financial security and
organizational effectiveness. The Institute conducts in-depth research, provides access to a network of thought
leaders, and enables those it serves to anticipate trends, plan future strategies and maximize opportunities for
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To learn more about the TIAA-CREF Institute’s research and initiatives for higher education leaders, please visit
their website at www.tiaa-crefinstitute.org.

Pullias Center for Higher Education

Rossier School of Education
University of Southern California
October 2015
 Executive Summary
Given the large-scale and largely unintentional changes to the faculty workforce (e.g., move to predominantly
contingent adjunct appointments, de-professionalization) that have occurred over the last several decades, there is a
need for thoughtful and intentional discussion of the potential characteristics of new faculty models. In our most
recent report, Adapting by Design (2015), we outlined why a new model is needed: the tenure-track/adjunct model,
as currently constructed, does not serve the enterprise well. Our earlier research (Kezar & Maxey, 2014) indicated
that one of the reasons that it has been difficult to move forward with development of new faculty models has been
the absence among key stakeholder groups of a shared vision for the future of the faculty. Lacking any compelling
options or ideas around which changes might begin, the enterprise has remained at a standstill.

In this survey study, we collected the views of faculty, campus administrators, board members, accreditors, and state-
level higher education policymakers at a broad range of institutional types (public and private, two-year and four-
year, and various Carnegie classification types) to gain a better understanding of these stakeholders’ views about
potential new faculty models. Our hope is that understanding these groups’ perspectives on the attractiveness and
feasibility of new faculty models can advance the conversation around the future of the faculty in meaningful and
concrete ways.

The survey included 39 two-part scaled response items, each presenting a potential attribute of a future faculty
model. These survey items were organized into eight categories related to faculty roles: faculty pathways; contracts;
unbundling of faculty roles; status in the academic community; faculty development, promotion, and evaluation;
flexibility; collaboration and community engagement; and public good roles. The following are key findings:

 Overall, we found general agreement across many of the questions and categories in this survey, indicating
greater-than-anticipated potential for common ground and a way forward to create new faculty roles. Areas of
strong agreement include the need for more full-time faculty, ensuring some sort of scholarly component in all
faculty roles, fostering more collaboration among faculty, allowing some differentiation of roles focused on
teaching and research, and developing a more complex view of scholarship, epitomized in Boyer’s (1990)
Scholarship Reconsidered. Our findings dispel the pervasive myth that there is a tremendous and impassable
gulf between groups’ views about the faculty.

 A major theme that emerged was the overarching need to maintain and restore professionalism to the faculty
role, which relates to issues such as protecting academic freedom, inclusion in shared governance, equitable
pay, career advancement, professional development, and the like.

 We did not find remarkably resistant views among unionized faculty members in our survey nor, indeed, views
that were much different from those of faculty overall. Although the collective bargaining process might add a
layer of complexity to making decisions about faculty employment and contracts, our survey responses indicate
that the views of faculty members (both full- and part-time; tenure track and non–tenure track) who are in
collective bargaining agreements are not distinctly different from their non-unionized peers.

 Although many stakeholders had interest in and found many areas of a future faculty model attractive, there
were gaps in interest in some proposals and in views on their feasibility in certain areas. Stakeholders registered
concerns about the feasibility of proposals such as creativity contracts, more customized faculty roles, more
flexible faculty roles, and creation of consortial hiring arrangements.

The areas of agreement identified in this study can serve as starting points for discussion, providing points of
consensus to help move the greater dialogue about the future of the faculty from mere exchange of ideas to the
creation of a reality. If this report has any effect, we hope that it will help to provoke a collaborative dialogue about
sustainable and meaningful change in the faculty model.
Table of Contents

Introduction and Study Background. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Methods and Study Design. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
Findings
I. Stakeholders’ Perspectives
a. Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
b. Faculty Pathways . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .10
c. Contracts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .13
d. Unbundling of Faculty Roles. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .16
e. Status in the Academic Community. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .19
f. Faculty Development, Promotion, and Evaluation . . . . . . . . . . . .21
g. Flexibility. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .23
h. Collaboration and Community Engagement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .25
i. Faculty Roles and the Public Good . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
II. Gaps between Attractiveness and Feasibility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .29
III. A Closer Look at Faculty Members in Unions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .36
IV. Faculty Professionalism: Ideals and Realities,
Rifts and Restoration. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .44
Appendix A: Survey Instrument . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
Introduction and Study Background

I n recent decades, the employment model in higher education has markedly changed. Tenure-track
faculty have declined as a percentage of the workforce in higher education and now represent about 30
percent of the instructional faculty across all non-profit institutions (Kezar & Maxey, 2015; NCES, 2013).
Most faculty members who provide instruction at colleges and universities today are non–tenure-track
faculty (NTTF); the majority of them are employed as adjuncts on term-to-term contracts, receive meager
compensation and usually no access to benefits, and encounter unsatisfactory working conditions. This trend
has extended across all institutional types, including research universities and small liberal arts colleges. The
faculty model has shifted in such a way as to make it increasingly unattractive to potential new entrants into
the profession. Faculty leaders, administrators, and leaders of national higher education associations worry
about whether talented individuals will continue to go into the professoriate (Maxey & Kezar, 2015).

A mounting body of evidence suggests that the growing reliance on contingent labor is resulting in numerous
negative impacts on the enterprise, enjoining us to consider different employment arrangements and
models. These negative impacts are detailed in several of the Delphi Project’s publications at
www.thechangingfaculty.org. In short, the contingent model, particularly the adjunct model, is detrimental
to student learning and outcomes. The evidence suggests problems for first-year persistence, retention,
transfers from two-year to four-year colleges, and graduation rates, with some of the most pronounced
impacts seen among first-generation and remedial students, who are the object of numerous special
initiatives (Bettinger & Long, 2010; Gross & Goldhaber, 2009; Eagan & Jaeger, 2008; Ehrenberg & Zhang,
2004; Harrington & Schibik, 2001; Jacoby, 2006; Jaeger & Eagan, 2009; Kezar & Maxey, 2014). These
conditions stem from institutions’ failure to properly support this growing segment of the faculty. Further,
increasing reliance on contingent appointments contributes to a variety of institutional problems, ranging
from poor morale to ineffective governance. For example, there are signs of strain as a shrinking pool of
individuals holding tenure-track appointments takes on an increasing and likely unsustainable level of
responsibility for satisfying the multiple obligations of curriculum development, departmental and other
forms of service, and conducting research. In order for higher education to move forward and to be better
prepared to weather the many changes and challenges that confront the sector, there needs to be an
intentional effort to develop a new employment model and a more principled approach to faculty work. A
return to a largely tenure-track faculty model is highly unlikely, given current economic realities and the
concerns with the tenure-track model and priorities of policymakers, legislators, and academic
administrators. Furthermore, the tenure-track faculty model has challenges that have gone unaddressed for
decades, as well, such as the incentive system that typically does not reward teaching (for more details see
Kezar & Maxey, 2015).

In the face of these conditions, the Delphi Project has sought to initiate a nationwide discussion aimed at
creating a compelling vision for the future of the professoriate that will be attractive to new faculty members,
will more effectively facilitate student learning, will respond to external stakeholders’ critiques, and will
better sustain campus and systemic operations and the health of the profession and overall enterprise. The
project emerged from the belief that the best way to initiate an effort to develop such a vision is to examine
the perspectives of a wide array of higher education stakeholders and to identify key areas of agreement that
reflect opportunities for groups to work together toward change. With the term faculty model, we mean a set
of elements that make up faculty career/work that includes contracts, roles, values, training, responsibilities,
and priorities. We are not presenting a single new faculty model here; rather, we address an array of elements
that could forge future faculty models. Most previous reexaminations of faculty models have not looked
across all these facets, but usually examine only one or two elements. In contrast, we intentionally surveyed
stakeholders to identify their perspectives across the various dimensions that make up faculty models. The
project has also developed other key publications that might be read in conjunction with this report to create
context for understanding new faculty models. For example, Adapting by Design (2015) outlines why new
faculty models are needed, and it provides an overview of potential options, many of which are tested in the

The Professoriate Reconsidered 1

survey results presented here. That report is helpful for individuals who seek more background on the
question of why new models are necessary and would like to see examples of alternative faculty models and
approaches for developing new models.

A few notable efforts to envision or create new faculty models have taken shape, although these are as yet
isolated cases. Perhaps the best known effort was Ernest Boyer’s Scholarship Reconsidered (1990), a book
proposing what was then a new way to think about faculty work. In their recent book, The Humanities, Higher
Education, and Academic Freedom: Three Necessary Arguments, Bérubé and Ruth (2015) assert a new,
teaching-intensive, tenure-track model. Medical schools have already developed a set of relatively new
faculty arrangements organized around greater flexibility and a differentiation of roles across clinical,
teaching, and research lines; the medical school model also includes a more modest role for tenure. The
medical school model fosters the participation and unique contributions of all faculty members to their
institutions, regardless of their contract type, including through their participation in governance.
Northwestern University has proposed to end distinctions among faculty, calling all faculty members (on and
off the tenure track) “professors,” ending the use of non-tenure track terminologies. They are also in the
process of starting a faculty promotion and advancement model that applies to all faculty, including
professional development and involvement in governance; these are all elements of professionalization of
the faculty. Northwestern continues to investigate further changes needed to support all faculty and develop
this new faculty model. There are other examples of emerging ideas and experiments to be found sprouting
up on campuses across the country, but there has been little attention to examining stakeholders’ views
about these and other potential alternatives. Through the research presented in this report, we hope to
identify and better understand the advantages and disadvantages of different approaches and the points of
consensus about possible paths forward.

This research tried to answer the following question: What might be some key characteristics of the future
faculty in the United States? The need for projection and planning is dramatic, given the large-scale and
largely unintentional changes to the workforce that have already occurred. No strategic or principled model
has yet emerged as an alternative to our current arrangements characterized by a shrinking tenure-track
faculty and growing reliance on contingency. And, there has been no critical examination of potential future
faculty models in higher education. This study is the first of its kind.

This study builds on our earlier research (Kezar & Maxey, 2014), which identified one of the key reasons that
it has been difficult for the enterprise of higher education to move forward and develop new faculty models:
there is no shared vision for the future of the faculty. As we examined views of key groups such as faculty
leaders, administrators, and policymakers, we found that no group had developed a cohesive view about
what the future faculty should look like. Lacking any compelling options or ideas around which changes
might begin, the enterprise has remained at a standstill. We believe that, by working to promote discussion
across the boundaries that typically separate stakeholder groups, we can build consensus about the need to
change and pool ideas about potential approaches for reconsidering the professoriate. To this end, our Delphi
work includes state policymakers, national groups representing academic leaders such as deans and
provosts, accreditation leaders, national higher education associations representing presidents and other
constituent groups such as business officers, faculty unions, disciplinary societies, and emerging faculty
groups such as The New Faculty Majority. By working across these communities, it is possible to start the
enterprise on a new path forward. In our previous work we helped academic leaders come to consensus
about the need to better support non–tenure-track faculty. The success of those encounters suggests that a
common vision can coalesce to create action and change. This strategy has already worked with previous
efforts, and we are convinced it can inform the issue of new faculty models, as well.

2 The Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success

 Organization of this Report

After a brief summary of the research methods and instrument design, the findings in this report are
organized into four major sections. First, we describe stakeholders’ perspectives and levels of interest in
proposals that focus on various elements of new faculty models. Findings in this section are organized by the
eight major areas of the survey: faculty pathways; contracts; unbundling of faculty roles; status in the
academic community; faculty development, promotion, and evaluation; flexibility; collaboration and
community engagement; and faculty roles and the public good. The second section explores in detail gaps
between stakeholders’ views on the attractiveness of certain elements of potential new faculty models and
their feasibility. In the third section, we examine in more depth the views reported by faculty members in
unions. Finally, the fourth section offers a broader look at faculty professionalism. There, we highlight
consensus among the stakeholders we surveyed about the need to restore professionalism to the faculty role
in light of several decades of degradation. We conclude with a focus on major areas of agreement among
stakeholders from this study and suggestions for how to continue this important work.

The Professoriate Reconsidered 3

Methods and Study Design

W e developed a survey instrument to better understand higher education stakeholders’

perspectives on future faculty models. We first reviewed the literature on faculty models and
employment models in other professional fields, and we then identified examples of new faculty
models that have emerged on campuses across the United States. This helped us to generate
content for the survey. We collected material on existing alternative models from scholarly sources, such as
Ernest Boyer’s Scholarship Reconsidered, from isolated experiments, such as at The Evergreen State College,
and from other more widespread developments, such as the changes taking place in faculty roles and
contracts at medical schools and in the for-profit sector of higher education. It is important to note that,
although we call the models in this report “future faculty models,” we do not mean to imply that innovations
do not already exist on some campuses. Some of the responses that we examined build on existing practices
that are not yet widespread. What we are trying to identify is views about whether these might become more
normative or widely accepted components of new faculty roles.

Our goal was to survey members of a variety of key stakeholder groups in higher education, asking them to
envision the future of the faculty and to consider the attractiveness and feasibility of potential attributes that
could be components in broader, yet-to-be-designed faculty models. The survey included 39 two-part,
scaled-response items, each presenting a potential attribute of a future faculty model. These survey items
were organized into eight categories related to faculty roles: faculty pathways; contracts; unbundling of
faculty roles; status in the academic community; faculty development, promotion, and evaluation; flexibility;
collaboration and community engagement; and public good roles.

FIGURE 1. EXAMPLE SURVEY ITEM, AS PRESENTED TO PARTICIPANTS

The survey was designed to capture not just whether respondents found a particular attribute to be an
attractive or good idea, but also whether they believed it would be practical or feasible to implement it.
Respondents registered their views on the attractiveness and feasibility of each survey item using a five-
point scale ranging from not at all attractive/feasible to very attractive/feasible. A “neutral” option was
available for those who may not have held a strong opinion one way or another.

