Faculty Job Satisfction Survey Updates

Dec. 6, 2021

Dear Faculty,

Since arriving here last year, I have been frequently told that we must—now—become more successful at recruiting and retaining our faculty, especially those who are diversifying their fields and reflecting the communities and experiences of our students. Thanks to many conversations with faculty, chairs, students, and administrators, I’ve come to understand that doing this effectively requires meaningful and reliable baseline data that we can share broadly and thoroughly with our campus community, use to determine what actions we can take to enhance the working experiences for our faculty and, ultimately, return to over time to see whether positive change is occurring and, if not, recalibrate our actions.

We have had several important efforts, in past years, to collect data on the collective and individual experiences of our faculty. These have revealed that our community wants to undertake this work and take the results of these sorts of data-collection efforts seriously. Thanks to the leadership of our Assessment and Institutional Effectiveness unit and in partnership with HRDI, Academic Affairs has contracted with the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education (COACHE), a research-practice partnership and network dedicated to understanding faculty experiences and improving faculty job satisfaction.  

I’m happy to announce, on behalf of the many whose names you see below my signature, that we will soon launch a campus COACHE survey (planned for February 2022). The COACHE instrument titled the “Faculty Job Satisfaction Survey” is completely voluntary and has been used at institutions across the country for many years, with excellent results both from the perspective of quantitative and qualitative rigor and from the perspective of its usefulness as a tool in creating campus action plans for improved faculty retention and job satisfaction. It is a longitudinal survey, and will be administered every three years, enabling us to understand how we are changing our faculty climate positively and negatively. Because it makes the findings easy to understand and share, it will allow us to make these results visible across campus. This will be an important means of ensuring that creating positive, affirming, and meaningful working experiences for our faculty stays a central aim of Academic Affairs.

Because dissemination of survey results is an important component of the COACHE framework, we will communicate survey results across colleges, divisions, and the Academic Senate. We look forward to conversations about what the survey reveals we are doing that is working, what we can do better, and where we have important work to do that has not yet begun.

I want to thank you in advance for participating in this voluntary survey. I know you have participated in multiple surveys before, and some of you may feel not enough has come of the time you have put into sharing your experiences, some of which are difficult to relay. This time will be different. Because the strength of COACHE outcomes depends on the strength of its inputs, I want to thank you for your willingness to collaborate with us on this venture. We commit to you that the results will matter.

This dedicated website can answer questions you may have, show you how COACHE has been used on other campuses, and let you know how you can contact our project leads with questions you may have.

I look forward to your participation.

Best wishes,

Carolyn

Carolyn Thomas, Ph.D.
 Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs

--on behalf of the COACHE Faculty Satisfaction Survey Working Group:

  • Su Swarat, Co-Chair, Associate Vice President, Institutional Effectiveness
  • Estela Zarate, Co-Chair, Vice Provost
  • Shelly Arsneault, Professor, Political Science; CFA Vice President, Political Action/Legislation Committee Chair
  • Michele Barr, Full-time Lecturer, Kinesiology  
  • Greg Childers, Associate Professor, Physics; Academic Senator
  • Patricia Pérez, Associate Dean for Faculty, College of Humanities and Social Sciences
  • Bobbie Porter, Assistant Vice President, Diversity, Equity & Inclusion
  • Kristin Stang, Associate Vice President, Faculty Affairs and Support