Systemic Improvement for Teaching Faculty and Expansion of Tenure for Teaching at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI)

In 2012, Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), a private research university in Massachusetts, made systemic change to better respect, recognize and support faculty off the tenure track. Motivated by the realization that teaching faculty and other contingent faculty were becoming more numerous at and more critical to the institution, WPI established regular titles and promotional lines for the NTTF. In the spring of 2021, WPI formally established a teaching track to tenure and an institutional goal to place 40 percent of its current full-time teaching faculty on the tenure track between August 2021 and August 2023. At WPI, the design and implementation of a tenure track for teaching faculty and the other changes for remaining NTTF began to resolve some intractable problems in higher education, such as the erosion of tenure and academic freedom, the precarious status of contingent faculty, and the weakening of faculty governance. These systemic improvements grant teaching faculty at WPI the professional identity and esteem currently missing in many institutions across the country.