Rethinking Faculty Work: Higher Education's Strategic Imperative (review)
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Rethinking Faculty Work: Higher Education's Strategic Imperative offers readers an analysis of the current and changing context of academic work, a framework for understanding faculty work, and a very comprehensive set of recommendations to guide faculty and administrators in their prioritization and decision making regarding faculty. Gappa, Austin, and Trice identify changing characteristics in the context of academic institutions and offer strategic directives for creating responsive, attractive environments for today's university and college faculty.
The authors' use of imperative is deliberate in that they outline current issues affecting higher education that have the power and possibility to dramatically alter the academic work place. Responding to these issues while being mindful of the faculty perspective and what impact these issues will have on maintaining a talented and diverse academic workforce is, indeed, imperative.
The authors define their audience as policy makers at all levels (national, system, and state), institutional leaders, current and future faculty members, and researchers interested in faculty issues. The book's purpose is to provide a vision for academic workplaces expressed in policies and practices that will attract quality faculty committed to the institution's mission. The book includes a comprehensive compendium of research methods and sources. The extensive literature review is helpful to situate trends in the workplace.
The authors also analyzed data from the National Survey of Postsecondary Faculty (NSOPF), the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI), the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), and the Survey of Earned Doctorates done by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) to provide an overview of demographic information and other trend data. In addition, the authors collected examples of innovative approaches that address faculty work and workplaces. Throughout the text, the authors rely on these sources of data to present a clear and comprehensive analysis of issues associated with rethinking faculty work.
The text is divided into three parts. Part 1 looks at the changing context of academic institutions, trends, diversity, and growth. The first three chapters in Part 1 focus on changes in workers and workplaces. Due to changing expectations, requirements, [End Page 128] and skills for today's faculty, coupled with the increasing diversity of faculty members and the higher priority that early-career faculty place on their personal lives, traditional academic employment practices and policies may no longer be appropriate. The days of the "ideal worker" who is solely dedicated to academic work no longer exist, and institutions of higher education are encouraged to find new, more flexible ways to approach faculty appointments. Administrative leaders must realize that, while academic buildings, residence halls, and labs begin to depreciate immediately, the "faculty's intellectual capital, taken collectively, is the institution's foremost asset" (p. 4).
The last two chapters of Part 1 examine three contract-renewable employment models; the Alternative Career Model, the Integrated Model, and the Marginalized Model, as well as fixed-term appointments as options that can provide more flexibility. They also touch on issues of satisfaction and dissatisfaction across subpopulations, faculty stress, and faculty recruitment. The content of Part 1 is comprehensive, interesting, and thought provoking. The authors do an admirable job of outlining the key issues related to faculty work and workplaces.
In Part 2, the authors provide a framework to be used as a resource for colleges and universities to rethink "how to create academic environments that attract and retain excellent faculty, because the work faculty do is critical to the ability of higher education institutions to fulfill their missions" (p. 125). The framework is built upon five key elements (employment equity, academic freedom and autonomy, flexibility, professional growth, and collegiality) that all faculty, regardless of their appointment type, should experience in their work. The core requirement of the framework is respect, which is fundamental to all institutional work environments and interactions for all faculty.
Gappa, Austin, and Trice are unique in this aspect of their work because they include all types of faculty appointments...