We piloted the survey in the fall of 2014 among a group of individuals representing the various stakeholder
groups we planned to survey, and we received extensive feedback to shorten the survey and to reword
certain survey items. Our original survey instrument was comprised of long descriptions of more complete
faculty models, with extensive details about new roles, contract types, responsibilities, and areas of work
within each individual model. The respondents in the pilot study found it too difficult to respond to numerous
components of these models at the same time, so we separated the survey questions into individual
attributes to simplify and focus responses. For each item on the survey, respondents were asked only to reply
on the attractiveness and feasibility of one attribute at a time. We also provided the opportunity for
participants to register open-ended responses within each section of the survey; this yielded several
thousand comments. This large amount of open-ended feedback is uncommon in survey administration, and

4 The Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success

it suggests that individuals had many views and perspectives to share related to the items contained in the
survey.

The final survey was disseminated between February and March of 2015 through a number of key national
higher education associations. It reached participants representing a broad range of stakeholder groups.
Although no definitive roster of key stakeholders in higher education exists, we designed the selection of the
sample population using Harcleroad & Eaton’s (2011) empirically grounded list of higher education groups
that have historically influenced issues pertaining to the faculty. These groups are:

1. Accreditation agencies;
2. Disciplinary societies;
3. Faculty stakeholder groups, such as New Faculty Majority, which
represents non-tenure-track faculty;
4. Unions;
5. State or system leadership and state compacts, represented here
by State Higher Education Executive Officers;
6. Governing boards; and
7. Individual and institutional membership associations that
represent academic leaders, such as the Council of Colleges of
Arts and Sciences, the American Council on Education, and the
Council of Independent Colleges.

Through the ongoing work of the Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success, we had already
established contacts within each of the stakeholder groups listed above. We drew upon these connections to
obtain nominations for survey respondents. Within each stakeholder group, we sought nominations for
individuals to participate in the survey, with a goal of approximately 50 individuals per group. However,
because these groups vary in the numbers of members they represent, it was appropriate to survey some
stakeholders in greater numbers than others. Accrediting agencies, state higher education executive officers,
and governing boards, for example, include far fewer individuals than faculty and administration groups, for
example. In response to this disparity, we allowed faculty and administrative leaders (deans and provosts)
to respond in greater numbers. These two groups also had the highest response rate in the survey. Given the
low response rate among stakeholders within the categories of state higher education executive officer,
accreditor, and governing board member, those results should be interpreted with some caution. Also, we
had far more responses from four-year than from two-year colleges; less than 7% of our total respondents
reported an affiliation with a two-year institution. While we retain these data from faculty members and
administrators from two-year colleges in our overall sample, we cannot with any confidence perform a
separate analysis of their responses or compare them with their colleagues in four-year institutions. We can
note, however, that responses tended to be fairly similar across these populations, with only a few areas of
difference (such as on proposals about altering or phasing out tenure or on forming partnerships with
community organizations). Future research might explore the views of community college faculty and
administrators in more detail, focusing on some of the preliminary differences we saw here.

The Professoriate Reconsidered 5

 TABLE 1. TOTAL NUMBER OF RESPONDENTS BY STAKEHOLDER GROUP

Stakeholder Group Number of Respondents

Accreditors 23

Deans 81 All from four-year institutions

Two-year: 50
Four-year: 854
904 Confirmed members of collective
Faculty: Tenured/Tenure-track
bargaining units: 427

Two-year: 18
Four-year: 181
199
Faculty: Full-Time Non–tenure-track Confirmed members of collective
bargaining units: 101

Two-Year: 24
Four-Year: 107
131
Faculty: Part-Time Non–tenure-track Confirmed members of collective
bargaining units: 54

Governing Board Members 20 All from four-year institutions

Two-year: 13
Provosts 188 Four-year: 175

State Higher Education Executive Officers 7

TOTAL: 1,553

We conducted descriptive and trend-data analyses to highlight similarities and differences in stakeholder
views. We also examined the data for differences by institutional type (e.g., between public and private or
between two-year and four-year institutions), and conducted an analysis of the open-ended survey
responses, which, as noted above, numbered in the thousands. Open-ended responses were particularly
important in understanding the gaps between attractiveness and feasibility on the survey. Additionally, the
open-ended comments helped us to better understand some of the factors that affected respondents’ views
about the attractiveness or feasibility of certain attributes included in the survey. Because of the volume and
extensive nature of the open-ended feedback we received, it is only possible to include a few salient samples
in this report. Other publications that will focus on trends identified in the open-ended responses are
forthcoming from the Delphi Project.

6 The Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success

 A Note on Interpreting the Data

Respondents registered their perceptions about the attractiveness and feasibility of each survey item using
a five-point scale, ranging from not at all attractive/feasible to very attractive/feasible. A “neutral” option
was available to participants who may not have held strong views about an item. Since we could not interpret
participants’ reasons for selecting the neutral option, we did not consider neutral responses in the analysis;
rather, we focused our attention on the allocation of responses indicating more positive and more negative
views on attractiveness and feasibility to evaluate support and opposition with respect to each item.
Although we do not present neutral responses in the data tables in this report, we did not eliminate them
entirely from the dataset; thus, it is important to note that the positive and negative responses in the data
tables generally do not add up to 100 percent. The percentage of neutral responses to any given question can
be derived by taking the sum of the positive and negative responses and subtracting it from 100 percent.

To conduct the analysis for this report, we determined definitions for reporting levels of attractiveness and
agreement on survey items. Where affirmative attractiveness responses fell between 50 and 74 percent for
a group, we describe this as demonstrating moderate interest in a proposal. Where support was above 75
percent on a survey item, we express this as strong interest or strong views on the attractiveness of an
idea. In cases where the affirmative attractiveness responses across groups varied, with groups being
roughly split between moderate and strong interest, we describe this as showing mixed levels of interest.
To determine what constitutes agreement across groups, we set the following thresholds:
1. When six out of the eight groups fell into the above defined ranges for interest or attractiveness, we
defined this as showing agreement among most groups;
2. When seven groups fell into the ranges, we defined this as demonstrating strong agreement; and,
3. When all eight groups fell into the ranges, we described this as constituting unified agreement
among the stakeholder groups.

So, for example, when 75 percent or more of respondents from each of the eight stakeholder groups in
the study demonstrated interest in a survey item, we would describe this as showing unified agreement
and strong interest in the proposal; when seven of the eight groups demonstrated interest, but groups
were roughly split between moderate and strong interest, we would describe this as showing strong
agreement and mixed interest.

We also noted some large gaps in stakeholders’ agreement with a particular survey item and their perception
of its feasibility. We describe in some detail proposals in which we saw a large gap between attractiveness
and feasibility, defined as feasibility that is at least 25 percentage points lower than attractiveness for a
particular answer across at least five of the eight stakeholder groups.

Data tables containing the percentages of respondents in each stakeholder group that found a potential
attribute to be attractive or unattractive are presented at the start of each section; values are rounded to the
nearest whole percentage point. Additionally, select open-ended responses from each section are included,
where pertinent, to add contextual depth to the discussion and to strengthen the narrative that emerges from
the data.

The Professoriate Reconsidered 7

Stakeholders’ Perspectives: Overview

“There are some interesting concepts presented in the survey. I think the
challenge overall is that academic institutions, and academics themselves,
are not generally open to change. While many of the ideas presented would
likely improve the quality of education for students and the quality of life for
faculty, I don’t foresee a situation where these changes could be made
nationally. Individual institutions might implement some of these. Change is
hard.”
—Comment from an Accreditor

T he quote above, submitted by an accreditor at the end of the first section of the survey, captures a
sentiment repeated throughout the survey by members of the various participating stakeholder
groups. Respondents found many of the ideas in the survey to be more attractive than not, but they
tended to be less certain about the overall feasibility of implementing these attributes. We found in
the survey data that stakeholders’ views reflected gradations of support for proposals: most respondents in
each group indicated that they thought most ideas were attractive, but quite often with differing degrees of
enthusiasm. This general finding of the study calls attention to the fact that there may be some potentially
unanticipated common ground among stakeholder groups to begin discussions of change efforts, with more
and less enthusiastic supporters working together on shared goals. We also found that, for many questions,
stakeholders found the avenues for achieving change to be elusive and complicated to determine; this was
apparent based on stakeholders’ views about feasibility and other feedback, such as the quote above,
provided in the open-ended-response fields. Yet, we also believe that the survey responses may
overemphasize pessimistic views regarding feasibility due to stereotypes and beliefs that may not reflect
campus realities.

Several issues are often raised in discussions of barriers to moving forward and creating a new faculty model
for the future. There are three, in particular, that we have commonly heard as we have interacted with
various groups on these issues over the past several years. The first perceived barrier is that there is little or
no agreement across groups; in fact, it is not uncommon to encounter the view that there is a tremendous
gulf between groups’ opposing views about the faculty, particularly between faculty and administrators.
Faculty members, writ large, are said to be committed to the historic, traditional tenure-track model,
whereas administrators are said to be committed to the proliferation of adjunct positions. These two
distinctive viewpoints are typically described as polarizing the Academy and making conversation between
groups difficult, if not impossible. A second perception we have encountered is the belief that unions are
diametrically opposed to any type of change in current faculty arrangements, and that unions will work to
prevent the progress of any effort to think creatively about potential alternative faculty models. The third
and final perceived barrier is the cost of change. Financial constraints and added costs are described as
making any future models, particularly those that would seek to deliver more equitable compensation and
support for all faculty, impossible to support. Critics claim that tuitions will have to rise if faculty members
are to be provided any additional resources, thus justifying their support for the continual hiring of
contingent faculty.

An important contribution of our survey is that the data collected challenge these pervasive myths. We found
strong views about the attractiveness of proposals across the various stakeholder groups on a variety of new
faculty pathways, contracts, and work and role arrangements. The notion that faculty members,
administrators, and policymakers do not and cannot share similar perspectives on changing the future of the

8 The Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success

faculty—or, in the very least, some basic components of a potential future faculty model—is simply not borne
out by the data. Additionally the view that unions are unwilling to engage in new models of faculty work is
not at all reflected in the data. For example, faculty members who were in unions often had views that were
very similar to those of other stakeholder groups, and in some instances these faculty were even more open
to changes in faculty roles.

While the data from this study do not speak directly to the financial concern, we have conducted other work
that complicates the myth that finances are preventing the pursuit and implementation of changes to the
faculty model. In our publication, Dispelling the Myth, for example, we identify ways that institutions can find
the funds necessary to better support faculty and to improve the quality of instruction, making investments
to prioritize their academic missions. Our work suggests that the willingness to fund these changes—or the
lack thereof—speaks to leaders’ priorities; if institutional leaders believe that the core academic mission is
an important priority, there are ways to redirect or reallocate funding to make sure changes to support that
mission can be achieved. The Delta Cost Project and other sources have identified the downward trends in
funding for instruction and academic budgets, showing how other funding priorities have subsumed larger
shares of the budget over time. 1

In summary, the research described in this report contributes to this work of

dispelling myths and stereotypes that prevent the design and adoption of new faculty
models. The data challenges, for the first time:

1. that we lack the necessary agreement on key issues to begin having important
discussions in earnest about new faculty roles; and,

2. that union leadership and members are unwilling to consider or contribute to

new faculty models.

As mentioned above, we have organized the data and findings included in this report according to the same
eight categories that were presented to respondents who completed the survey. In each section, we give a
brief overview of the main topics or themes reflected in the proposals, present key areas of agreement—and
where pertinent, areas of disagreement—over the attractiveness of proposals, and additional narrative
reflecting views on feasibility and other reactions provided by respondents, particularly as conveyed through
open-ended-response feedback. We highlight areas of agreement and disagreement, in particular, to help
inform discussions that can help to propel movement toward more intentional change in faculty models. As
the data demonstrate, there was far more agreement than disagreement among stakeholder groups across
the vast majority of survey items; in fact, the greatest areas of disagreement were largely isolated to only a
few features. We urge the reader to keep in mind this wide-ranging consensus while considering these results
and when participating in discussions about the future of the faculty. The other details provided in this
study—notes on views about feasibility and feedback from open-ended-response questions—also help to
inform discussions by calling attention to issues that may need to be addressed as changes are considered,
designed, and eventually implemented.

1 The Delta Cost Project has published a number of informative reports on this and other topics related to higher education finance and

costs. These reports can be found on its website at http://www.deltacostproject.org/.

The Professoriate Reconsidered 9

Stakeholders’ Perspectives: Faculty Pathways
urrently, faculty work is dominated by two types of tracks or pathways: a tenure track, which

C typically involves faculty in research, teaching, and service in varying, and sometimes unbalanced
proportions, and a non-tenure track, which typically employs faculty to focus primarily on one of
those activities. However, due to the poor working conditions and lack of status typical of non–
tenure-track positions, non–tenure-track pathways at many institutions fail to engage faculty optimally in
even the one area of work that is their intended responsibility. Both of these current tracks fall short in
providing support across the various activities that have traditionally been seen as comprising faculty
success. For example, competing priorities often leave faculty members disengaged from the broad range of
scholarship that would benefit the faculty members themselves, and also benefit their students and the
institutions they serve.

The first section of the survey sought to explore stakeholders’ views about alternate pathways and
arrangements that could help to create a broader—and in some cases, maybe a more customized—range of
work roles, which would allow faculty to maximize their engagement in scholarship, creativity, satisfaction,
and productivity.

TABLE 2. STAKEHOLDER GROUPS’ VIEWS ON FACULTY PATHWAYS

Including frequency of positive and negative responses on attractiveness for each group, in percentages
Tenure-Track

Accreditors

Governing
Part-Time
Full-Time

Provosts

SHEEOs
FACULTY PATHWAYS
Faculty

Boards
Deans
NTTF

.
NTTF

Creating opportunities for highly customized and A 50% 71% 61% 67% 70% 52% 75% 71%
continuously changing faculty pathways through
Creativity Contracts. U 34% 17% 21% 20% 15% 22% 15% 0%

Providing multiple pathways or tracks for faculty A 53% 70% 60% 57% 68% 74% 55% 71%
members to pursue appointments that focus primary,
long-term responsibilities in a particular area of
practice. U 31% 16% 18% 21% 20% 4% 20% 14%

Advancing a more complete and widespread A 73% 79% 76% 88% 83% 83% 80% 71%
implementation of Ernest Boyer's Scholarship
Reconsidered. U 11% 7% 7% 2% 9% 0% 10% 0%

Creating greater differentiation of faculty contracts A 39% 53% 62% 63% 57% 65% 70% 71%
and roles among different institutional types to
ensure that distinct missions are served. U 38% 25% 19% 16% 17% 13% 25% 14%

Focusing the majority of faculty members’ roles A 27% 48% 55% 53% 30% 57% 75% 71%
throughout higher education around responsibilities
for teaching and student development. U 58% 35% 31% 36% 57% 17% 15% 14%

Supporting all faculty members who teach, regardless A 83% 84% 91% 77% 75% 87% 75% 71%
of contract or rank, in conducting scholarship.
U 7% 5% 3% 8% 12% 0% 15% 14%

Aligning individual faculty pathways more closely to A 26% 31% 33% 68% 58% 56% 90% 57%
departmental and institutional needs. U 48% 38% 34% 13% 21% 17% 10% 14%

A Attractive
U Unattractive

NOTE: Values that are bolded and underlined indicate that more respondents in the corresponding stakeholder group viewed the potential
attribute of future faculty models as feasible, rather than infeasible.

