Faculty Culture and College Life: Reshaping Incentives Toward Student Outcomes

Traditionally, faculty role and workload are shaped by academic culture, including values and incentives that tend to be in large part discipline related and institutionally driven. Teaching, research, and service are the common tripartite “assignments” for faculty, with weights, distributions, and definitions of terms being more institutionally specific than discretely generalizable (Moore and Amey, 1993). As institutions evolve, so do the expectations held for and by faculty. As new initiatives and directions take hold, it is common to find faculty work following suit, at least as a generality. For example, an academic unit interested in increasing its national standing and prestige is likely to reflect this ambition in increased expectations for faculty-generated external research funding, publications, and national visibility. Faculty also do not maintain the same interests and levels of expertise in all three areas over the life of their career, and often negotiate greater emphasis on one area for a period of time (Baldwin, 1990). Many come to the professoriate for altruistic reasons, and report strong motivation to remain, based on intrinsic rewards (for example, contact with students, love of teaching, intellectual curiosity [Moore and Amey, 1993]). It is also clearly demonstrated in the literature that faculty will respond in kind to those activities and behaviors for which they are reinforced either in the tenure and promotion processes or in annual evaluation for salary increases. Often, these two sets of rewards are not in concert and can even be cause for significant conflict and frustration for faculty, especially, but not exclusively, those in untenured positions.