University Rewards for Faculty Community Service
Survey data collected from deans and directors of graduate schools of social work indicate that community service is the least valued of faculty activities among faculty peers, deans, and university administrators. Publication and teaching are consistently the most valued and rewarded in tenure and promotion and other personnel decisions. Findings are discussed, and recommendations made that might help to close the gap between the need for service activities and the existing faculty reward system.
Bibliometrics: a potential decision making aid in hiring, reappointment, tenure and promotion decisions.
The assessment of scholarship assumes a central role in the evaluation of individual faculty, educational programs and academic fields. Because the production and assessment of scholarship is so central to the faculty role, it is incumbent upon decision makers to strive to make assessments of scholarship fair and equitable. This paper will focus on an approach to the assessment of the quantity and impact of the most important subset of an individual's scholarship-peer-reviewed journal articles. The primary goal of this paper is to stimulate discussion regarding scholarship assessment in hiring, reappointment, tenure and promotion decisions.
The New ‘U’
Today's talk about tenure must be framed within broader discussions about the role of the university. Our university system is now over one hundred years old, the “Old-Time College” is gone, the “cold war” university is no longer viable, and the foundations of the modern “multiversity” are cracking, so it is time to talk about change. But change is not necessarily reform, and resisting change probably will not keep things the way they are, so academics must understand the forces reshaping the university. Whenever I listen to colleagues defend the status quo by saying that the United States has a university system that is the envy of the world, I hear echoes of the Detroit automobile industry's casual dismissal of foreign competitors in the early 1960s. The decision not to change did not preserve the auto industry, and it is unlikely to preserve public universities as we know them. The current debates about tenure began with ideological attacks on “tenured radicals” who used their secure jobs to subvert conservative cultural values. The attack on tenure gathered steam as fiscal hawks in financially-strapped states looked for ways to save money and found huge state university systems with budgets to match. When asked why he robbed banks, the legendary Willie Sutton replied, “Because that's where the money is.” When asked why they are robbing tenure, legislators, regents, and administrators reply, “Because that's where the money is.” Personnel costs are a large share of university budgets and tenure ties the hands of administrators and legislators accustomed to using purse strings to control universities.