The faculty members of the future: how are they being shaped?

Christian Century, Feb 4, 1998 by Barbara G. Wheeler

Second, institutions should nurture faculty members' sense of vocation, giving special emphasis to junior faculty. The single least expected and most significant finding of our study of junior faculty was that their success--defined as tenure or extension of contract--is a function not of how well they perform but of decisions the institution makes before they arrive. Early in the three-year study, before we knew at would happen to those we were following, we noticed that some junior faculty had what we came to call "valuable jobs." They were doing things that key faculty members thought important. Others had what we called "junky jobs"--a collage of tasks no one else wanted to do but that had to be done to please accreditors or political caucuses in the school or in outside constituency groups.

We also noticed that some junior faculty had been carefully chosen for their potential to fit the school's culture; these usually got a lot of attention from powerful senior faculty after they arrived. Others were hastily appointed and usually ignored. Not surprisingly, most of the carefully chosen junior faculty were serving in valued positions and most of the haphazardly appointed in junky jobs.

It was also not surprising that most of the first group were tenured or promoted or both, and the others weren't. If one of the schools we studied had not had a financial crisis, the correlation would have been almost perfect. In only one or two cases did sponsored faculty in good jobs mess up so badly that their colleagues did not want to retain them; and in only one or two instances did junior faculty manage to overcome the handicap of appointment to a junk job.

The success or failure of new faculty, then, is largely determined before they begin to work for an institution by the way that institution has shaped the position and the care with which it selects the occupant. The reason for this, I'm convinced, is that new faculty--though very smart and well read (and probably better educated than most of their senior colleagues), though religiously observant and already experienced in teaching, though flexible, open and good-humored--have not found a vocation, do not know what purpose they want to serve. If administrators and senior faculty set their assignments with real seriousness and adopt them into the company of educators with great care, that invitation can function as a genuine call to profession, and many of those so called will find their calling.

If, however, schools cobble together positions purely for their own convenience and select the occupants carelessly, new faculty will see that offer for what it is: a contract to buy their services. The work will probably get done, but the relationship will not be happy or lasting.

Barbara Wheeler is president of Auburn Theological Seminary in New York City and director of Auburn's Center for the Study of Theological Education.