What Do The Faculty Want?
WHAT DO THE FACULTY WANT?
an invitation to discourse by the
Research Professoriate
University of California, Berkeley January 15, 2009
These hard financial times are hitting our public and private universities. In what ways will that impact the research faculty? What can we do about it? Some open discussion and debate is called for, so let us try to start.
Before asking what we want, let’s start by being clear what we have. There are several aspects of our careers (as Professors in good research universities) that are unusual:
1. We are (mostly) in charge of our own work. We decide how to teach any particular course (within general guidelines established by peers in our department). We decide what research topics to pursue and how to do that.
2. We are protected by the canons of academic freedom.
3. We have (or expect soon to have) tenure.
4. We get promotions and salary increases that are decided (mostly) on an objective evaluation by our peers.
5. We have excellent graduate students to work as our assistants in teaching and our apprentices in research.
6. We get sabbatical leaves.
7. We are invited to participate in governance of the institution through committee service in the department, college, campus, and system.
8. We are provided with staff to handle many burdensome chores; and we usually can rely on the top administration to keep things organized and funded.
What about our personal financial condition? Well, we commonly like to believe that, since we are so intellectually superior, we could earn much higher salaries out in the world; but we have taken on this academic calling and expect to lead merely comfortable lives. The rewards we seek are primarily non-monetary: pride and perhaps acclaim for our research/creative accomplishments and satisfaction from our teaching experiences. And, we have a rather good retirement plan.
So,
What are our complaints?
What do we want?
What are our ideas for the future?
George Goldman said,
January 15, 2009 @ 10:41 am
Who has this gone out to ?
admin said,
January 15, 2009 @ 11:53 am
I have sent a note about this posting to my email list – around 300 people, mostly UC faculty.
Charlie
anon said,
January 21, 2009 @ 2:30 am
I think you are thinking like sukrat, but I think you should cover the other side of the topic in the post too…