Finding Our Voices in an Inclusive Faculty Community

Kristi Lee, Colette Taylor, and Jenny Loertscher

“Seattle University is dedicated to educating the whole person, to professional formation, and to empowering leaders for a just and humane world.”

The Seattle University mission binds individual members of the faculty community together through shared aspirations that we strive to uphold for our students. For many of us, the mission is what drew us here. Yet, too often the burden of enacting the mission is not shared equally and the work invested in mission-centered tasks is not appropriately recognized. As members of the SU ADVANCE Task Force charged with revising Seattle University’s guidelines for promotion to full professor, our overall goal is institutional, cultural, and structural transformation that aligns promotion standards with our values-based, educational mission. Informed by four years of research aimed at uncovering the realities of faculty life, with an emphasis on exploring how these realities are experienced by women faculty and faculty of color, our primary task has been to align the rewards system with a holistic understanding of what faculty actually do to support and sustain Seattle University.   

Unheard Voices and Unrecognized Contributions

In order to fulfill the SU mission, faculty are called to roles and activities often not recognized within the traditional reward structures of higher education. In fact, many roles and activities that are key to an inclusive and broadly-envisioned academy are often seen as counterproductive to tenure and promotion because they are “invisible” when it comes to formal, official assessments. Such essential but “invisible” activities include mentoring of students and colleagues, designing curricula and programs, chairing governance committees, providing leadership for units or initiatives, and many other types of time-intensive, expert-driven work. Without these contributions, the university would cease to function. Yet, this work is all-too often under-recognized and under-valued by universities, resulting in a disconnection between vibrant, mission-focused faculty activities and traditional academic categories of visible, valued work. In light of promotion and tenure guidelines that prioritize and privilege publications and discovery-based research, many faculty members choose in their pre-tenure years to put their passions for student and community engagement, program development, and other essential university activities aside. This creates a circumstance where faculty must choose between activities that are integral to the functioning of a mission-driven institution and lie within their areas of expertise and the activities that will earn them tenure and promotion.

Therefore, faculty members often sideline their passions in light of tenure and promotion demands, thus forgoing contributions in some of the very areas that best align with university mission and their own expertise. Nationally, data shows that this phenomenon disproportionately affects women faculty and faculty of color. These same faculty members often do the “hidden work,” that is required for the institution’s success.  Nationwide, there is intense pressure to diversify faculty – whether through embodied diversity, diversity of scholarship, and/or diversity of pedagogy – but without diversifying infrastructure, reward systems, and/or support. This discrepancy is creating profound contradictions in the fabric of faculty life at institutions all over the country.

For the last four years, SU ADVANCE has been conducting a systematic study of faculty life in order to uncover the actual activities that faculty spend time doing. The research in this area conducted by SU ADVANCE demonstrates that this forced choice is negatively affecting many faculty at Seattle University, creating profound tensions for faculty across diverse departments and faculty ranks. Many faculty try to do it all—be superstar scholars, as well as do the invisible, but essential work that enables the university to thrive. While many actually juggle these demands very well, there are costs. Being forced to maintain bifurcated professional identities is inequitably stressful on faculty and is often insufficiently recognized as such by the institution, even as it creates negative impacts that ripple across the institution.

 SU ADVANCE and Reimagining the Professoriate

Traditionally, faculty work has been divided into three categories, scholarship, teaching, and service.Yet our research shows that faculty work, especially at a mission-driven institution like ours, is complex and defies this kind of simple categorization. SU ADVANCE proposes a reimagined professoriate in which the diversity of faculty contributions are valued, welcomed, and celebrated for what they are—necessary for success, satisfaction, and sustainability of the university. This new reality requires alignment between what faculty actually do and the recognition systems that are used to evaluate us.

The proposed revised guidelines for promotion to full professor empower faculty to use our own voices to holistically describe how we contribute most productively to the university community. According to the revised guidelines, a full professor at Seattle University must demonstrate a positive impact at SU and beyond, and provide evidence that our contributions have been recognized by the communities impacted. Positive recommendations may be based on evidence that a candidate has developed and applied their range and level of accomplishment across multiple dimensions of the faculty role.

Comprehensive integration of faculty work requires both revisions to existing promotion guidelines and an accompanying cultural transformation to fully and fairly operationalize the revised guidelines. The SU ADVANCE team has been working with the Center for Jesuit Education, the Center for Faculty Development, and others to design professional development opportunities to support faculty in imagining their work in an integrated way and to train campus leaders to mentor and evaluate faculty in a manner that supports the holistic view of faculty work we have described.

 The need to reimagine the professoriate has never been highlighted more than in our current situation.  Even when the immediate impacts of the COVID-19 crisis finally end, we will not be going back to normal. Our roles as faculty will be forever changed and the institution will need to adapt and diversify the way we recognize faculty contributions.  SU ADVANCE is helping to lay the groundwork to ensure that all of the efforts made by faculty now will be integrated into institutional reward systems in the future. Although perhaps subtle, this shift in perspective may allow faculty to feel a greater sense of inclusion in the university community.  The work of SU ADVANCE has paved the way for a fair, programmatic evaluation of faculty work and has us well-positioned as an institution to have the greatest flexibility in the future.