10 The Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success

 Areas of Agreement on Faculty Pathways

Multiple Pathways and Differentiated Roles

There was unified agreement and moderate interest across the stakeholder groups in providing multiple
pathways or tracks for faculty members to pursue appointments that focus their primary, long-term
responsibilities in a particular area such as research, teaching, or professional or clinical practice. Here,
greater flexibility and variation in the foci of faculty work and roles—whether they are primarily focused on
teaching, research, or service—rather than maintaining a focus on all three roles, with a dominant role for
research, was determined to be an item to consider for the future professoriate. There was also strong
agreement across groups that faculty roles should be differentiated among different types of institutions that
serve distinct missions.

Broadly Defined Scholarship for All

Faculty members, administrators, and policymakers demonstrated strong agreement and strong interest in
ensuring that faculty members were supported in maintaining some role in scholarship, regardless of
whether the primary focus of their work is on teaching, service, or research as part of the design of a future
faculty model; 75 percent or more of respondents from nearly every stakeholder group found this proposal
to be attractive. As a reminder, scholarship was defined broadly and involves not only traditional research
but also application of research or scholarship on teaching. Many adjunct faculty members currently lack
access to such opportunities. When opportunities to maintain a role in scholarship are available, support
through compensation and funding for related activities is not always available. Thus, this is an important
change that the data suggest that stakeholders believe should be made. One comment from our open-ended
responses reflected common perspectives held across stakeholder groups about the importance of this issue:

“Teaching faculty have to have some way to stay current. ‘Scholarship’ as it is

traditionally defined is probably not the best way to ensure this happens, but something
needs to take its place. While participation in research may not be the best way to keep
faculty up-to-date, it does help.”
—Comment from a State Higher Education Executive Officer

Multiple Definitions of Scholarship, as Promoted by Boyer

Another area of strong agreement and strong interest across stakeholder groups was their views about
advancing a more complete and widespread implementation of the broader view of scholarship advanced in
Ernest Boyer’s Scholarship Reconsidered. Since the early 1990s, leaders across higher education have
heralded the important contributions of Boyer’s work. Boyer asserted that scholarship should be broadly
defined to encompass research on teaching, institutional service and community engagement, and more
varied forms of research that include synthesis. Parts of Boyer’s proposal have already been adopted across
the higher education enterprise, although in varying degrees from one institution to the next. The data from
this study suggest that there is strong agreement that an effort to continue working toward the ideal set forth
by Boyer should be a priority.

Creativity Contracts
Another component of Boyer’s Scholarship Reconsidered included in the survey was met with moderate
interest and strong agreement across stakeholder groups. Creativity contracts are a tool for facilitating
faculty members’ participation in a broader range of scholarly activities by engaging them in highly
customized and continuously changing faculty roles. Each group agreed that giving faculty members the
ability to negotiate involvement in a variety of roles over the course of their careers is an important feature

The Professoriate Reconsidered 11

to consider for future faculty models, rather than the more narrow foci and largely unchanging roles that
define faculty work today.

Areas of Disagreement on Faculty Pathways

Concerns about Emphasizing Teaching to the Exclusion of Other Key Faculty Roles
One area where the data revealed disagreement about attractiveness was the proposal to focus the majority
of faculty roles throughout higher education around teaching, reserving research and service as more
exceptional roles for only a small subset of faculty members at institutions with a research mission. SHEEOs,
board members, accreditors, and provosts were interested in focusing faculty roles on teaching and student
development, reducing their research and service responsibilities. However, faculty members (tenure-track
and, to a lesser extent, part-time and full-time non–tenure-track) and deans did not find an increased focus
on teaching and student development at the expense of research and service to be an attractive idea.

It might appear to some that the lack of consensus on this item is almost at odds with some of the earlier
agreement around more differentiation of roles by institutional type or the ability for faculty to focus their
primary responsibilities around a particular area of practice, such as research, teaching, or service. However,
as responses to other survey items suggest, there is a strong consensus among stakeholder groups that
faculty members should have some form of opportunity to engage in scholarship and more flexibility to
pursue scholarship in multiple forms over the course of their careers. This includes scholarship that may be
required to enable faculty to remain viable and current in their fields, not necessarily the pursuit of original
research. For faculty and deans, teaching and student development were seen as one part of faculty members’
engagement in a broader set of scholarly roles. The negative responses to this particular item might also
reflect fears that only research universities would have a scholarly mission in the future, raising concerns
about an increasingly stratified hierarchy among institutional types.

Future discussions should be informed by this split in views about increasing the focus of faculty roles on
teaching and student development. Given the survey responses, we suggest that future discussions about
teaching-focused faculty roles should also address how to maintain a scholarly component, such as through
opportunities to keep up with advances in the field or institutional professional development.

Aligning Faculty Roles to Institutional and Departmental Needs

Another point of disagreement was the survey item that called for more closely aligning faculty work to
departmental and institutional needs, rather than having a more individual orientation. Board members,
SHEEOs, provosts, and deans were more interested in this proposal, while faculty of all types found this to
be an unattractive idea. Autonomy has long been an important part of faculty work. Conversations about
future faculty roles need to take this historical context into consideration, and supporters of greater
alignment with departmental and institutional goals will need to make clear justifications for why this might
be an important priority. We also caution that the negative faculty perceptions of valuing institutional over
individual priorities may simply represent faculty views of the constrained roles within new contingent
appointments. There is often less individual discretion and very tight institutional control over work in these
roles. We may find in the future that the imbalance, if there is one, has moved from an overemphasis on
individual priorities to an overemphasis on institutional priorities.

12 The Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success

Stakeholders’ Perspectives: Contracts
he current range of faculty contract types—tenured, tenure-track, full-time non–tenure-track, and

T part-time or adjunct—dominates the higher education landscape. If this system is in need of revision,
what types of contracts might replace them? Or, how might current contracts be altered to best suit
the needs of faculty members, students, departments, and institutions, as well as the needs of the
communities they serve? The second section of the survey explored views about potential changes to
contracts, ranging from mere modifications to the current model to more extensive changes that would
dramatically alter the status quo. This section also acknowledged that the type and degree of change
necessary might be differentiated across the enterprise, depending on the different missions and conditions
on the ground at individual institutions and within academic units. This section provides important insights
into future types of contractual relationships that faculty members may have with their institutions.

TABLE 3. STAKEHOLDER GROUPS’ VIEWS ON CONTRACTS

Including frequency of positive and negative responses on attractiveness for each group, in percentages

Tenure-Track

Accreditors

Governing
Part-Time
Full-Time

Provosts

SHEEOs
Faculty

Boards
CONTRACTS

Deans
NTTF

NTTF
.

Phasing out tenure in favor of multi-year, A 9% 45% 46% 51% 25% 52% 68% 57%
renewable contracts. U 86% 39% 43% 43% 67% 35% 21% 14%

Maintaining a tenure track, but modifying it by A 14% 40% 40% 40% 31% 48% 60% 57%
implementing term-tenure contracts eligible for
renewal every 10–15 years. U 74% 40% 41% 48% 54% 17% 35% 29%

Adding teaching-only tenure positions to the A 45% 77% 67% 46% 57% 74% 50% 57%
faculty. U 37% 12% 18% 31% 30% 9% 25% 29%

Maintaining a faculty model that closely A 58% 33% 38% 53% 66% 52% 32% 14%
resembles the current system of tenure-track,
full-time non–tenure-track, and part-time faculty,
but with some modifications. U 16% 37% 42% 20% 10% 13% 42% 57%

Increasing the utilization of full-time non–tenure- A 63% 77% 67% 70% 86% 70% 79% 83%
track appointments to reduce reliance on part-
time positions. U 21% 13% 22% 17% 7% 13% 15% 14%

Creating consortium agreements among local A 59% 62% 73% 50% 51% 70% 50% 71%
institutions to develop shared, full-time faculty
positions. U 26% 24% 17% 28% 26% 9% 20% 14%

Revising incentives and rewards structures and A 61% 64% 58% 65% 74% 91% 65% 86%
policies to better reflect different institutional
priorities. U 15% 10% 16% 12% 11% 4% 20% 14%

A Attractive
U Unattractive

NOTE: Values that are bolded and underlined indicate that more respondents in the corresponding stakeholder group viewed the potential
attribute of future faculty models as feasible, rather than infeasible.

The Professoriate Reconsidered 13

 Areas of Agreement on Contracts

Incentive and Reward Structures

Unified agreement and moderate interest was found among all stakeholder groups in revising incentives
and reward structures and policies to better reflect different institutional priorities. Stakeholders agree
that teaching institutions, for example, should provide salary increases based on teaching excellence. The
idea that incentives and rewards structures should be revised was reflected in the following quote:

“Valuing all areas with incentives and rewards is important to the overall structure if we
wish to engage individuals in their overall strengths.”
—Comment from a Governing Board member

Institutional Consortia
There was also unified agreement and moderate interest among stakeholder groups that consortium
agreements were an approach that should be considered. Consortium agreements allow neighboring
institutions to develop arrangements to create shared, full-time faculty positions for individuals who would
otherwise be hired by multiple institutions in the consortium individually and often on part-time contracts. 2

Full-Time Non–Tenure-Track and Teaching-Only Tenure-Track Positions

There was agreement among most stakeholder groups on creating more full-time non–tenure-track
positions to reduce reliance on part-time positions, although the levels of interest were mixed across groups.
Additionally, there was agreement among most stakeholder groups and moderate interest in adding
teaching-only tenured positions to the faculty.

Note that the teaching-only tenure-track concept presented here was different from an item in the earlier
section that called for teaching to be the primary focus for a majority of the faculty. In contrast, the contracts
proposal discussed here suggests making teaching-focused tenure-track positions an option, one type of
faculty position among several position types. It is important to note that tenure-track faculty and provosts
found this proposal somewhat less attractive than other groups. Other proposals including teaching-only
tenure positions have been circulated in recent years (Bérubé and Ruth, 2015); the findings here suggest that
it would be a worthwhile endeavor to explore these options and further develop this idea.

2An example of an existing consortium agreement is the Five Colleges Consortium in Massachusetts. Information about the Five Colleges
Consortium can be found at http://www.fivecolleges.edu/.

14 The Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success

 Areas of Disagreement on Contracts

Maintaining the Status Quo Versus Phasing Out Tenure

Much of the current discussion about future faculty models focuses on a choice between two contrasting
ideas: maintaining a model closely resembling the status quo or taking the more radical step of eliminating
tenure and replacing it with some alternative system, such as one built on multi-year contracts. We included
three questions that cut to the core of the debate between these different approaches, asking respondents to
evaluate the following three proposals:

On maintaining the status quo: Maintaining a faculty model that closely resembles the
current system of tenure-track, full-time non–tenure-track, and part-time faculty, but with
some modifications directed at resolving some of the current perceived challenges (e.g., less
focus on teaching than research or other faculty responsibilities and/or questions about job
security and academic freedom for non–tenure-track faculty).

On phasing out tenure: Phasing out tenure in favor of multi-year, renewable contracts
(typically shorter-term contracts during a probationary period, increasing to five years later
on) with clear protections for academic freedom, clearly defined grievance processes, and
clear expectations for faculty members’ contributions to teaching, research, and service.

On a middle option, keeping tenure, but moving toward renewable term-tenure

contracts: Maintaining a tenure track, but modifying existing arrangements by implementing
term-tenure contracts that would be eligible for renewal every 10–15 years.

To many groups, the idea of sticking with the current arrangements—even with some modifications—is
unattractive; these groups included full-time non–tenure-track faculty, part-time non–tenure-track faculty,
SHEEOs, and board members. However, although most full-time non–tenure-track and part-time faculty
respondents found the proposals to be unattractive, they were somewhat evenly divided on the question; 37
percent of full-time non–tenure-track faculty found the proposal unattractive as compared to 33 percent
attractive, and 42 percent of part-time faculty found the idea unattractive as compared to 38 percent
attractive. The highest levels of responses against maintaining the status quo came from SHEEOs. For non–
tenure-track faculty, specifically, the status quo represents a system that has not worked particularly well
for them. If modifications could be made to resolve some of the current challenges with the arrangements,
the idea might be viewed more favorably. Still, there is some apparent unease about sticking with a system
that many view as broken.

Proposals that involve eliminating tenure are just as unattractive—if not more so—to other groups, notably
tenure-track faculty and deans. Perhaps not surprisingly, tenure-track faculty expressed the strongest
opinions that phasing out tenure in favor of multi-year, renewable contracts was unattractive. Accreditors,
board members, and SHEEOs were the most interested in the idea of phasing out tenure, whereas provosts
and non–tenure-track faculty—both full-time and part-time—were more evenly split on the issue.

On the third proposal, regarding term-tenure contracts, stakeholder groups were mostly divided between
internal institutional stakeholders and external policymakers: faculty groups, deans, and provosts found the
idea unattractive, whereas accreditors, board members, and SHEEOs found it attractive.

The Professoriate Reconsidered 15

Stakeholders’ Perspectives: Unbundling of Faculty Roles
he unbundling of faculty roles is a phenomenon that has been unfolding since the inception of

T American higher education. Generically, unbundling is the differentiation of tasks and services that
were once offered by a single provider or individual (“bundled”) and their subsequent distribution
among multiple providers and individuals (Smith, 2008). The third section of the survey contained a
number of potential attributes of future faculty models that involved professional and instructional
unbundling, thus breaking the triad of research, teaching, and service. Instructional unbundling refers to
separating the different roles involved with teaching into course design, delivery, assessment, and advising
(Paulson, 2002; Smith, 2008, 2010). Many experts on faculty issues believe that the unbundling of faculty
roles is a trend that is likely to continue; in light of this, it is important to understand some of the ways that
unbundling will affect faculty roles in the years to come (Kezar, Gehrke, & Maxey, 2014).

