Blog Post 1

It has been quite a couple of months or so. Once all of the email congrats (“glad it is you and not me”) and the “don’t go over to the dark side” died down among colleagues who saw the announcement that I was to be the new Faculty Fellow in the Office of the Provost, I found myself confronted with – and surrounded by – a new reality. First impressions? Colleagues on the 5th floor of PC are here all of the time. They spend all day, every day, in their offices (or in each other’s offices or in various conference rooms in a variety of configurations), meeting and meeting and mulling over numbers and policies and thinking about us: faculty members.

At the risk of cliché, I will not see the university – this one or any other – the same way again. The issues that rise to the top are big and small, they are faculty-centered and student-centered and sometimes preoccupied with what other universities are doing or how they are surviving in this competitive environment. Over these weeks and days, I have had the opportunity to contribute to conversations about faculty policies from spousal hires to primary/secondary instructors, from new faculty orientation to scholars at risk in other parts of the world, to name a few. I have met colleagues in many schools and at all levels. I have chatted with Vice Provosts and Deans and participated in the inaugural meeting of the Faculty Success Council, a group of mostly faculty and some staff members from across FIU charged with leading the development of programs and procedures that promote our success.

I found myself sitting in a conference room, looking around the table at colleagues from across the university – researcher, director, librarian, instructor, professor, and so on – hashing out the question of how to define what faculty do, would like to do and are expected to do. Before we can reward, we need to figure out what success looks like. It turns out that is not so straightforward a question (not just a matter of research dollars or how many times you have been cited by colleagues). The debate coalesced around the word scholarly. We exist in a university, in a country and in a world, where old models of liberal arts education are – on a good day – being questioned and – on a bad – under attack. All but for the most elite institutions have to adjust. This has meant, and I do not have to tell you, a complexifying of hierarchies among faculty. We now have: full professors, associate professors, assistant professors, clinical professors, digital instructors, instructors, senior instructors, adjunct instructors, and that is not all… This group – the Faculty Success Council – at its first meeting was attempting to construct a description or charge for the group, which involved defining, collectively, faculty and their aspirations and goals. This was not easy. How to respect new hierarchies within a longstanding system of hierarchies? How to define as equally important teaching when many of us have worked our way – through sweat and tears – up ladders of research success often at great personal cost. Can you reconfigure a system already running at full steam? Well, it seems we have to try. We have to honor our colleagues whose jobs may be defined differently and whose struggles might often be the same. So, these past weeks have allowed me to view the university from a different vantage point and challenged me to be humble and patient, and when possible, to voice my own concerns as an Associate Professor of History who has some, but limited, experience with leadership and administration.  Such is the charge of the Faculty Fellow in the Office of the Provost.

I would like to end by coming clean: I see the ways that inequalities manifest among (and between) faculty members and administrators; how there are in-groups and those on the outs. I do not take up this job naively or without purpose. I would, however, like to do my job, so please write me and let me know what you think. What do you want to hear about?

Rebecca