SHAPING FACULTY ROLES IN A TIME OF CHANGE: Leadership for Student Learning
San Diego, California
April 2-4, 2009
During the 20th century, America with its broadly decentralized system of colleges and universities created the most powerful mechanism for the development of human talent in the history of the world. With little fanfare and even less institutional self-reflection, however, what is often referred to as “the envy of the world” is undergoing a profound transformation. In their influential recent book The American Faculty (2006), Finkelstein and Schuster note that our colleges and universities are being “destabilized in the face of extraordinary rapid change.”
As the end of the first decade of the 21st century approaches, AAC&U invites faculty and other campus leaders—as individuals and as teams—to consider what is at stake for the future of undergraduate education and its faculty in a time of increased splintering of roles, contingency of status, and workload demand. How do these issues vary across sectors and from institution to institution in both 2- and 4-year schools? What are individual faculty, faculty groups, departments and disciplines, and whole institutions doing to creatively and thoughtfully respond in the face of change and conflict?
This conference will engage participants in shaping the priorities and even the definition of the 21st century faculty, with a particular focus on undergraduate education. The goal is to better understand changes in teaching, learning, research, service, and shared governance and to learn from the most promising practices that allow faculty to strike a balance across multiple roles and responsibilities. Graduate students, early career faculty, and later career faculty, both part time and full time, are urged to join with other campus leaders in articulating a new and more inclusive vision of the faculty that connects individuals across a range of institutions and professional situations.
In addition to focusing on the issues outlined above, participants will be invited to present and explore together such issues as inclusion, equity, and diversifying the faculty; expanding roles in governance for contingent faculty; the increasing expectations for faculty research productivity; budget constraints; and preparing future faculty for these reshaped roles and responsibilities.
AAC&U’s April 2-4, 2009 conference in San Diego will be the first in a series offering a national forum on the current state of the higher education faculty and the changes needed to strengthen undergraduate education. A second conference to highlight new models for faculty will be held in Philadelphia, March 25-27, 2010. Plan now to organize a campus team to join others from across the country in both national conversations about these critical faculty issues.
Major themes for 2009 include:
- Responsibilities for learning (teaching, curricular designs, and assessment)
- Creating new approaches to community, academic freedom, and shared governance (for contingent, tenure track, and tenured faculty)
- Faculty work and leadership in the engaged campus (involvement in community partnerships and the scholarship of engagement)
- Balancing the many roles of the faculty (integrating the professional and the personal and creating new approaches to faculty development)
- Movement toward a new conception of the profession
|