TABLE 4. STAKEHOLDER GROUPS’ VIEWS ON THE UNBUNDLING OF FACULTY ROLES

Including frequency of positive and negative responses on attractiveness for each group, in percentages

Tenure-Track
UNBUNDLING OF FACULTY ROLES

Accreditors

Governing
Part-Time
.

Full-Time

Provosts

SHEEOs
Faculty

Boards
Deans
NTTF

NTTF
Expanding the number of positions that are A 36% 60% 59% 42% 43% 70% 50% 86%
focused more exclusively on teaching, research,
or service. U 42% 19% 19% 32% 37% 13% 15% 14%

Increasing the use of technology and A 40% 48% 42% 78% 77% 87% 100% 86%
instructional software to give faculty members
opportunities to use in-person class time to
engage students. U 33% 28% 31% 6% 5% 4% 0% 0%

Making greater use of educational professionals A 39% 42% 41% 63% 61% 70% 65% 71%
whose roles complement the knowledge and
skills of traditional faculty members. U 38% 29% 40% 19% 23% 9% 10% 0%

Unbundling the instructional role to focus faculty A 23% 30% 32% 38% 35% 61% 42% 71%
members’ attention on the most essential tasks,
such as curriculum development, course design,
and outcomes assessment. U 55% 47% 43% 40% 44% 13% 21% 0%

A Attractive
U Unattractive

NOTE: Values that are bolded and underlined indicate that more respondents in the corresponding stakeholder group viewed the potential
attribute of future faculty models as feasible, rather than infeasible.

Areas of Agreement on the Unbundling of Faculty Roles

While the survey responses revealed several key points of agreement on possible changes to faculty
pathways and to contracts, reactions were generally more mixed on the question of unbundling faculty roles.
Stakeholder groups’ responses to each item in the section failed to meet our thresholds for determining
agreement on the attractiveness—or even unattractiveness—of the proposals. Among these contested
questions, the survey item with the most agreement among groups was the proposal to expand the number
of positions that focus more exclusively on one of teaching, research, or service, rather than retaining the
emphasis on all three roles within most faculty positions. This proposal reflects a trend that has already been

16 The Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success

occurring over the last 30 to 40 years. It is possible that interest in this proposal is a reflection of
stakeholders’ familiarity with this ongoing trend. This aligns with the data in the faculty pathways and
contracts sections, as well, demonstrating that some increased differentiation among faculty roles is
attractive to most stakeholders.

Areas of Disagreement on the Unbundling of Faculty Roles

Unbundling Instructional Tasks

The greatest area of disagreement emerged from responses to the last proposal in the section: unbundling
the teaching role into many discrete responsibilities. In comparison with the other proposals in this section—
(1) split faculty roles according to traditional areas of responsibility (teaching, research, and service), or
introduce (2) technology or (3) paraprofessionals to support student instruction—the fourth proposal
entails more dramatic unbundling of the instructional role by only involving faculty members in the most
essential tasks, such as curriculum development, course design, and outcomes assessment. Respondents
from the accreditation community and SHEEOs supported unbundling the instructional role in this way, and
their support for this proposal was mirrored in their interest in taking care of other instructional activities
through some combination of technology and additional educational professionals. However, these
stakeholder groups’ responses on this fourth proposal contrast with the views expressed by all faculty
groups, provosts, and deans. (The other stakeholder group, board members, was more divided internally on
this issue.) Although there was some mixed interest in the first three proposals, this final survey item found
only weak interest among these key groups. The responses suggest a concern that unbundling the faculty
role in instruction can lead to faculty members losing meaningful involvement in work related to one core
institutional mission: teaching.

Some specific perspectives about unbundling appeared in the open-ended responses to this section, which
highlight some of the concerns associated with these areas of disagreement:

“This ‘unbundling’ concept is troubling. These tasks are the faculty role.”
—Comment from a Tenured/Tenure-Track Faculty Member

“The danger in unbundling faculty roles is that some roles are perceived by
administrators as less valuable and the professors in those roles will be
deemed less valuable as a result.”
—Comment from a Tenured/Tenure-Track Faculty Member

“I think unbundling is a terrible idea. The experience of teaching real

students in the classroom is necessary for knowing how to design a course,
a curriculum, and know what standards to use for assessment.”
—Comment from a Full-Time Non–Tenure-Track Faculty Member

These quotes indicate faculty concerns that the various instructional tasks of faculty are too
intertwined to be unbundled in this way, and also that such unbundling would lead to an increasing
undervaluing and de-professionalizing of the faculty role.

The Professoriate Reconsidered 17

Technology and Educational Support Professionals
Although all items in this section failed to meet our threshold for determining agreement across groups,
several proposals came close. Due to the patterns in the responses, however, we interpreted these results
as areas of disagreement rather than of outright agreement. The second proposal, to increase the use of
technology for content delivery in order to free up class time for in-person student engagement, was met
with strong interest among all groups except for the faculty. Faculty registered some interest on this item,
but in far lower proportions than other stakeholders. A similar split can be seen in the responses to the
third proposal, to complement traditional faculty with other educational professionals to improve content
delivery and instruction. Faculty members responded to this idea with far less interest than was expressed
by other stakeholders, and tenure-track and part-time faculty responses were particularly evenly split
between finding this attractive and unattractive.

It is important to note that we have examined the issue of unbundling the faculty role in earlier research
(Gehrke & Kezar, 2015; Kezar, Gehrke, & Maxey, 2014), and we discovered that very little research exists
on the efficacy of unbundling; rather, most existing research points to potential problems. We suspect some
of the disagreement among stakeholders in this section of the survey reflects the legacy of unbundling
efforts that have taken place with minimal consideration of impact, as well as a general lack of knowledge
about how role changes can reshape faculty work in ways that may or may not serve student learning.

18 The Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success

Stakeholders’ Perspectives: Status in the Academic Community
his section examined stakeholders’ views on various proposals related to equity for all faculty

T members, as well as issues of status within the academic community. We wondered about
stakeholders’ views on the increasing disparities in pay, benefits, job security, and status between
different types of faculty members that have developed over the last several decades. In addition to
questions about basic tenets of professional equity, such as access to compensation, information, and the
tools necessary to perform one’s job, we asked about issues such as academic freedom and shared
governance. These issues have historically been core elements of the faculty role and central to academic
professionalism; however, recent evidence suggests rising inequality in these areas for contemporary faculty
members (Kezar & Sam, 2010). Are higher education stakeholders interested in changing these
circumstances through intentional planning of future faculty models?

TABLE 5. STAKEHOLDER GROUPS’ VIEWS ON STATUS IN THE ACADEMIC COMMUNITY

Including frequency of positive and negative responses on attractiveness for each group, in percentages

Tenure-Track

Accreditors

Governing
Part-Time
Full-Time

Provosts

SHEEOs
Faculty

Boards
STATUS IN THE ACADEMIC COMMUNITY

Deans
NTTF

NTTF
.

Ensuring that all faculty members have the same A 92% 96% 95% 95% 90% 96% 100% 86%
rights and protections with regard to academic
freedom. U 3% 1% 3% 2% 1% 0% 0% 0%

Providing all faculty members equitable A 87% 94% 97% 80% 88% 91% 80% 86%
compensation for performing the same duties,
as well as access to benefits. U 6% 0% 2% 10% 8% 5% 20% 0%

Permitting all faculty members to be involved in A 72% 92% 93% 67% 69% 91% 75% 57%
shared governance and decision making that
affects their work. U 16% 5% 2% 16% 15% 0% 10% 14%

Providing all faculty members access to all the A 96% 97% 98% 96% 99% 96% 90% 100%
information and tools needed to do their jobs.
U 2% 1% 2% 2% 0% 0% 0% 0%

A Attractive
U Unattractive

NOTE: Values that are bolded and underlined indicate that more respondents in the corresponding stakeholder group viewed the potential
attribute of future faculty models as feasible, rather than infeasible.

Areas of Agreement on Status in the Academic Community

Improving Status and Professionalism Across Ranks

Some of the highest levels of interest recorded for proposals presented in the survey, as well as the highest
levels of agreement across stakeholder groups, were found in response to survey items concerning the
improvement of status and professionalism across academic ranks. Stakeholder groups showed unified
agreement and strong interest in ensuring that all faculty members have the same protections for academic
freedom, equitable compensation for performing similar duties, and access to all the information and tools
needed to do their jobs. There was unified agreement across groups on the idea of permitting all faculty

The Professoriate Reconsidered 19

members to be involved in shared governance, although their levels of interest were mixed; the highest levels
of interest were seen among non–tenure-track faculty and accreditors.

Although the findings from this section might seem intuitive, the strong agreement about ensuring equitable
status across faculty ranks often does not reflect the current conditions experienced by non–tenure-track
faculty, particularly part-time or adjunct faculty, on campuses and in departments. It is possible that some
participants responded to this section of the survey with what they believed to be the most socially desirable
responses. However, a more complete picture emerges when these responses are considered alongside the
strong levels of interest throughout the survey in proposals to revise or redesign parts of the current
arrangements that have perpetuated inequity and status differentiations. In the context of these findings, it
is reasonable to conclude that these responses reflect a genuine concern about the growing reliance of higher
education on a system of contingent labor that has implications for institutions, for the ability of faculty to
do their jobs, and for the future of academic professionalism.

20 The Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success

Stakeholders’ Perspectives: Faculty Development, Promotion, and
Evaluation

W e wondered about stakeholders’ views about whether faculty members, like professionals in
other fields, should have access to and continuously engage in opportunities to learn in order to
remain contemporary in their research fields and in their teaching practices. How attractive is it
for faculty members to continue to hone their craft to keep up with new discoveries and forms of
knowledge, with an increasingly diverse student body, with the constant emergence of new technologies,
and with changing expectations in academia as a whole? Promoting professional growth for faculty members
at colleges and universities allows them to remain current in the knowledge of their fields, to engage with
other scholars, and to be productive in their own work by exposing them to new research methods,
pedagogies, practices, and strategies for improving teaching and learning in their courses. The fifth section
of the survey explored stakeholders’ views about the provision of professional development and possible
ways that evaluation and promotions might be incorporated into faculty work.

TABLE 6. STAKEHOLDER GROUPS’ VIEWS ON FACULTY DEVELOPMENT,

PROMOTION, AND EVALUATION
Including frequency of positive and negative responses on attractiveness for each group, in percentages
Tenure-Track

Accreditors

Governing
Part-Time
Full-Time

Provosts

SHEEOs
FACULTY DEVELOPMENT, PROMOTION, AND
Faculty

Boards
Deans
EVALUATION
NTTF

NTTF
.

Providing all faculty members with opportunities A 86% 96% 97% 75% 92% 95% 70% 71%
for promotion. U 5% 2% 2% 7% 4% 5% 10% 14%

Clearly defining expectations and evaluation A 96% 94% 95% 97% 97% 100% 100% 100%
criteria for all faculty members.
U 2% 1% 3% 0% 0% 0% 0% 0%

Ensuring that all faculty members receive clear A 98% 96% 96% 98% 96% 96% 100% 100%
terms for notification of renewal or termination,
as well as grievance processes. U 1% 1% 1% 1% 1% 0% 0% 0%

Continuously engaging all faculty members in A 90% 93% 92% 94% 100% 96% 85% 100%
development opportunities that help them
maintain knowledge, learn about and practice
using pedagogies and high-impact practices,
and utilize learning outcomes assessment.
U 3% 0% 3% 2% 0% 0% 5% 0%

Including participation in periodic professional A 54% 67% 68% 81% 81% 82% 70% 71%
development as a requirement.
U 26% 15% 19% 7% 13% 5% 5% 0%

Creating a more rigorous process and A 51% 61% 53% 83% 76% 86% 95% 86%
expectations for regularly scheduled evaluation.
U 26% 13% 15% 7% 14% 5% 0% 0%

A Attractive
U Unattractive

NOTE: Values that are bolded and underlined indicate that more respondents in the corresponding stakeholder group viewed the potential
attribute of future faculty models as feasible, rather than infeasible.

The Professoriate Reconsidered 21

 Areas of Agreement on Faculty Development, Promotion, and Evaluation

Similar to the questions on status in the academic community, the questions on faculty development,
promotion, and evaluation produced high levels of agreement—with stakeholder groups unified in their
interest in the proposals presented.

Clarifying Faculty Expectations, Criteria for Evaluation, and Contract Renewal

Some of the highest levels of agreement and interest across the stakeholder groups were expressed in
response to proposals that would seek to clarify expectations of faculty members and terms for contract
renewal. Stakeholder groups demonstrated unified agreement and strong interest in clearly defining
expectations and evaluation criteria for all faculty members and ensuring that all faculty members receive
clear terms for notification of renewal or termination. Although there was strong interest and unified
agreement on clarifying expectations and evaluation criteria, interest in creating more rigorous processes
and expectations for regularly scheduled evaluations was more mixed, while still positive across stakeholder
groups. Respondents of all faculty ranks showed moderate interest in this proposal, while provosts, deans,
accreditors, governing board members, and SHEEOs demonstrated much stronger levels of interest.

Providing Opportunities for Promotion

There was also unified agreement that proposals providing all faculty members with opportunities for
promotion were attractive, with most groups showing strong levels of interest.

Providing Opportunities for Professional Growth and Development

There was unified agreement and strong interest across all stakeholder groups on the proposal that all
faculty members be continuously engaged in professional development opportunities in future faculty
models. There was also unified agreement that the proposal to include participation in periodic professional
development as a requirement for promotion and evaluation was attractive, although as one might imagine,
faculty found this proposal slightly less attractive than did other groups.

The findings in this section—the unified or strong levels of agreement on the attractiveness of the
proposals—suggest that these are issues that can and should be addressed in institutions’ ongoing work to
improve their faculty models. In fact, as our earlier research suggests, these are areas in which changes that
are not terribly difficult or costly to implement have the potential to yield substantial benefits for faculty
members, students, and the institution (Kezar & Maxey, 2013). Some of the Delphi Project’s examples and
practice case studies also show that institutions that have made investments to extend or improve
professional development, promotion, and evaluation opportunities for part-time faculty members have
quickly realized the benefits and put additional effort into making additional changes in other areas of faculty
practice. This may be a natural starting point for many institutions to begin making changes that will help to
improve faculty work immediately, while also creating a foundation of support for the consideration and
pursuit of additional changes in other areas as they move forward.

