Nature of Work: Research

Faculty satisfaction with research is a function not just of the time faculty members have to commit to research, but importantly, of the clarity and consistency of institutional expectations for research productivity and the resources colleges and universities provide faculty to meet them. When faculty are criticized for falling short of others' expectations for research, consider the demands, obstacles, mixed signals, and lack of meaningful support that may be undermining their ability to do their best work.

The COACHE instrument invites faculty to assess the environmental qualities conducive to research productivity. The questions are designed to be agnostic on institutional type (e.g., research university, liberal arts college) and research area (in the disciplines, creative work, the scholarship of teaching and learning). It is in the analysis where participating colleges and universities can determine whether faculty feel they are being supported in fulfilling the expectations of them.

Nature of Work: Service

Among the top three responsibilities of the tenure-stream faculty--but almost always the third--service is infused in the ethos of shared governance and the DNA of faculty life. In COACHE focus groups, faculty included in their definition of their most "vital" colleagues an engagement in service to the discipline and university. Yet, tenured faculty expressed their dissatisfaction with their service work: too many committees doing unfulfilling work, too many reports sitting unread on administrators' shelves, and too many good soldiers picking up the slack of faculty colleagues who, whether by influence or incompetence, seem always to evade service commitments. Meanwhile, college and universities are often encouraged as a best practice to "protect" pre-tenure faculty from too many time commitments outside of the teaching and research that will make their tenure case. The aggregate result is a gulf between institutional expectations for service and the recognition it receives in evaluations of faculty.

The COACHE survey instrument invites faculty to explore these tensions with questions about the quantity, quality, and equitable distribution of their service work broadly defined, as well as their institutions' efforts to help faculty be service leaders and sustain their other commitments as faculty. In follow-up interviews with faculty and institutional leaders, a common refrain emerged: faculty are eager to participate not in more service, but in more meaningful service, and we must do better to engage and to reward those contributions.

Nature of Work: Teaching

Among the core areas of faculty work explored by the COACHE survey, teaching--and the supports institutions provide faculty to teach well--is bound by significant constraints, but also by great opportunities. The challenge for every faculty member is to strike a balance between institutional expectations for teaching and the time and ability available to invest in it.

Dissatisfaction can occur when expectations for teaching are unreasonable or contrary to what faculty were promised at the point of hire, when institutional support is lacking, or when the distribution of work is inequitable. Time is the common denominator: if expectations for teaching outstrips the time available to meet them, morale and productivity can suffer.

When considering COACHE results on this benchmark, keep in mind that our instrument measures not teaching load, but faculty satisfaction with teaching load. While reducing teaching load is often "off the table" as a short-term fix, increasing faculty satisfaction with teaching load can be accomplished through workshops and seminars about improving teaching, mentoring students, using instructional technologies, and experimenting with new pedagogical techniques. These opportunities may be housed in centers of teaching and learning (or of "faculty success" or "faculty excellence"), where other resources and advice are dispensed by seasoned experts. The implementation of and communication about these supports can increase faculty satisfaction with the nature of teaching.