BY ADRIANNA KEZAR, JOHN W. CURTIS, EMILY KOREN, AND KC CULVER
The answer to the question our title poses is not very much—yet. There are serious challenges facing higher education in the United States today, from efforts to restrict teaching “uncomfortable” subjects to new and repeated attacks on tenure and the persistent underfunding of colleges, universities, and student financial aid. We know little about how these challenges to higher education as a societal institution affect faculty members and academic personnel. Beyond anecdotal reports, there are few national efforts to gather data on who is doing the teaching, research, and public service in our colleges and universities, and what their working lives look like. Our Faculty, Academic Careers, and Environments (FACE) project is an attempt to do just that.
The purpose of the FACE project is to understand who faculty are, what their academic careers look like, and how the environments in which they work shape their ability to thrive as instructors, researchers, and public scholars in the community. Between 1998 and 2004, the National Center for Education Statistics administered four iterations of the National Study of Postsecondary Faculty (NSOPF), which served as the primary source of nationally representative data on faculty. Given that NSOPF was last administered in 2004, FACE explores how a nationally representative study of academic personnel might be done most effectively twenty years later. And we need your help.
As part of our project, we are conducting a pilot survey for academic personnel. To participate in the survey, which is open through July 7, visit https://edsurveys.rti.org/faces/Login.aspx.
We are aiming to capture the experiences of the academic workforce broadly, including all of the part-time and full-time professionals who do faculty-like work—related to instruction, research, and public outreach—regardless of whether they are designated as faculty members. The survey is open to tenure-line and contingent faculty across disciplines and across not-for-profit sectors of higher education (for example, public and private, two- and four-year, and minority-serving institutions).
A nationally representative study is critical to understanding the organizational, behavioral, and psychosocial factors influencing academic employment. There is a particular need for data that illuminate the experiences of faculty members in terms of their positionality and roles. Such data promises to allow a better understanding of the composition of the academic workforce and efforts to diversify it; the institutional environments that influence faculty members’ performance, workplace mental health, and well-being; and the work experiences that shape outcomes for faculty, students, and higher education overall.
This type of data can better support efforts to advocate for faculty. In recent decades, data about changing trends within faculty contracts have helped to put a spotlight on the adjunctification of the faculty workforce, a trend that was less apparent in the 1980s and 1990s because of a lack of data. Data about facilities have demonstrated a widespread need for adequate spaces to conduct quality instruction. While the AAUP’s compensation survey has been critical in documenting salary inequities among different groups of faculty, the FACE survey aims to identify these issues in a broader context of issues relevant for advocacy by and on behalf of faculty. For example, demographic and workplace climate data can help us to understand the potentially widespread nature of discrimination. Exploration into governance can help identify the decline in faculty influence.
Breaking new ground for analysis of potentially problematic issues, our survey examines topics such as wellness, inclusion, and identity that previous surveys of the academic workforce have not addressed. With funding from the National Science Foundation, the FACE project is led by a team of researchers from the University of Southern California, the University of Alabama, and RTI International—an independent, nonprofit research institute—with expertise on quantitative research and faculty issues. The goal of the project is to examine and pilot test how best to create a national survey of faculty teaching at colleges and universities of all types across the country.
The FACE project is collecting data both from institutions and from faculty members in order to learn about institutional policies and practices as well as individual experiences. FACE team members conducted focus groups with institutional researchers and human resources professionals from different institutional contexts to inform institution-level data collection instruments and processes.
In designing the faculty-level instrument and processes, the project team considered how faculty members’ behavioral and psychological experiences at work are shaped by their multiple individual and professional identities, as well as by their meaningful participation and working conditions that determine their capacity, willingness, and opportunity to perform. We use inclusive design approaches, centering faculty who are often marginalized or overlooked because of their individual or professional identities while recognizing historical and systemic contexts.
We especially want to learn more from colleagues working in community colleges and minority-serving institutions, whether in full- or part-time positions and regardless of faculty or tenure status. Note that all responses will remain confidential, and the research team will not have access to the names or contact details of individual respondents.
To learn more about the FACE project, visit www.faceonfaculty.org.
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 2200769. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
Adrianna Kezar is the Dean’ s Professor of Leadership, Wilbur-Kieffer Professor of Higher Education at the University of Southern California, and director of the USC Pullias Center for Higher Education. John W. Curtis is an independent research and evaluation consultant who has served previously as director of research for the American Sociological Association and for the AAUP, where he was responsible for the Faculty Compensation Survey. Emily Koren is a postdoctoral researcher at the USC Pullias Center for Higher Education, KC Culver is an assistant professor at the University of Alabama and co–principal investigator on the Faculty, Academic Careers, and Environments project.