22 The Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success

Stakeholders’ Perspectives: Flexibility

G appa, Austin, and Trice define flexibility as “the ability of faculty members to construct work
arrangements to maximize their contributions to their institutions as well as the meaningfulness of
their work and personal lives” (2007, p. 141). Traditional tenure track faculty careers have been
designed in a very linear fashion with only one career track available; tenure-track faculty members
typically proceed through seven years to tenure and then have opportunities for promotions at standardized
intervals. Additionally, full-time faculty work typically translates into 50 or more hours per week (AAUP,
1998; NCES, 2005). Individuals often need—and desire—more flexible arrangements to meet their various
personal and professional responsibilities, particularly to seek greater work–life balance or to respond to life
challenges that demand their attention. Research on female faculty demonstrates that a lack of such flexible,
family-friendly policies may be one of the factors related to the higher turnover and greater attrition of
women faculty that institutions are striving to recruit and keep (Johnsrud & Heck, 1994; Zhou & Volkwein,
2004; Xu, 2008). More flexible options would enable faculty members to attend to various personal
responsibilities and life circumstances, while reducing their stress levels so that they are more capable of
performing at their highest level while at work. When individuals are stressed, their productivity and
commitment to their institutions may decline. Thus, offering flexibility allows faculty members to meet
personal and professional obligations, while also benefiting the mission and operations of the institution.
However, flexibility can be difficult for institutions to implement and costly to employers. We included a
section on flexibility in this study to gauge how stakeholders’ perceived strategies that could address these
issues in new faculty models.

TABLE 7. STAKEHOLDER GROUPS’ VIEWS ON FLEXIBILITY

Including frequency of positive and negative responses on attractiveness for each group, in percentages
Tenure-Track

Accreditors

Governing
Part-Time
Full-Time

Provosts

SHEEOs
Faculty

Boards
FLEXIBILITY
Deans
NTTF

NTTF

Creating greater employment flexibility for full- A 85% 82% 76% 74% 83% 77% 74% 100%
time, tenure-track faculty members by stopping
the tenure clock or allowing them to move to
part-time appointments temporarily, as needed. U 4% 7% 10% 12% 3% 5% 11% 0%

Lengthening probationary periods for more A 48% 55% 44% 44% 40% 36% 42% 33%
traditional tenure-eligible faculty. U 26% 13% 18% 33% 24% 27% 32% 50%

Creating greater flexibility for faculty to address A 73% 73% 73% 62% 81% 50% 42% 71%
personal needs on campus. U 8% 8% 9% 17% 10% 18% 32% 14%

A Attractive
U Unattractive

NOTE: Values that are bolded and underlined indicate that more respondents in the corresponding stakeholder group viewed the potential
attribute of future faculty models as feasible, rather than infeasible.

The Professoriate Reconsidered 23

 Areas of Agreement on Flexibility

Creating Greater Flexibility for Work–Life Balance

There was unified agreement and strong interest among stakeholder groups on the attractiveness of granting
greater flexibility for tenure-track faculty members, such as by allowing them to stop the tenure clock or to
move to part-time appointments to care for children and family or to attend to other sorts of situations that
may arise. There was also strong agreement and strong interest across groups in creating greater flexibility
for faculty members to address personal needs on campus by offering access to a variety of services such as
child care, dry cleaners, or meal plans.

Creating Options for Flexible Timelines, but Not Lengthening for All
There were varied, but still positive levels of interest in a proposal to lengthen probationary periods for
tenure-eligible faculty. We decided to point this item out in order to differentiate it from the earlier proposal
to provide flexible contract timelines. Although more respondents from each group indicated that they
thought this proposal was attractive rather than unattractive, only full-time, non–tenure-track faculty
members showed a level of interest above 50 percent. These views, when compared to views on the earlier
proposal to create greater flexibility including the ability to stop the tenure clock, suggest that stakeholders
are open to creating options that can lengthen the probationary period, but do not believe that such a change
needs to be made across the board for all tenure-eligible faculty. Rather, such decisions should be made on a
case-by-case basis.

24 The Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success

Stakeholders’ Perspectives: Collaboration and Community
Engagement
igher education institutions have the capacity to make improvements to teaching and research, to

H enrich the quality of life for individuals, and to contribute to economic vitality in their regions by
creating opportunities for greater interdisciplinary collaboration and greater engagement and
partnership with external communities, nonprofits, government, or businesses. Some institutions
have already designed faculty models and roles that emphasize and encourage greater interdisciplinarity
and other forms of collaboration across traditional disciplinary boundaries. Such arrangements can
contribute to greater collegiality and community among faculty; the feeling of isolation that faculty members
on many campuses experience can be overcome as faculty members work together and relate to one another
as specialists, educators, and collaborators (National Institute of Education, 1984; Smith, 1988). Many other
institutions have explored ways to be more engaged in work that helps to solve community problems or to
promote regional and local economic development. This section of the survey sought to explore stakeholders’
views about a few key proposals about the nature of cross-campus collaboration, interdisciplinary work, and
engagement with external communities and groups, and how these ideas should be incorporated into faculty
work and roles.

TABLE 8. STAKEHOLDER GROUPS’ VIEWS ON COLLABORATION AND

COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT
Including frequency of positive and negative responses on attractiveness for each group, in percentages
Tenure-Track

Accreditors

Governing
Part-Time
Full-Time

Provosts

SHEEOs
COLLABORATION AND COMMUNITY
Faculty

Boards
Deans
ENGAGEMENT
NTTF

NTTF

Encouraging and facilitating greater A 85% 83% 84% 90% 96% 86% 84% 100%
opportunities for faculty members to collaborate
with one another and across disciplines. U 4% 5% 4% 2% 0% 5% 0% 0%

Fostering greater connections between faculty A 73% 76% 74% 88% 83% 82% 84% 57%
members and the communities served by
institutions. U 9% 6% 6% 3% 1% 0% 5% 0%

Creating new partnerships with industry, A 63% 64% 64% 89% 87% 82% 95% 100%
business, corporations, nonprofits, and
government agencies. U 15% 16% 14% 2% 0% 5% 0% 0%

A Attractive
U Unattractive

NOTE: Values that are bolded and underlined indicate that more respondents in the corresponding stakeholder group viewed the potential
attribute of future faculty models as feasible, rather than infeasible.

The Professoriate Reconsidered 25

 Areas of Agreement on Collaboration and Community Engagement

All stakeholder groups were unified in their agreement that encouraging interdisciplinary collaboration,
fostering connections between faculty members and the community, and creating new partnerships with
industry, business, nonprofits, and government were attractive ideas to incorporate into future faculty
models. As we pointed out in the introduction to this section, this may be a reflection of the fact that many
institutions have already begun to pursue and implement policies and practices to institutionalize these sorts
of ideas.

Strongest Support for Interdisciplinary Collaboration

Unified agreement and the strongest levels of interest across groups were found in response to the survey
item on interdisciplinary collaboration, which called for encouraging and facilitating greater opportunities
for faculty members to collaborate with one another and across disciplines through team-teaching
arrangements, interdisciplinary research centers, and/or cross-college appointments.

Less Certainty About Creating and Managing External Partnerships

Stakeholders were unified in their agreement but showed mixed levels of interest in the proposal to foster
greater connections between faculty members and their communities by encouraging and rewarding
community engagement work conducted through arrangements such as service-learning partnerships,
participatory research, and volunteer service. As compared to other stakeholders, fewer faculty respondents
expressed interest in creating new partnerships with industry, business, corporations, nonprofits, and
government agencies to facilitate experiential learning opportunities and to connect faculty work to current
practices and changes in the professions and applied fields. Comments indicated that faculty members may
have had concerns about the implications for their academic freedom when partnering with private
companies, as well as the additional commitments and demands on their already limited time.

“I would caution public universities re: partnerships with industry and

corporations and government agencies, NGOs, etc., that do not protect
academic freedom.”
—Comment from a Tenured/Tenure-Track Faculty Member

“All of these types of partnerships could be great, but it needs to be recognized

that creating these kinds of partnerships is itself time consuming.”
—Comment from a Tenured/Tenure-Track Faculty Member

“Good grief, as if faculty don’t have enough to do already without adding the
pressure to engage an often reluctant community. Enough already! For god’s
sake, let us teach.”
—Comment from a Part-Time Non–Tenure-Track Faculty Member

26 The Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success

Stakeholders’ Perspectives: Faculty Roles and the Public Good
igher education is intended to benefit the public good, not just the students who pay to enroll in

H courses. The collective work of colleges and universities—of their faculties—supports the public’s
welfare and vitality in many ways, such as by fostering democratic engagement, by ensuring college
access through partnership with K–12, through research that benefits society, by offering public
critique of social policies, or through capably filling positions of leadership on community boards. In light of
this, many believe that a fundamental characteristic of a future faculty model is to ensure the continued
commitment to providing services or benefits to the greater public. This section sought to explore ways that
contributing to the public good might be formally incorporated into faculty work and roles and thereby
maintained as a commitment in the future.

TABLE 9. AREAS OF AGREEMENT ON FACULTY ROLES AND THE PUBLIC GOOD

Including frequency of positive and negative responses on attractiveness for each group, in percentages

Tenure-Track

Accreditors

Governing
Part-Time
Full-Time

Provosts

SHEEOs
Faculty

Boards
PUBLIC GOOD

Deans
NTTF

NTTF
.

Encouraging and rewarding faculty to engage in A 68% 70% 74% 59% 73% 64% 68% 43%
social critique and research on controversial
issues. U 10% 11% 5% 11% 6% 5% 0% 14%

Defining expectations for how faculty members A 48% 61% 61% 72% 69% 68% 84% 86%
will contribute to shaping the development of
citizenship among students. U 23% 15% 17% 7% 11% 5% 5% 0%

Encouraging faculty to support low-income and A 83% 78% 84% 89% 89% 81% 95% 100%
first-generation college students. U 5% 6% 6% 1% 1% 10% 0% 0%

Encouraging faculty to conduct research that is A 52% 52% 59% 48% 51% 55% 61% 29%
available to the public (limiting research
that restricts open access). U 18% 16% 12% 11% 18% 23% 6% 0%

A Attractive
U Unattractive

NOTE: Values that are bolded and underlined indicate that more respondents in the corresponding stakeholder group viewed the potential
attribute of future faculty models as feasible, rather than infeasible.

Areas of Agreement on Faculty Roles and the Public Good

Supporting Low-Income Students

There was unified agreement and strong interest across all stakeholder groups that faculty should be
encouraged to support low-income and first-generation college students through undergraduate research,
mentoring, bridge programs, and first-year college experiences. There was also strong agreement and strong
levels of interest in defining expectations for how faculty members will contribute to shaping the
development of citizenship among students.

The Professoriate Reconsidered 27

Faculty Research Roles and the Public Good
There was also strong agreement and moderate interest in encouraging and rewarding faculty for playing
the role of social critics and doing research on controversial issues that are a part of the current public
discourse. We also found agreement among most stakeholder groups that it was a good idea to encourage
faculty to conduct research that is available to the public, steering them away from publications that require
payment or otherwise restrict access to scholarship. However, groups demonstrated lower levels of interest
in the latter. This could be a reflection of the dominance of more restricted platforms and the strong
pressures for faculty to publish in prestigious journals, which are less likely to be open access.

Educating Citizens
There was strong agreement across groups, but mixed levels of interest in defining expectations for how
faculty will contribute to the development of citizenship among students. Board members and SHEEOs
showed the most interest in this proposal; tenure-track faculty expressed the least amount of interest, and
they were the only group that responded below 50 percent in the affirmative. This reaction by faculty
members should not necessarily be interpreted as opposition among faculty to the idea of contributing to
the development of citizenship; rather, it could be interpreted as a discomfort with a proposal that may be
too prescriptive. Faculty members may be warier about allowing institutions to define precisely the scope
and content of such responsibilities to develop citizenship.

“What does ‘citizenship’ mean? I would be very wary of something that

vague and potentially arbitrary.”
—Comment from a Tenured/Tenure-Track Faculty Member

“The language of ‘citizenship’ is potentially troubling—though I do think

we work to help students become more thoughtful civic actors, what one
person considers a ‘good citizen’ may vary widely from the next.”
—Comment from a Tenured/Tenure-Track Faculty Member

28 The Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success

Gaps Between Attractiveness and Feasibility
“I'm starting to feel I’m just a pessimist, but I am definitely noticing a tendency on my part not to
feel that change is feasible. I’m thinking of feasibility largely in political terms (could the will to
achieve be found in the administration and faculty?).”
—Comment from a Tenured/Tenure-Track Faculty Member

W e have noted throughout this report that, contrary to prevailing expectations, stakeholder groups
generally agree on the attractiveness of many policies and practices related to new faculty
models. In addition to the attractiveness of such proposed changes, however, we also asked
respondents from each group to consider whether a particular proposed practice was feasible.
In the survey data, we found that there were practices that many stakeholder groups considered feasible,
especially proposals regarding professionalizing the faculty and faculty development, promotion, and
evaluation. For example, most groups agreed on both the attractiveness and feasibility of efforts to ensure
that all faculty members have access to the tools and information necessary to do their jobs, clearly defined
expectations and evaluation criteria, clear terms for contract renewal or termination, and processes for
addressing grievances and violations of academic freedom. In other words, most stakeholders surveyed
believe that these basic requirements of faculty working conditions are both necessary and feasible to
implement.

However, other areas of the survey revealed gaps between stakeholders’ levels of interest in a particular
statement and their perceptions of its feasibility of implementation. For the purpose of this report, we have
focused our attention on statements that had gaps of 25 or more percentage points across five or more
stakeholder groups. We include in these results a selection of open-ended responses from the survey to help
deepen our understanding of some of these gaps between perceptions of attractiveness and feasibility of
these considerations for new faculty models.

Feasibility of Changes to Faculty Pathways

Statements in the Faculty Pathways section elicited large gaps between attractiveness and feasibility
responses across multiple stakeholder groups.

