V. Components of the Multi-Year Plan
     B. Expenditures
          (1) Major Initiatives $7.0 M
              (e): Faculty and Staff Roles and Rewards

Recommendations have come forward from the Task Force on Faculty Roles and Rewards. The changes proposed are essential. In particular, the three components of the University Mission (research, teaching, and outreach) must be regarded as scholarly activities, provided they are conducted in a scholarly fashion. There is a perception that the present tenure and promotion system for faculty is designed to give preferential recognition to research and less weight to teaching and outreach. While we should continue to expect scholars at a Land Grant Research University to be multidimensionally excellent, we must recognize that people have life cycles, that significant changes occur over a 30-year period of service. As suggested by Boyer and Rice, it may be productive to use new terminology and speak of the Scholarship of Research and Discovery, the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning and the Scholarship of Service and Outreach. The best scholarship also calls for the integration of knowledge, by forming connections across the three dimensions, and by fostering interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary activities. Teaching and learning should include mentoring and advising. If someone chooses to spend two years on developing new technologies for teaching a course, this work must be recognized and rewarded as scholarship. The recommendations from the Task Force on Public Service, which defines academic outreach as a component of teaching and research, is another constructive way to blur the boundaries and to generate new approaches to assessing scholarship.

The category of Public Service must be reconceived so that service to the discipline, the department, the University, and the community--"service" in the sense of good citizenship--are recognized in different ways. These activities differ from outreach in the Land Grant sense of applying scholarship to important societal issues, but they are very important. In fact there is a great need in our institutions and in our communities for citizenship, for locals as well as cosmopolitans. People who serve the University in the governance system, for example, will naturally find it harder to fulfill all of the other expectations, such as the number of scholarly activities produced that year. As long as the quality of the scholarship is measured, rather than the quantity, a natural recognition of the range of contributions is possible.

No individual should be expected to contribute equally to all components of the mission at all times. Nor should any department necessarily deliver equal amounts of teaching, research and service. What is important is an agreed upon set of deliverables by unit and individual, with the emphasis varying broadly over time. In terms of becoming an empowering institution, it will also be productive to reward units as well as individuals. If a department or support unit has made stellar progress in advancing a multicultural environment, for example, then the entire unit could be rewarded, e.g., with additional supplies and services budgets. Or if a unit contributes to mentoring new students by providing faculty to engage with students in residence halls, to create a new sense of community, then the department should be rewarded as a whole. Funds in support of such departmental and unit initiatives are explicitly included for this major initiative.

In a Research University that is also Land Grant, there is merit in considering criteria that are different when moving from an Assistant to an Associate Professor and when moving from an Associate to a Full Professor. At earlier stages it is important to emphasize research since, given the nature of the modern Ph.D., a student does not necessarily emerge as a creative scholar with an original research agenda. But in becoming a Full Professor it is fitting to require not only more of the same, but also to expect a response to a wider calling of becoming a full citizen of the University as well as of the discipline. Our Universities need people with both cosmopolitan and local perspectives. It is necessary to think globally and act locally as well as to think locally and act globally.

These suggestions are not meant to be exhaustive--only illustrative. The work of the Task Force should be pursued urgently through the appropriate channels. Without a revision of the reward system it will be virtually impossible to bring about the synergy and the optimization of the creative energies of all individuals to tackle the myriad demands placed on the future University. In parallel fashion the proposals for reward and recognition of staff in the Working Group Report on Support Services must be studied. Not all these recommendations cost money. Sometimes they point to culture changes that are necessary for the University. What we need is a University that is more flexible with respect to the expectations that it places upon faculty and staff and more responsive to the range of their contributions.

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