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Information for Institutional Data Providers
Information for Faculty Survey Respondents
Thank you for your interest in the Faculty, Academic Careers, and Environments (FACE) Project.
This project includes a survey of individuals working in teaching, research, and public service or community outreach at degree-granting nonprofit colleges and universities in the United States. The Spring 2023 pilot survey is part of a study seeking to understand how best to create a nationally representative profile of academic personnel, including their working conditions, career experiences, and diverse academic identities.
This page provides an overview of the FACE Project pilot survey and links to other resources about the project.
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. RTI International is a highly-respected firm that regularly surveys individuals and institutions on behalf of the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the U.S. Department of Education. The FACE Project has been approved by the institutional review board (IRB) at the University of Southern California and is funded with a grant from the National Science Foundation.
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. We’re interested in better understanding the work and workplace experiences of part-time and full-time adjuncts, instructors, lecturers, research scientists, extension faculty (also called public outreach or community education faculty) and other academic personnel who work in classrooms, labs, and extension sites. In some other 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, and we want to hear from a broader cross-section of academic workers.
The FACE Project research team has developed a set of questions about your academic employment, your working conditions, and your identity. The questionnaire is designed to be relevant for your specific position and career status. All information you provide will remain confidential; RTI International will remove your name and institutional affiliation before sharing data with our research team. When combined with responses from other academics at colleges and universities around the country, this data will produce a more complete picture of academic life in 2023. (The last comparable national study was carried out in 2004.)
If you have any questions not answered by the information on this website, you can email face_survey@rti.org or call (866) 253-0474. For more information about the FACE Project, check out our FAQs.