Creativity Contracts
First, there were large gaps between support and feasibility of creativity contracts across seven of the eight
stakeholder groups. Open-ended comments suggest that stakeholders perceive that the complexities
inherent in this policy would make it difficult to implement and manage:

“For small liberal arts colleges like mine, the options that require specialization of roles
and those that require frequent renegotiation would present both logistical and political
problems.”
—Comment from a Provost

“Individual faculty pathways (question 1) strikes me as ideal, though negotiating these

would be incredibly time consuming and would exacerbate and encourage the bloat of
middle administration.”
—Comment from a Tenured/Tenure-Track Faculty Member

The Professoriate Reconsidered 29

These stakeholder comments and others point to concerns about complicated logistics, bureaucratic and
political hurdles, and the potential for administrative bloat as a result of implementing creativity contracts.

Boyer’s Model
The Boyer model, while supported at fairly high levels across all stakeholder groups, also had large gaps
between support and feasibility across five stakeholder groups, and slightly smaller gaps across the other
three groups. While a few comments suggest that Boyer’s model has been implemented at some institutions,
other comments reveal a concern for the complexity of this model that is similar to the response to creativity
contracts. Both faculty and administrators struggled to conceive of how it could be implemented effectively
across large and bureaucratic universities, with some noting first-hand experience with the complexities of
putting the Boyer model into practice:

“Unfortunately the Boyer model is incredibly hard to operationalize and can easily
become an ‘anything goes’ approach.”
—Comment from a Dean

“My previous institution (a Carnegie Doctoral Extensive campus) implemented a version

of the Boyer model. Despite the good will and efforts on the part of faculty and
administration, the results were mixed at best. It is not simply a matter of administrators
wanting to count beans; faculty were a large part of the problem too.”
—Comment from a Tenured/Tenure-Track Faculty Member

“We have tried the Boyer model at my institution, and it’s very hard to institute in any
meaningful way.”
—Comment from a Tenured/Tenure-Track Faculty Member

While we highlight here that creativity contracts and implementation of the Boyer model were
noted by many or our respondents as bureaucratically challenging, there is also research that
demonstrates that many campuses have successfully implemented these models (Braxton et. al.,
2002).

Feasibility of Changes to Contracts

Consortium Agreements
Though there was unified agreement among stakeholder groups that consortium agreements were an
attractive approach, every stakeholder group except governing board members believed that this option was
likely not feasible. Participants indicated a variety of reasons for their concerns about the feasibility of such
arrangements in their open-ended responses, ranging from the difficulties of collaborating with potential
competitors, to navigating different institutional cultures, to geographical isolation:

“The competitive nature of our higher education climate makes partnering with other
universities difficult. When we have done this in the past in two graduate programs, the results
were so negative that we dissolved the agreements, with all parties happy to do so.”
—Comment from a Provost

30 The Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success

 “Consortia would be difficult to negotiate given the different academic cultures on each campus,
unless you are working within an existing system.”
—Comment from a Tenured/Tenure-Track Faculty Member

“…[C]onsortium agreements might work in big-city schools, but my school is isolated, so this
strikes me as quite unfeasible. We don’t have enough nearby institutions to make this work, in my
view.”
—Comment from a Tenured/Tenure-Track Faculty Member

It may be that consortium agreements will become both more attractive and more feasible in coming years
due to financial challenges and new technologies that make these arrangements logistically easier. We
believe that, while leaders see consortia as complex, they are increasingly important structures that are likely
to play a large role in the future higher education landscape.

Phasing Out Tenure

Interestingly, while two of eight stakeholder groups demonstrated large gaps between support and
feasibility of phasing out tenure for multi-year contracts—and five of the groups demonstrated smaller gaps
(10–24 percentage points)—tenured and tenure-track faculty members actually showed a “reverse gap”
between their perceptions of attractiveness and feasibility of this proposal. In other words, more faculty
perceived this option as feasible than as attractive. Comments indicate that while the vast majority of this
group vehemently opposes phasing out tenure, approximately one quarter of them believe that tenure will
be eliminated anyway:

“I don’t really have much hope for the survival of tenure, but I do hope that whatever eventually
replaces it is more like [multi-year renewable contracts] than what we currently have.”

“I fear the loss of tenure, though it is already happening.”

“Tenure is probably on its way out; faculty need to face up to this reality.”

“It does seem that the tenure system can’t last in its present structure. It is becoming less
economically feasible and intellectually viable.”

—All Comments from Tenured or Tenure-Track Faculty Members

Many believe that tenure is unlikely to be a part of the future of the academy. Because there has been little
or no effort to rethink tenure beyond post-tenure review, this outcome is certainly possible. While
meaningful modifications to tenure might make it a more attractive option moving forward, such proposals
have not been offered in the past decades. As noted in the introductory sections of this report, recent
proposals for teaching-focused tenure positions suggest an alternative that might gain support.

Maintaining the Status Quo

We also see several additional small “reverse gaps” around the idea of maintaining the status quo with some
modifications. All non–tenure-track faculty, board members, and SHEEOS perceived this option as more
feasible than attractive. While comments were less clear on why this reverse gap might have emerged, it
makes sense that these groups would believe that a slightly modified version of the status quo is feasible

The Professoriate Reconsidered 31

because of the relative ease of sticking with what is already in place, as compared to pursuing an option that
is dramatically different.

Feasibility of Changes Addressing Status in the Academic Community3

Academic Freedom 3
While all stakeholder groups felt that it was important to ensure that all faculty have the same rights and
protections under academic freedom, all three faculty groups, accreditors, and SHEEOs displayed large gaps
between support and perceived feasibility of this proposal. Comments indicate that stakeholders have
concerns about whether academic freedom can ever be truly protected for those faculty members who lack
tenure:

“Tenure is the essence of academic freedom; how does a contingent employee whose contract is
renewable semester by semester feel free to research and develop his/her own scholarship,
teaching style, and community involvement?”
—Comment from a Part-Time Non–Tenure-Track Faculty Member

“Tenure protects academic freedom. Any policy that weakens tenure weakens academic freedom.
Academic freedom strengthens teaching, scholarship, and democracy. Any policy that weakens
tenure weakens teaching, scholarship, and democracy. So my president and provost have to wait
a few years to fire me? That’s not tenure—that’s a travesty.”
—Comment from a Tenured/Tenure-Track Faculty Member

Equitable Compensation and Shared Governance for All Faculty

There were also large gaps across most stakeholder groups with regards to the feasibility of ensuring
equitable compensation for all faculty, as well as promoting involvement in shared governance and decision-
making for all faculty. Comments demonstrated concerns about pay equity and participation in shared
governance for NTTFs for several reasons, including departmental cultures, power differentials, budgetary
constraints, and the varying levels of investment that different types of faculty have within their institutions:

“I think it would be very difficult for smaller institutions to address equity and space issues for
all faculty regardless of type or rank, especially in the wake of the Great Recession.”
—Comment from a Dean

“Bringing adjuncts fully into faculty governance would be difficult at this time in light of our
faculty culture and the limitations of adjunct requirements for academic service. We do need to
explore ways to enable adjuncts to have a clear voice for their cohort.”
—Comment from a Provost

“Strangely it’s not always the administration but senior faculty members that prevent all faculty
from having an equal voice in regards to shared governance on the department level.”
—Comment from a Tenured/Tenure-Track Faculty Member

3 NOTE: There were no meaningful gaps between attractiveness and feasibility on proposals in the unbundling section; thus, we do not
discuss unbundling in this section.

32 The Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success

 Feasibility of Changes to Faculty Development, Promotion, and Evaluation

Stakeholder groups demonstrated feasibility gaps on two items in this section: providing promotion
opportunities for all faculty members and continuously engaging all faculty members in development
opportunities. Comments around feasibility indicated concern over budgetary constraints, confusion over
what promotion opportunities for adjuncts could look like, and general concern for additional exploitation
of NTTFs if professional development becomes yet another requirement:

“Some ideas—like providing same faculty development opportunities to all types of

faculty—will have significant budgetary implications.”
—Comment from a Provost

“Part-timer promotions? How does that work?”

—Comment from a Part-Time Non–Tenure-Track Faculty Member

“Non–tenure-track faculty are not required to do professional development or service

because of their excessive teaching loads—such additional requirements are seen as
exploitation here.”
—Comment from a Tenured/Tenure-Track Faculty Member

“Unless adjuncts enjoy steady, reasonably paid work, they won’t be willing to develop
themselves professionally. Rent comes first. More adjuncts will leave the profession if
more work or more rigorous evaluation methods do not come with better working
conditions.”
—Comment from a Part-Time Non–Tenure-Track Faculty Member

Feasibility of Changes Addressing Flexibility

More Flexibility for Tenure-Track Faculty

Stakeholders across all groups showed concerns about the feasibility of providing more flexibility for full-
time tenure-track faculty members, including stopping the tenure clock or moving to a part-time position
temporarily to handle personal needs. Comments indicate concerns about the logistical issues of managing
such a policy, as well as its financial implications:

“Faculty love flexibility, but it becomes a logistical nightmare the larger the organization
gets.”
—Comment from an Accreditor

“Flexibility may run into funding challenges.”

—Comment from a Dean

The Professoriate Reconsidered 33

Meeting Personal Needs on Campus
Additionally, all stakeholder groups except board members evidenced large gaps between attractiveness and
perceived feasibility of providing personal resources such as childcare on campus. Comments on this
proposal overwhelmingly pointed to budgetary constraints as the major reason for their opinions of its low
feasibility, especially at public institutions:

“Great ideas but the funding one is particularly critical because of reduced state
funding.”
—Comment from a Tenured/Tenure-Track Faculty Member

“At our public institution, it would be difficult to find the money for most of these things.
Great ideas, probably impossible to implement.”
—Comment from a Part-Time Non–Tenure-Track Faculty Member

Feasibility of Changes in Collaboration, Community Engagement, and the Public Good

While there was nearly universally strong agreement on the attractiveness of many proposals in these final
two sections, there were several feasibility gaps around encouraging faculty to engage in collaborative and
interdisciplinary work, community partnerships and service learning, social critique, and development of
citizenship among students. Comments indicated concerns about the time and money required to implement
community partnerships, lack of rewards for interdisciplinary or service-oriented work, and potential
infringements on academic freedom in terms of social critique and citizenship development:

“We do all of these. But the way we budget creates barriers to cross-discipline team
teaching. We support community engagement on an ad-hoc basis, but it is not rewarded
in tenure and promotion explicitly.”
—Comment from a Tenured/Tenure-Track Faculty Member

“Great ideas. However, are departments and administrators really able to properly
recognize such work in terms of tenure and promotion? I don’t believe so.”
—Comment from a Tenured/Tenure-Track Faculty Member

“If service learning or volunteer learning is promoted, the extra time to set these
learning situations up must be acknowledged and compensated. Off-site learning
experiences requires tons of hours of unpaid labor on the part of the professor. That’s
why many of us cannot do it.”
—Comment from a Tenured/Tenure-Track Faculty Member

“I have done service learning with my classes and participated in faculty learning
communities, so the opportunities are here, but the reward is not. There is absolutely no
validation for work in these areas, which is very time consuming.”
—Comment from a Full-Time Non–Tenure-Track Faculty Member

34 The Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success

 “Faculty members have to create partnerships, they cannot be forced into partnerships.
One cannot, all of a sudden, forget the unique role of faculty members in a college or
university.”
—Comment from a Dean

“…This all smells like restricting academic freedom, and that is not a good smell at all.
Open access, ‘citizenship,’ and ‘social critique’ are all very much context-dependent
goods, and capable of definition in ways that limit academic freedom.”
—Comment from a Tenured/Tenure-Track Faculty Member

Responding to Feasibility Concerns: Making New Faculty Models Viable

Open-ended comments from the survey provided some needed context to the gaps we found between
stakeholders’ support of proposals about new faculty models and their beliefs about the feasibility of
implementing these ideas. While there were a wide variety of opinions expressed in the comments,
stakeholders repeatedly indicated concerns about the complexities and logistical difficulties of implementing
changes to the faculty model, anticipating resistance from other campus stakeholders and budgetary
constraints. There will surely be logistical complexities that arise from any major changes to the faculty role.
However, we have already discussed reasons why budgetary constraints might be less salient than is widely
thought, and the results of this survey demonstrate that there might be less resistance to change and more
areas of agreement than many stakeholders realize. It appears that the bureaucratic complexity of new
faculty models is an issue that needs to be the subject of more research and visionary thinking among
academic leaders. Historically, campuses have dealt with similarly complex, paradigmatic challenges, so it
seems unsatisfactory to assume that a shift to more varied and differentiated faculty roles is unattainable.
Rather than abandon these efforts due to their perceived obstacles, we should prioritize further discussions
of new models to develop viable ways forward.

The Professoriate Reconsidered 35

A Closer Look at Faculty Members in Unions
“Collective bargaining agreements will constrain most public universities with unions,
making most of these options impossible.”
—Comment from a Dean

“…implementation of most of the issues presented in this study would require

renegotiating faculty union contracts. As you can tell from my responses, this is the
overriding issue in our ability to change faculty workloads (even if the majority of the
faculty agree with a suggested change).”
—Comment from a Dean

“Some goods or potential trends that will further alienate faculty. Most are impossible in
union environments.”
—Comment from a Provost

ecause unions have been characterized so regularly and fervently as a major obstacle to change (as

B reflected in the open-ended survey responses above), we decided that it would be particularly
important to compare the responses of faculty members in collective bargaining agreements to the
full sample of faculty members in our study. Our analysis found that union members’ perspectives
on proposals were not remarkably different from the views expressed by members of the faculty overall. In
this section, we present some of the differences that did emerge in our analysis, organized by faculty rank.
The differences are not vast and usually only constitute a difference of a few percentage points. An important
point to take away from this section is that, although the collective bargaining process might add a layer of
complexity to making decisions about faculty employment and contracts, the views of faculty members who
are in collective bargaining agreements are not distinctly different from those of their non-unionized peers.

