BY KRIS BOUDREAU AND MARK RICHMAN
In her recent survey of a handful of research universities that have improved conditions for their teaching faculty—particularly those that provide job stability and paths for professional advancement—the Chronicle’s Becky Supiano suggests that while such a “teaching track” distinct from a tenure track can “elevate undergraduate instruction and the instructors who put it first,” it might also “risk cementing their second-class citizenship.” Supiano asks whether improved conditions for teaching faculty will elevate these faculty or perpetuate their second-class status.
Our experience at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), a midsized R2 STEM institution in Worcester, Massachusetts, demonstrates how an institution seeking to do right by its teaching faculty needs to take the boldest steps to avoid that risk. During the spring of 2021, after a three-year institutional effort initiated by its faculty governance activists, WPI adopted a real tenure track for teaching faculty. This policy was part of a larger package of changes that included the right to participate in faculty governance for all full-time teaching faculty as well as secured longer-term contracts for those who would remain off the tenure track—features that thankfully are becoming more common in higher education. However, a tenure track based on rigorous criteria designed specifically for the teaching faculty is new.
When WPI approved this tenure track—with the overwhelming support of its faculty, the endorsement of its administration, and approval by its board of trustees—it also committed to placing 40 percent of its full-time teaching faculty onto tenure lines within three years. As of July 2022, WPI is about 60 percent of the way to fulfilling that commitment, with thirty previously contingent teaching faculty now employed on the tenure track.
The success of WPI’s tenure proposal depended equally on fairness to the teaching faculty and continued rigor in the tenure process. WPI’s new tenure criteria are realistic, based on existing expectations for teaching faculty with heavier teaching loads than the traditional tenure-track faculty, rather than on unfair new expectations. They are rigorous, reflecting clearer and more exacting standards for excellence in teaching practice and in professional growth and currency that includes teaching innovation. And they are aspirational, driving teaching faculty to reach higher than they might have without the expectations of an ongoing peer-review process and the support of our full tenure-track infrastructure.
We expect that WPI’s tenure track for teaching will strengthen both the professional status of our teaching faculty and the educational outcomes for our students. Michael Bérubé and Jennifer Ruth make this point compellingly in their 2015 monograph, The Humanities, Higher Education, and Academic Freedom: Three Necessary Arguments, in which they argue that a tenure process for teaching faculty would reverse the “hollowing out” of academia brought on by ad hoc hiring off the tenure track, with few or no systems of professional review and mentoring and no guarantee of academic freedom.
Instead, with 1) modest resources for tenure-track teaching faculty to attend workshops, present their teaching materials, design assessments to capture learning outcomes for new classroom approaches, and disseminate their work (both disciplinary and pedagogical); 2) annual reviews that include discussions about progress toward tenure; and 3) expectations that they make a mark on both students and other faculty members at WPI and beyond, our tenure-track teaching faculty will receive not only the protections of academic freedom but also the institutional support for professional development that strengthens the academic excellence of our entire university.
In many ways, our campus community had already moved toward supporting and learning from the non-tenure-track faculty. WPI’s Morgan Center for Teaching and Learning includes them in various teaching innovation grants and employs them for TA development. For many years, teaching faculty have been involved as advisors and directors in our signature project-based curriculum (including our Global Projects Program), as faculty in our Great Problems Seminars, and as program directors. They have taught as equal partners with tenured and tenure-track faculty, designed new courses, won campus awards, and advised students. A tenure track for these faculty members was the logical extension of—and, we argued, the only fair response to—the quality and commitment the teaching faculty had shown to WPI. The tenure track institutionalizes the university’s respect for them well beyond providing a set of formal academic titles and adds the critical component of guaranteed academic freedom that is difficult to secure with anything less than tenure.
Do our improvements to the lives of WPI’s teaching faculty inadvertently “cement” their “second-class citizenship”? When the proposal was voted on by our tenured and tenure-track faculty, who had nothing personally to gain from its passage, it passed with 90 percent approval. As department tenure committees continue to nominate teaching faculty for these new paths and advise the tenure-track teaching faculty during annual pre-tenure reviews, they are discovering the impressive accomplishments and contributions of their teaching colleagues. We expect that as these faculty earn tenure in the years to come, their success will be applauded as loudly on campus as the news of the other newly tenured faculty.
Supiano suggests that a teaching track might improve university teaching in two main ways: by placing particularly effective teaching faculty in gateway and other pivotal courses; and by more broadly improving a university’s teaching culture.
WPI’s tenure criteria compel even higher aspirations. They require that candidates for tenure demonstrate positive impacts on their students in significant ways. And although tenure for teaching faculty does not require research or scholarship, it does require—more broadly—continued development as intellectuals and as teachers through their contributions and positive impacts on other teacher-scholars within and beyond WPITenure for teaching faculty does much more than make the best of a bad situation. It directly addresses the problem of second-class citizenship of our teaching faculty. By extending, supporting, and protecting exemplary teaching throughout the institution, it finally places teaching faculty and traditional tenured and tenure-track faculty on equally solid footing.
Kris Boudreau is a professor in the humanities and arts department at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and a former member and chair of WPI’s committee on governance. Mark Richman is associate professor of aerospace engineering at WPI and is serving his third term as secretary of the faculty.
