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Creating Options: Models for Flexible Faculty Career Pathways

An ACE–Center for Effective Leadership & Alfred P. Sloan Foundation project

In the promotion and tenure processes, tenure-track and tenured faculty frequently encounter ambiguous and contradictory criteria, conflicting messages between institutional rhetoric and the reward structure, murky and secretive review procedures, and unmitigated stress.¹  Added to this inhospitable combination, tenure-track and tenured faculty often find difficulty successfully navigating the promotion and tenure processes while simultaneously striving to fulfill personal responsibilities. These factors cause many talented academics to choose non- or marginal academic career paths.

The rigid, traditional model of academe particularly affects women and people of color. The barriers that they encounter in their climb up the academic ladder typically stem from the structure of academe (i.e., policies and practices) and/or from the culture of academe (i.e., experiences of isolation, marginalization, tokenism, exclusion, etc.).² The focus of this ACE/CEL project is to tackle some of the structural barriers, with the objective of developing and using specific recommendations for augmenting the number of pathways to a successful academic career.

Structural barriers include tenure and promotion policies, which dictate both the kind of work faculty must perform to earn tenure (research vs. teaching vs. service), as well as the way in which they must do the work (independently vs. collaboratively) to be rewarded. Another example of a structural barrier is the probationary period (the pre-tenure years), which poses a problem for women faculty because it often coincides with their prime years for childbearing.³ In addition, for some senior faculty approaching retirement, the lack of flexible employment options frequently translates into continuing in their full-time positions for longer than they wish and, in some cases, longer than departmental colleagues want them to stay.⁴

To this end, the goals of Creating Options: Models for Flexible Faculty Career Pathways, funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, are three-fold:

1. To raise awareness of the problems that higher education faculty encounter, particularly those at research universities, regarding their recruitment, retention, revitalization, work life/family balance, and career satisfaction.
   
   
2. To initiate a national dialogue on the need to alter specific aspects of the structure of the academy and to, in turn, impact the culture, particularly with respect to tenured and tenure-track faculty at research universities. Such changes are needed in order to make tenured and tenure-track positions more viable career options for talented scholars who wish to pursue successful and fulfilling academic careers while simultaneously being able to manage personal life/family obligations.
   
   
3. To generate thoughtful, tested approaches to assist research universities in implementing promising practices in this area.

For more information about the Creating Options project, contact Gloria Thomas, Associate Director, at gloria_thomas@ace.nche.edu or (202) 939-9404.

Questions about this page can be directed to jean_mclaughlin@ace.nche.edu.

This page was last updated on January 11, 2007.

¹Chait, Richard P. (Ed.). (2002). The Questions of Tenure. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (return to text)
²Trower, Cathy. Study of New Scholars. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Graduate School of Education. See http://www.newscholars.org. (return to text)
³Ibid. (return to text)
⁴Finkelstein, M., R. Seal, and J. Schuster. (1998). The New Academic Generation: A Profession in Transformation. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. (return to text)