Faculty and Higher Education

I remember a choice line from a boss of mine when I started one of my first major administrative positions in higher education: “in the end students come to college because of good faculty, they are the rock stars, and we are the roadies”.

You could have all the best facilities, technology, and programs in the world, but without good faculty to teach your programs, sales will be slow.

Do faculty have a legitimate voice in your school, including the adjuncts? Are they included in the decision making process from start to finish. or are they simply informed about what they will be doing?

I will share an article that inspired these thoughts:

“Higher Education's Missing Faculty Voices”

“Conversations about what we need to know about higher education, both to rate college and university performance and to provide information to prospective students and their parents, leave one word largely unspoken: faculty.”

“A recent report by the Institute for Higher Education Policy, "Mapping the Postsecondary Data Domain," mentions faculty members only once—as users, not as subjects of data. And the report is only the latest in an effusion of discussions of higher-education data needs. The same neglect occurred at a daylong Department of Education symposium on the subject in February. While pondering what we need to know to improve and reform higher education, students, administrators, and researchers were mentioned repeatedly, but the faculty members who teach those students received only rare and fleeting attention.”

Read it all here: http://chronicle.com/article/Higher-Educations-Missing/146871/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Serious questions for serious times.

Dr Flavius A B Akerele III

The ETeam