Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Who is conducting and sponsoring this project?
- The Faculty, Academic Career, and Environments (FACE) is a project of the Pullias Center for Higher Education at the University of Southern California, in collaboration with the University of Alabama and RTI International.
- The project is funded by the National Science Foundation.
What is the Faculty, Academic Career, and Environments (FACE) Project?
- The purpose of the FACE Project is to design and test the methods and survey items for a nationally representative study of faculty and academic personnel encompassing instructional, research and public service staff in permanent or temporary positions in the United States who may or may not have a faculty title. While the faculty role is commonly understood as encompassing responsibilities such as teaching, research, and/or service, there are vast differences in the careers and work experiences of academic personnel based on the institutions where they work, the structure of their workload, the supports available to them, employment conditions such as contract length and benefits, and the backgrounds and experiences they bring to the work. All of these differences are crucial to capture, which is why it’s important for us to ensure that the study reaches and is relevant for academic workers across institution types and employment situations.
Why study faculty and academic personnel?
- Faculty/academic personnel are critical to the success of the higher education enterprise. They teach undergraduate and graduate students, further knowledge through research, and serve the communities they work in. In other words, faculty success contributes to student success, innovation, and helping communities thrive.
Whom do you include in your definition of faculty?
- We use the term “faculty” broadly to capture part-time and full-time employees in higher education whose primary responsibilities are focused on one or more areas of the academic triad model: teaching, research and scholarship, and/or service and community outreach. We are interested in better understanding part-time and full-time adjuncts, instructors, lecturers, research scientists, extension faculty (also called public outreach faculty), and other academic personnel whose roles in classrooms, labs, and extension sites serve the core mission of higher education.
- In some contexts, the term “faculty” is reserved for tenured and tenure-track employees or for full-time instructional staff. We believe that such distinctions create false hierarchies among members of the academic workforce that are unproductive; if you do faculty-like work, we want to hear from you.
What is the Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success?
- FACE is one part of this larger long-term project to support faculty nationally. The Delphi Project is dedicated to enhancing awareness about changing faculty trends using research and data to better support faculty off the tenure track and to help create new faculty models to support higher education institutions in the future. It is a partnership with The American Association of Colleges and Universities which began in 2011. It has hundreds of resources to help better support the professoriate, please click this link for more information.
The study sounds somewhat similar to other surveys of faculty (e.g., COACHE, FSSE, HERI Faculty Survey). What additional insights would the FACE survey provide?
- First, institutions selected for the sample may participate in FACE without paying a fee.
- Second, we include a broad population of academic staff including both part-time and full-time instructors, research staff, and community educators. Other surveys are limited to only some of these populations, leading to an incomplete understanding of the people doing faculty work on campus.
- Our sample includes a wide range of postsecondary institutional types, including:
- Public and private not-for-profit;
- 2- and 4-year institutions;
- Minority serving institutions and predominately white institutions;
- Land-grant and non-land grant institutions; and
- Across Carnegie classifications.
- Each survey has a different focus: COACHE surveys focus on either job satisfaction or retention of faculty; FSSE focuses on faculty’s perceptions of student engagement. FACE is distinct in that it focuses much more broadly on faculty’s experiences at work– whether they have the resources they need to do their job well, how much they participate in decision-making in the department/program, what types of teaching practices they use– in addition to their career trajectory and overall career satisfaction.