Creating the Future of Faculty Development: Learning From the Past, Understanding the Present (review)

In the past four decades, faculty development programs and centers have come to occupy an increasingly prominent place in the landscape of colleges and universities across the country. Growing numbers of institutions, from research universities to community colleges, have seen the impact that such resources as individual consultations, orientations and workshops, grants, or publications can have on their faculty's success, and have invested in them accordingly. Yet such programs have spanned a wide range in their origins, offerings, disciplinary linkages, and structures; the overall status of faculty development as a profession is still evolving.

At this stage, then, what is the central scope and focus of faculty development? What informs and influences how faculty developers do their work? What are the most common forms, practices, and challenges in the field, and what might its future hold? Mary Deane Sorcinelli, Ann Austin, Pamela Eddy, and Andrea Beach, drawing on their more than 50 years of collective experience as faculty and faculty developers, have written a volume offering valuable insights into these and related questions.

The book's empirical core derives from a 2001 survey of the oldest and largest professional association of developers: the Professional and Organizational Development (POD) Network in Higher Education. This study is the first large-scale scan of the field since 1986 and the first to go beyond program descriptions to probe more deeply the "major issues that undergird the array of services offered" (p. 69). With a 50% response rate of nearly 500 participants from 331 institutions, the survey gives a broad perspective, useful not only to developers themselves but also to the faculty and the academic administrators who oversee, support, and collaborate with development efforts.

The authors begin by cataloguing forces within higher education (such as increasing pressures for assessment and accountability, for addressing the needs of diverse student populations, and for integrating new technologies) that make such a study crucial. After sketching a historical schema placing faculty development's evolution into "ages," the volume offers both a portrait of the contemporary state of affairs (current faculty development personnel and programs, influences on developers and programs, and current issues addressed by faculty development services), and a look ahead (future priorities, directions, and recommendations).

The volume's strengths are many. First, it shapes a complex and variegated field into an admirably coherent picture. The authors' analyses of the survey's quantitative and qualitative data are clear and easily navigated; each chapter concludes with a useful set of "highlights" and many feature graphs that efficiently point to prominent findings.

The authors supplement the survey data with other evidence of current practices: scans of faculty development websites, a rich capture of relevant research literature (resulting in a 26-page bibliography), and a catalogue of Hesburgh Award-winning programs that offer concrete examples of ways to address important challenges.

But the volume's most valuable contributions emerge in the authors' identification of pivotal questions about the future of faculty development as a profession, and the agency of developers in shaping it. Who should own faculty development: faculty, administration, or a blend? Who should do faculty development work: those trained in it as a discipline, with core competencies and skills, or those coming to it more informally, from more varied paths and backgrounds? (pp. 143–145).

They follow these questions with concrete recommendations, aimed at both faculty developers and administrators, to promote professional preparation and development; inform practice with scholarship; broaden the scope of faculty development; link individual and institutional needs; remember that context still matters; redefine faculty diversity; and support a view that faculty development is everyone's work (pp. 164–174).

One of the book's limitations derives from the authors' decision to survey only members of the POD Network. The authors acknowledge this constraint (p. 31) and announce (p. xii) that the survey now is...