“But What do the Faculty Think About it?”

The job of a provost involves assessment of many new ideas. We in the academy live in interesting times, with external challenges to long-held assumptions about how to produce quality education. This moment is spawning a variety of innovations and changes.

At the Provost’s Office, in kicking around a new idea, we often ask, “Does anyone have a sense of what the average faculty member would think about this?”

We have advisory groups involving deans, faculty, staff administrators, students, and others; they are helpful to us. I meet with the Faculty Senate and the Main Campus Executive faculty; they offer important insights. However, we never feel that we can learn enough about how faculty might view a given issue.

One goal we have is to increase trust and collaboration between the faculty and the administration. To achieve this, we need honest communication. More importantly, we need to find out what faculty view as their challenges and day-to-day problems and what they view as the strengths of Georgetown.

One tool for such communication is a survey of the faculty, asking them their reactions/attitudes/feelings about a range of components of their work life here at Georgetown. For this to work, faculty must feel free to express their real opinions.

To launch a faculty survey we joined a group of other universities – Johns Hopkins University, Duke University, Tulane University, University of Rochester, University of Arizona, and University of Virginia, among others. On Wednesday, October 16, Georgetown will be asking faculty members to answer a Faculty Job Satisfaction Survey or the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education (COACHE) Survey.

The COACHE Survey was designed and is administered by the Harvard Graduate School of Education. The areas covered by the survey include research environment and institutional support; teaching load and student quality; nature and distribution of service responsibilities; facilities and work resources; personal and family policies; health and retirement benefits; interdisciplinary work and collaboration; mentoring; tenure and promotion opportunities, clarity and reasonableness; recruitment and retention, and institutional governance and leadership.

The survey will cover all full-time faculty members, including tenured faculty, tenure-track faculty, and non-tenure-track faculty in the Main Campus and the Qatar Campus.

In April 2014, the Harvard Graduate School of Education will release a summary report of the results from the Survey. Following the release of the report, the Provost’s Office will organize a main-campus-wide discussion of results.

The Harvard Graduate School of Education collects data confidentially, only using identities to send reminders to non-respondents. Data will be shared with Georgetown anonymously. Harvard will provide statistical results in the aggregate and by sub-groups, but only when groups have more than 5 respondents in order to protect anonymity. Georgetown will receive responses back in de-identified form, and these records will be held in the Office of Assessment and Decision Support. No one in a supervisory or evaluative capacity will have access to individual responses.

For those readers who receive a request to complete the survey, I ask that you seriously consider it. Full participation increases the value of the survey to Georgetown and provides a better answer to the question, “What do the faculty think about it?”