Unionized Tenured and Tenure-Track Faculty

Tenured or tenure-track faculty members in collective bargaining units showed little, if any difference in
their responses on the attractiveness or feasibility of proposals in the survey, as compared to tenured and
tenure-track faculty overall (union and non-union combined). In those cases where differences were
exhibited, survey responses only showed a difference of a very few percentage points. The section on
unbundling of faculty roles was the one section of the survey in which a significant difference appeared to
correspond to the unionization trait. In that section, eight percent more of the unionized tenure-track faculty
group express interest in expanding the number of teaching-, research-, or service-only positions among the
faculty as compared to the tenure-track faculty average, and nine percent more unionized tenure-track
faculty find increasing use of technology to supplement instruction attractive. Additionally, about 5 percent
more union members find the use of paraprofessionals attractive. Thus, unionized faculty demonstrated
views that were more favorable of the attractiveness of new faculty models, as compared to the overall
averages for the tenured and tenure-track groups.

36 The Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success

 Unionized Full-Time Non–Tenure-Track Faculty

Full-time non–tenure-track faculty members in collective bargaining units were also highly similar in their
responses as compared to the full-time non–tenure-track faculty member responses overall. There were only
a few areas of pronounced difference. In the faculty pathways section, more union members express interest
in providing multiple pathways for long-term focus on teaching, research, or clinical practice (11 percent
more in the unionized group find this attractive), in creating different contracts and roles among different
institution types (14 percent more find this attractive), and in focusing a majority of faculty roles around
teaching and student development. An additional eight percent more of union members found phasing out
tenure attractive as compared to full-time non–tenure-track faculty members overall. Like their tenured and
tenure-track colleagues in collective bargaining units, these faculty were more interested in unbundling than
the full-time non–tenure-track average: 12 percent more unionized faculty found expanding exclusive
teaching-, research-, and service-only positions attractive, 17 percent more found increasing technology use
in instruction attractive, 10 percent more found making greater use of paraprofessionals attractive, and 12
percent more found it attractive to unbundle the faculty role to focus on essential tasks. 11 percent more of
this group also had interest in developing partnerships with external groups like government, nonprofits,
and business.
Part-time non–tenure-track faculty members in collective bargaining units were similar to the part-time
non–tenure-track faculty member average, overall. The main differences were in the contracts section. As

Unionized Part-Time Non–Tenure-Track Faculty

compared to their non-unionized peers, 13 percent fewer unionized part-time faculty found the idea of
phasing out tenure for multi-year contracts attractive and nearly 10 percent fewer showed interest in
implementing term tenure. An additional 10 percent of unionized part-time faculty found adding teaching-
only tenure positions attractive as compared to part-time faculty members overall, and 10 percent more
showed interest in maintaining the status quo. Nine percent fewer unionized faculty found consortium
agreements attractive than their non-unionized peers.

Union members responded most closely to faculty members overall across all ranks in their responses to
questions in the sections on status in the academic community and on faculty development, evaluation, and
promotion—often the differences were a single percentage point, give or take a fraction of a point.

The Professoriate Reconsidered 37

Faculty Professionalism:
Ideals and Realities, Rifts and Restoration
“Effective leadership is necessary for the kinds of ideas suggested here.”
—Comment from a Provost

A s we discussed in earlier sections, the findings from the survey showed unified agreement across all
participating stakeholder groups that a core set of issues related to status in the academic
community and faculty development, evaluation, and promotion are essential for the future of the
faculty. All stakeholder groups largely agreed that the following components should be a part of any future
model for all faculty, regardless of contract type or rank:

 Ensuring that all faculty members have the same rights and protections with regard
to academic freedom.

 Providing all faculty members equitable compensation for performing the same
duties, as well as access to benefits.

 Permitting all faculty members to be involved in shared governance and decision

making that affects their work (e.g., participation and voting in department faculty
meetings and faculty senates).

 Providing all faculty members access to all the information (e.g., clearly defined
policies and evaluation criteria) and tools (e.g., instructional resources, office space,
access to computers and copiers, ability to utilize support staff) needed for faculty
members to do their jobs.

 Providing all faculty members with opportunities for promotion.

 Clearly defining expectations and evaluation criteria for all faculty members so that
they can understand how their work is to be assessed.

 Ensuring that all faculty members receive clear terms for notification of renewal or
termination (e.g., information about processes and timelines), as well as processes
for addressing grievances related to termination and alleged violations of academic
freedom.

 Continuously engaging all faculty members in development opportunities—either

through institutional faculty development programming or funding to participate in
external conferences—that help them to maintain knowledge in their areas of
expertise, to learn about and practice using pedagogies and high-impact
instructional practices, and to utilize learning outcomes assessment.

 Including participation in periodic faculty professional development as a

requirement for promotion and evaluation.

 Creating a more rigorous process and expectations for regularly scheduled

evaluations of faculty performance, aligned to clear expectations for faculty work.

38 The Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success

Each of these items is directly related to the professional status of the faculty, so we can say that there was a
strong consensus among stakeholder groups around the general idea that the faculty role should be re-
professionalized. A desire for greater professionalization among the faculty was similarly reflected in
proposals that involved reducing higher education’s reliance on part-time faculty in favor of full-time
positions with greater status. For example, there was unified agreement among stakeholders that
institutions should increase the utilization of full-time non–tenure-track appointments to reduce reliance on
part-time positions. There was also agreement among most of the stakeholder groups that consortium
agreements, which would consolidate part-time positions across institutions into full-time positions, and
tenure-track teaching-only contracts should be considered.

Although there was unified agreement across stakeholder groups—and often strong interest—in the
proposals on status in the academic community and those on faculty development, evaluation, and
promotion, the changes that have occurred over the last several decades and continue to persist today have
resulted in outcomes very different from these proposals. Less than one third of faculty members across the
higher education sector are currently on the tenure track or hold tenured appointments (NCES, 2013); the
model of the traditional faculty member, once described as “the professional par excellence” (Parsons, 1968,
545) has become increasingly scarce. A bifurcated system of tenure-track and non–tenure-track or adjunct
faculty, each with different working conditions, roles, and experiences as members of our academic
communities, has emerged and divided the professoriate into more and less privileged groups. Only a small
subset of postsecondary educators—those who are tenured or on the tenure track—bear all the typical
characteristics of a profession (Sullivan, 2005). 4 Meanwhile, those who serve in non–tenure-track positions,
particularly adjuncts, routinely receive little compensation for their work, enjoy few meaningful protections
for academic freedom as a result of their term-to-term employment, have few opportunities for professional
development and evaluation to improve their work, may have no chance for promotion, are not permitted to
be involved in shared governance, and often even lack access to basic information and resources necessary
to do their jobs.

Many of the comments in the open-ended-response section address this disconnect between the ideal of
professionalism for all faculty and the current reality, which reflects a de-professionalization of the faculty.
Faculty members are concerned about what future changes to faculty roles might mean for them—they have
only ever known or witnessed the steady degradation of the academic profession. Undergirding their
comments is a distrust of proposals that come from their administrations, a distrust that has been fueled by
the historical trends that we outlined above. Recent examples, such as Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s
unilateral political move to change tenure, have been lightning rods for the issue of administrative overreach
into changing faculty roles without faculty input. Faculty members are open to new faculty models, but
remain cautious, skeptical, and sometimes even cynical that administrators will make choices that will
improve conditions, rather than continue to degrade them:

“These statements leave out the key question—who determines the new standards? At my
university there is far too much distrust of the faculty on [behalf of] the board and in the
upper administration to allow for significant faculty input in a renegotiation of
workload.”
—Comment from a Tenured/Tenure-Track Faculty Member

“The survey has presented lots of interesting possibilities for improving the
teaching/working environments in higher education. Unfortunately, administrators seem

4
Sullivan (2005) describes professions as characterized by three distinctive features: (1) specialized training in a field of codified
knowledge; (2) a measure of status accompanied by the autonomy necessary to independently determine and regulate standards of practice;
and (3) a commitment to support the public good and welfare.

The Professoriate Reconsidered 39

 more bent on maintaining the status quo for their own benefit than improving the quality
of their institutions. After 20 years as an adjunct, I look with dismay at the
corporatization of the universities, where profitability has displaced learning as their
defining purpose. It will not be easy to turn the ship around.”
—Comment from a Part-Time Non–Tenure-Track Faculty Member

“The number one thing to be addressed is the de-professionalization of faculty and the
growing number of working-poor, part-time faculty with no chance for promotion,
security, retirement and benefits and a faculty/administrative system that depends upon
their exploitation for their own benefit.”
—Comment from a Part-Time Non–Tenure-Track Faculty Member

“Again, the main issue isn’t our job duties or role, it’s the lack of respect we receive from
our institutions. We need adequate job security, livable wages, academic freedom, and
decision-making power within our universities.”
—Comment from a Full-Time Non–Tenure-Track Faculty Member

Some participants in the survey—and not only faculty—even cynically doubted whether administrators’
responses supporting proposals for change genuinely reflected those administrators’ views, suggesting that
such sentiments were merely rhetoric without the backing of a commitment to actually doing anything
differently:

“Institutional administrators pay ‘lip service’ to many of these concepts. I am not

confident they could be implemented although they would be beneficial to faculty
members.”
—Comment from an Accreditor

Faculty will have to do their part to build trust, too. Administrators and even faculty themselves regularly
cited faculty intransigence as an obstacle:

“It is difficult to imagine privileged faculty members giving up that privilege, whatever it
is.”
—Comment from a Dean

“I think that my employment group, the TTF, are likely the source of resistance to new models. I
support such models myself and believe they are inevitable, but I also respect the anxiety that
TTF feel in regard to greatly changing traditional faculty roles.”
—Comment from a Tenured/Tenure-Track Faculty Member

Despite the challenges and mistrust that have been so pervasive in contributing to the degradation of the
faculty, the results of this study give us ample hope for collaboration and shared decision-making in the
future. If all stakeholder groups can bring the same openness about changes in faculty work and roles to
future discussions that they brought to this survey, there is a possibility that they can create something truly
remarkable—and effective—together. Part of that work will entail restoring the professional status of the
faculty. Certainly, the unique privileges that accompanied traditional tenured roles in the past may not be

40 The Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success

possible in the future, but the degradation of faculty roles that has occurred is something that we must seek
to repair in order to move forward. This is a situation that all groups agree is problematic.

Given the overwhelming agreement among stakeholders that the professionalism of faculty should be
restored in a future faculty model, this should be a primary topic of discussion as leaders in all stakeholder
groups begin to chart a course forward, to design future faculty models, and to implement and administer
them fairly. First, however, it is important to engage in meaningful dialogue about why our current practices
fall so short of what we believe should be the role and impact of institutions of higher learning. We recognize
that the easiest route may be to see ourselves as powerless, labeling this gap as the result of financial
challenges or of a lack of trust and cooperation among stakeholder groups. Yet, we think greater discussion
and exploration of this issue across groups is needed, and that such deliberation and the implementation of
real models could produce an impact that addresses the many shared interests of faculty, administrators,
and others whose efforts make higher education possible.

The Professoriate Reconsidered 41

Conclusion

O verall, the results from this survey demonstrated greater-than-anticipated agreement on the
attractiveness of many proposals for the future of the faculty among higher education stakeholders.
Virtually every section of the survey included items around which there were interest and
agreement across multiple stakeholder groups. These findings are heartening to us as we consider
the crossroads at which our academic community finds itself today. In recent years, there has been growing
awareness that our current faculty arrangements and policies may not be serving the Academy and the
missions of our institutions well, and that it may well be time for a discussion across the enterprise about
how we might change. As stakeholders across institutions navigate the path forward, they will need to
consider the sorts of questions at the core of this research and its findings: What are the types of faculty
positions that are needed? How will the roles of faculty members be structured and organized in order to
best serve our students, our institutions’ missions, and the rapidly evolving expectations of our society? What
steps will we take to ensure that clearly demonstrated values relating to academic professionalism are
enshrined in faculty positions, regardless of faculty rank or the focus of one’s work, restoring our ideals and
strengthening the faculty to meet the current and future needs of the higher education enterprise?

This report points to many areas of agreement that can serve as starting points for discussions, lending points
of consensus to move from idea to reality a greater dialogue about the future of the faculty. It dispels
pervasive myths that suggest that there is a tremendous and impassable gulf between stakeholder groups’
views about the purpose and structure of the faculty. If this report has any effect, we hope that it will help to
provoke a collaborative dialogue about change—as so many of the Delphi Project’s reports have aimed to do.
We believe that efforts to consider, design, and implement future faculty models are more likely to be
successful when a diverse group of stakeholders are involved and engaged in each stage of the process.

Certainly, underlying our many findings of agreement on the attractiveness of proposals, there are also some
very pertinent questions that are raised about feasibility. These points will need to be considered as part of
the dialogue, as well. Once a clearer vision for the future of the faculty is established, steps will need to be
taken to operationalize and implement it. We have never suggested in our work that change will be easy—
and the respondents to our survey agree. Higher education institutions and the enterprise as a whole face
many challenges that will affect how future faculty models are designed and implemented. But, we do believe
that academic leaders and faculty can work together to develop solutions to the difficulties presented by
bureaucratic challenges, collaboratively creating new faculty models that address complex needs of
institutions and relevant groups and sharing ideas about how best to implement those new models once they
have been determined.

Financial concerns have repeatedly surfaced as one of the primary obstacles to faculty renewal and
renovation. When pursuing changes, however, we note that it may be necessary to reexamine priorities,
particularly in institutional budgeting, to make sure that costs can be covered to ensure that a faculty model
that adequately meets the needs of our students, our institutions’ missions, and our society can be achieved.
Mistrust across groups or intransigence within them are also perceived as barriers to change and innovation.
We challenge stakeholders to help us to disprove these myths, which are largely perceptual—they need not
be a reality.

As these conversations unfold and new visions for faculty work move toward implementation, it is necessary
to continue conducting research on how changes in these roles have an impact on faculty work, performance,
institutional goals, and student outcomes. Very little research has been conducted on faculty roles, and
changes in faculty roles have rarely been guided by research (Gehrke, & Kezar, 2015). In our work, we
continue to trace the changes taking place in faculty roles, and we seek to push back against the lack of
accountability as these changes ignore data on the impact they have on students and faculty and neglect

42 The Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success

existing knowledge about best practices. As we go forward, we need to make research on faculty roles a
priority—particularly as we move into unchartered territory.

Fortunately, the survey data reflect that there is enthusiastic interest in new approaches and in certain key
attributes of future faculty models. Here there is the potential to envision and adopt a greater diversity of
roles beyond the traditional tenure track and the non–tenure-track positions that have grown to become a
majority of the professoriate. The data presented in this report offer some valuable insights about proposals
that might be discussed, to be adapted, adopted, and implemented as institutions—and the enterprise as a
whole—explore the future of the faculty.

The Professoriate Reconsidered 43

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The Professoriate Reconsidered 45

Appendix A:
Survey Instrument
The survey was administered to participants online using Qualtrics. The survey has been recreated here to
allow readers of this report to examine the full text of the proposals contained in the survey, which were
abbreviated in earlier sections of this document. For each of the survey items, the following scale was offered;
it is not repeated below each survey item here in order to conserve space.

The Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success

Future Faculty Attributes and Roles Survey

INSTRUCTIONS
This survey is intended to gather the views of representatives of various higher education stakeholder groups about attributes of potential
future faculty models and roles. You have been invited to participate in this study as a (specific stakeholder group indicated here). Please
respond to the prompts in this survey from the perspective of a member of this group.

In the following sections, you will be presented with several attributes that could be included in future faculty models or roles—faculty
pathways and contracts, roles, and the characteristics of their work and work environments. For each of the statements presented, please
indicate:

1) How attractive the proposed characteristic would be to the stakeholder group you represent; and,
2) How feasible you believe the proposed characteristic would be as a potential characteristic of a future faculty model.

At the end of each section and at the conclusion of the survey you will also be invited to share additional reactions—in your own words.

The survey should take approximately 20–25 minutes to complete.

Faculty Pathways

For each of the following statements, please indicate 1) how attractive the proposed characteristic would be to the stakeholder group
you represent and 2) how feasible you believe the proposed characteristic would be as a potential characteristic of a future faculty
model.

1. Creating opportunities for highly customized and continuously changing faculty pathways through ‘creativity contracts,’ inviting faculty
members and institutional leaders to define or negotiate what faculty members’ professional goals and activities will be for a period of
several years during which they shift their primary emphasis among various scholarly activities (e.g., teaching or designing a new course,
conducting research and writing a book, focusing on service or clinical practice). These defined goals and activities would change with
each new contract term.

2. Providing multiple pathways or tracks for faculty members to pursue appointments that focus their primary, long term responsibilities in
a particular area of practice such as research, teaching, or professional or clinical practice that would direct the focus of their scholarly
activities over the course of their careers (e.g., teaching- or research-only appointments).

3. Advancing a more complete and widespread implementation of Ernest Boyer’s Scholarship Reconsidered, which emphasizes and rewards
a broader range of scholarly activities than is typically supported—by recognizing and valuing the scholarship of discovery (research to
advance knowledge), integration (synthesis of information), application (institutional service and community engagement), and teaching
and learning over the course of a faculty member’s career.

46 The Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success

4. Creating greater differentiation of faculty contracts (e.g., different contract types and terms) and roles (e.g., teaching, research,
service, and/or community engagement) among different institutional types to ensure that distinct institutional missions are served.

5. Focusing the majority of faculty members’ roles throughout higher education around responsibilities for teaching and student
development (e.g., advising, mentoring). Research and service would be more exceptional roles negotiated for a smaller subset of the
faculty, mostly at institutions with a research mission.

6. Supporting all faculty members who teach, regardless of contract or rank, in conducting scholarship in order to maintain benefits that
are derived from connections between scholarship and teaching.

7. Aligning individual faculty pathways more closely to departmental and institutional needs, rather than having a more individual
orientation.

8. What reactions do you have, if any, to the statements in this section?

Contracts

For each of the following statements, please indicate 1) how attractive the proposed characteristic would be to the stakeholder group
you represent and 2) how feasible you believe the proposed characteristic would be as a potential characteristic of a future faculty
model.

1. Phasing out tenure in favor of multi-year, renewable contracts (typically shorter term contracts during a probationary period, increasing
to five years later on) with clear protections for academic freedom, clearly defined grievance processes, and clear expectations for faculty
members’ contributions to teaching, research, and service.

2. Maintaining a tenure track, but modifying existing arrangements by implementing term-tenure contracts that would be eligible for
renewal every 10–15 years.

3. Adding teaching-only tenure positions to the faculty at institutions where faculty commonly focus on some combination of teaching,
research, and service.

4. Maintaining a faculty model that closely resembles the current system of tenure-track, full-time non-tenure-track, and part-time
faculty, but with some modifications directed at resolving some of the current perceived challenges (e.g., less focus on teaching than
research or other faculty responsibilities and/or questions about job security and academic freedom for non-tenure-track faculty).

5. Increasing the utilization of full-time non-tenure-track appointments to reduce reliance on part-time positions, reserving the use of
part-time appointments to facilitate periodic instruction by practitioners and for other exceptional circumstances only (e.g., to fill an
unexpected vacancy or accommodate a short-term spike in enrollments).

6. Creating consortium agreements among local institutions to develop shared, full-time (tenure-track or non-tenure-track) faculty
positions for individuals who would otherwise be hired by multiple institutions individually on part-time contracts. These positions would
include competitive salaries, health care and retirement benefits, office space at the faculty member's home institution, access to
professional development, and opportunities for promotion.

7. Revising incentives and rewards structures and policies to better reflect different institutional priorities (e.g., teaching, research,
community engagement).

8. What reactions do you have, if any, to the statements in this section?

Unbundling of Faculty Roles

For each of the following statements, please indicate 1) how attractive the proposed characteristic would be to the stakeholder group
you represent and 2) how feasible you believe the proposed characteristic would be as a potential characteristic of a future faculty
model.

1. Expanding the numbers of positions that are focused more exclusively on teaching or research or service, rather than an emphasis on all
three roles within each faculty position.

2. Increasing the use of technology and instructional software for functions such as content delivery (e.g., delivering lectures, interactive
resources) and engaging students in exercises and quizzes, providing faculty members with the opportunity to use in-person class time to
engage students’ critical thinking skills, assess their learning and understanding of concepts on an ongoing basis, and provide direct
support, as needed by students.

3. Making greater use of educational professionals whose roles complement the knowledge and skills of traditional faculty members (e.g.,
information technologists, course designers, undergraduate learning assistants, course assistants, early intervention specialists, and course

The Professoriate Reconsidered 47

coordinators) to improve content delivery, instruction, and educational experiences that occur inside and outside the classroom
and providing faculty members with the opportunity to focus their attention on engaging students and/or conducting scholarly research.

4. Unbundling the instructional role to focus faculty members’ attention on the most essential tasks such as curriculum development,
course design, and outcomes assessment, while redirecting other activities to some combination of technology and additional educational
professionals.

5. What reactions do you have, if any, to the statements in this section?

Status in the Academic Community

For each of the following statements, please indicate 1) how attractive the proposed characteristic would be to the stakeholder group
you represent and 2) how feasible you believe the proposed characteristic would be as a potential characteristic of a future faculty
model.

1. Ensuring that all faculty members, regardless of contract type or rank, have the same rights and protections with regard to academic
freedom.

2. Providing all faculty members equitable compensation for performing the same duties, as well as access to benefits.

3. Permitting all faculty members, regardless of contract type or rank, to be involved in shared governance and decision making that
affects their work (e.g., participation and voting in department faculty meetings and faculty senates).

4. Providing all faculty members, regardless of contract type or rank, access to all of the information (e.g., clearly defined policies and
evaluation criteria) and tools (e.g., instructional resources, office space, access to computers and copiers, ability to utilize support staff)
needed for faculty members to do their jobs.

5. What reactions do you have, if any, to the statements in this section?

Faculty Development, Promotion, and Evaluation

For each of the following statements, please indicate 1) how attractive the proposed characteristic would be to the stakeholder group
you represent and 2) how feasible you believe the proposed characteristic would be as a potential characteristic of a future faculty
model.

1. Providing all faculty members, regardless of contract type or rank, with opportunities for promotion.

2. Clearly defining expectations and evaluation criteria for all faculty members, regardless of contract type or rank, so that they can
understand how their work is to be assessed.

3. Ensuring that all faculty members, regardless of contract type or rank, receive clear terms for notification of renewal or termination
(e.g., information about processes and timelines), as well as processes for addressing grievances related to termination and alleged
violations of academic freedom.

4. Continuously engaging all faculty members, regardless of contract type or rank, in development opportunities—either through
institutional faculty development programming or funding to participate in external conferences—that help them to maintain knowledge in
their areas of expertise, learn about and practice using pedagogies and high-impact instructional practices, and utilize learning outcomes
assessment.

5. Including participation in periodic faculty professional development as a requirement for promotion and evaluation for all faculty,
regardless of contract type or rank.

6. Creating a more rigorous process and expectations for regularly scheduled evaluations of faculty performance, aligned to clear
expectations for faculty work for all faculty, regardless of contract type or rank.

7. What reactions do you have, if any, to the statements in this section?

Flexibility

For each of the following statements, please indicate 1) how attractive the proposed characteristic would be to the stakeholder group
you represent and 2) how feasible you believe the proposed characteristic would be as a potential characteristic of a future faculty
model.

48 The Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success

1. Creating greater employment flexibility for full-time, tenure-track faculty members, such as allowing them to stop the tenure clock, or
move into part-time appointments for a period of time to provide care for children and family members or to attend to other personal
situations that may arise.

2. Lengthening probationary periods for more traditional tenure-eligible faculty to allow them greater time to secure grant funding,
conduct research, and publish.

3. Creating greater flexibility for faculty to address personal needs on campus by offering access to a variety of services such as child care,
dry cleaners or laundry, or meal plans for use at campus dining halls.

4. What reactions do you have, if any, to the statements in this section?

Collaboration and Community Engagement

For each of the following statements, please indicate 1) how attractive the proposed characteristic would be to the stakeholder group
you represent and 2) how feasible you believe the proposed characteristic would be as a potential characteristic of a future faculty
model.

1. Encouraging and facilitating greater opportunities for faculty members to collaborate with one another and across disciplines through
team teaching arrangements, interdisciplinary research centers, and/or cross-college appointments.

2. Fostering greater connections between faculty members and the communities served by institutions by encouraging and rewarding
community engagement work conducted through arrangements such as service-learning partnerships, participatory research, and volunteer
service.

3. Creating new partnerships with industry, business, corporations, nonprofits, and government agencies to facilitate experiential learning
opportunities and connect faculty to current practices and changes in the professions and applied fields.

4. What reactions do you have, if any, to the statements in this section?

Public Good

For each of the following statements, please indicate 1) how attractive the proposed characteristic would be to the stakeholder group
you represent and 2) how feasible you believe the proposed characteristic would be as a potential characteristic of a future faculty
model.

1. Encouraging and rewarding faculty to engage in social critique and research on controversial issues that are part of the current
discourse.

2. Defining expectations for how faculty members, regardless of their role (e.g., teaching, research) will contribute to shaping the
development of citizenship among students.

3. Encouraging faculty to conduct research that is available to the public (limiting research that restricts open access).

4. Encouraging faculty to support low-income and first-generation college students through undergraduate research, mentoring, bridge
programs, and first year experience courses.

5. What reactions do you have, if any, to the statements in this section?

Reflection and Reactions

Please take a moment to reflect on the issues that have been presented in this survey.

1. What are your overall reactions to the statements about potential attributes and roles of future faculty models presented in this survey?

2. Do you have any additional thoughts to share that were not captured by your responses to prior questions in the survey?

The Professoriate Reconsidered 49

About The Pullias Center
With a generous bequest from the Pullias Family estate, the Earl and Pauline Pullias Center for Higher Education at
the USC Rossier School of Education was established in 2012 (the center was previously known as the Center for
Higher Education Policy Analysis). The gift allows one of the world’s leading research centers on higher education to
continue its tradition of focusing on research, policy, and practice to improve the ield.

The mission of the Pullias Center for Higher Education is to bring a multidisciplinary perspective to complex social,
political, and economic issues in higher education. Since 1996 the center has engaged in action-oriented research
projects regarding successful college outreach programs, inancial aid and access for low- to moderate-income stu-
dents of color, use of technology to supplement college counseling services, effective postsecondary governance,
emerging organizational forms such as for-pro it institutions, and the retention of doctoral students of color.

About Adrianna Kezar

Adrianna Kezar, Professor for Higher Education, University of Southern California and co-director of the Pullias Cen-
ter for Higher Education. Kezar holds a Ph.D. 1996 and M.A. 1992 in higher education administration from the Uni-
versity of Michigan and a B.A. 1989 from the University of California, Los Angeles. She joined the faculty at USC in
2003. She has several years administrative experience in higher education as well both in academic and student
affairs.

Dr. Kezar is a national expert of change, governance and leadership in higher education and her research agenda
explores the change process in higher education institutions and the role of leadership in creating change. She is
an international expert on the changing faculty and directs the Delphi Project on the Changing faculty and Student
Success – www.thechangingfaculty.org. Additionally, she is principal investigator for The TSLC Scholars Program: A
mixed methods study of a comprehensive college transition and success program for low income students funded by
The Buffett foundation. Kezar also regularly consults for campuses and national organizations related to her work
on non-tenure track faculty, STEM reform, change, collaboration, leadership development, and change.

She is an AERA fellow and has received national awards for her editorial leadership of the ASHE-ERIC report series
from ASHE, for developing a leadership development program for women in higher education from ACE, and for her
commitment to service learning from the National Society for Experiential Learning.

About Daniel Maxey

Daniel Maxey is currently Provost’s Fellow in the Of ice of the Provost at Santa Clara University. He previously was
Dean’s Fellow in Urban Education Policy in the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education where
he served as Co-Director of the Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success and research assistant to
Dr. Adrianna Kezar. Professor of Education, Co-Director of the Pullias Center, and Vice President of the Postsecondary
Education Division of the American Educational Research Association.

About Elizabeth Holcombe

Elizabeth Holcombe graduated from Vanderbilt University with a double major in Political Science and Spanish in
2008. After teaching elementary school in Atlanta with Teach for America, she moved to New York City to pursue
a Master’s degree in Politics and Education at Teachers College. Upon completing her Master’s degree in 2011,
Elizabeth began working at Mercy College. Elizabeth managed several programs at Mercy, including a college access
partnership, an academic advising and mentoring program, and a new co- and extra-curricular assessment initiative
within the Division of Student Affairs. Currently, Elizabeth is pursuing her PhD in Urban Education Policy with a
focus on Higher Education.
Pullias Center for Higher Education
Waite Phillips Hall, Room 701
3470 Trousdale Parkway
Los Angeles, CA 90089-4037
Phone: 213.740.7218
pullias.usc.edu