Faculty Priorities and Undergraduate Education at Vassar: A Proposal to Reexamine Faculty Assessment

When I visit scientists at other institutions, often the first thing they do is to give a tour of their research laboratories, regardless of the fact that biochemistry and molecular biology laboratories are monotonously similar. Research equipment is expensive, so the students, technicians, and post-doctoral associates who actually do the experiments share items like balances, centrifuges, or microscopes. During those requisite tours I always inspect the balances, not because they are inherently interesting, but rather because their condition is a good indicator of the way everyone works together. Frequently the balances are disgusting, surrounded by a mysterious blend of chemical powders, crystals, and caked on crud. No one would argue that this is good research practice, to have contaminating spillage all over the instrument where experimental reagents are weighed, but everyone in the laboratory is incredibly busy and it is rare for any individual to take time or responsibility to clean up a mess that the whole group contributes to. Whether this phenomenon results in faulty research is an open question, but it speaks to a whole spectrum of problems that afflict academic organizations, where the fragile balance between shared responsibilities and personal advancement is easily skewed.

Garrett Hardin’s landmark essay “The Tragedy of the Commons” addresses the challenge of shared resources, and Hardin’s analogy of a traditional village commons captures the essence of this problem to great effect. A commons can function well as a shared resource for grazing small herds, and should an individual herder add an animal to increase personal income, the community shares the burden of additional grazing. Other herders inevitably follow suit, each seeking to increase personal wealth and to maintain equitable share of the commons. If the herders are unable to agree on and abide by sustainable limits, the commons is inexorably overgrazed and degraded. Hardin’s scenario might seem simplistic, but the historical and current record show this drama continually played out, from the daily maintenance of a laboratory balance to the collapse of civilizations. “Tragedy of the Commons” was in many ways a plea to elevate an ethos of shared responsibility to the forefront of policy and rule making.

The mission statement of Vassar College presents an interesting collection of educational ideals and lofty goals, but is perhaps best summarized in the first sentence, which includes a quote from Matthew Vassar, “The primary mission of Vassar College (is) to furnish ‘the means of a thorough, well-proportioned, and liberal education.’” Put simply, Vassar is an undergraduate liberal arts college whose mission is to provide undergraduate students with the best possible liberal education. This imperative stands out from the rest of the mission statement, it is the “commons”, the shared enterprise that justifies a superb faculty, Vassar’s investment in professional resources, and all of the time and energy that goes into assessing, maintaining, and nurturing a talented faculty.

A number of wonderful liberal arts colleges, like Vassar, espouse the benefits of an education imbued with breadth, depth and rigor. Residential colleges can engender a peer-learning community taught and mentored by well-qualified and professionally supported faculty, along with abundant opportunity to engage with peers and faculty in learning outside the traditional classroom through independent study, internships, the arts, athletics, media, governance, and community service. A compelling asset of residential colleges is the mentoring relationships that can develop between an accessible faculty and students. Students frequently rely on faculty advisors or admired instructors for educational, career, and life guidance. Formal faculty mentoring programs have been found to improve academic success for first-generation-to-college students. Important and transformative educational experiences can result when students work with faculty on scholarly projects. A significant and often unacknowledged benefit comes from the informal or accidental interactions between faculty and students that can readily occur in the hallways, sidewalks, or cafes on small campuses. Mentoring by a readily accessible student-centered faculty is a large part of what distinguishes traditional liberal arts colleges from other educational venues, including many of the most prominent universities.

As I near the end of my third decade at Vassar, I can’t help but reflect on the many dedicated, accomplished, and gifted colleagues and students that I’ve been privileged to work with. But from the day I arrived at Vassar in 1984, I have been continually dismayed by the failure of this faculty and multiple administrations to coalesce around and maintain focus on the primary educational mission of the college. In place of a coherent student-centered educational community, the nexus of Vassar’s faculty often seems to be the faculty, entrenched in a laissez faire status quo that facilitates personal accomplishment and creativity, but provides little incentive to engage in the collective responsibilities, the shared introspection, and consensus building that are central to an innovative and rigorous educational community.

I began my teaching career in 1983 at the height of an abysmal job market, leaving a post-doctoral research position in molecular biology to take a one-year sabbatical replacement position at Earlham College, a small liberal arts school affiliated with the Quakers. The Quakers have rich tradition of rigorous and innovative liberal education, distinctive in their emphasis on community, conflict resolution, and social values. Everyone goes on a first name basis to minimize hierarchical relationships, all decisions are made by strict consensus (no voting), and all members of the community are expected to prioritize the educational mission. Faculty and administrators begin each year with a multi-day retreat on educational issues and priorities, sometimes with sample classes from one another. Earlham certainly had its share of the usual competition for resources, political maneuvering, occasional bickering, and other foibles that plague any academic organization, but always attenuated by strong peer pressure among the faculty to be collegial. At times the persistent focus on mission and collegial behavior could feel overbearing. But the result was a student-centered faculty, a coherent and innovative curriculum, strong mentoring, and highly engaged students. The institution-wide focus on students, community, and educational mission was striking, especially in contrast to what I found at Vassar.

I arrived at Vassar in the summer of 1984, on a three-year visiting contract. The campus was comparatively opulent, rich in resources that many seemed to take for granted, and the students were remarkable. But the campus engendered little sense of community, the faculty and administration were extraordinarily hierarchical, and from the very start I was advised to limit interactions with students and colleagues that might take time away from research. Rank seemed to permeate professional and social interactions between faculty, with frequent reference to “junior” or “senior” status. Faculty meetings were poorly attended, especially by non-tenured faculty, and often dominated by a few “senior” faculty. I used to walk away from faculty and committee meetings astounded at the gradient of faculty wisdom, ideas, assistant ideas, and in my case, visiting assistant ideas. Steve Jobs, the late co-founder of Apple spoke frequently of the stultifying effect that hierarchy can have on innovation and creativity in corporate culture, much less in education. People deserve recognition for their accomplishments, but the hierarchical culture I encountered at Vassar was socially corrosive, an anathema to liberal education and the College’s feminist traditions, and symptomatic of a community lacking effective faculty leadership and strong standards of collegiality.

The lack of a community ethos was reflected in many aspects of the campus. The faculty had just rejected a massive effort to revise the curriculum, there was a tenure cap, and campus morale was abysmal (at least among the untenured faculty and staff). Academic departments and programs appeared to function like isolated silos, autonomous entities competing for resources with little regard to institutional priorities or equity. Plenty of departments were collegial and well managed, with others afflicted by interpersonal feuds that spilled over into departmental business. Some departments seemed to be run like fiefdoms where full professors took choice teaching assignments and left the more labor-intensive introductory and intermediate courses to their less empowered colleagues. The college lacked well-articulated personnel policies and it was common for individual faculty and departments to negotiate special contractual arrangements or private research funds, contributing both to inequities and lasting resentments. Employment circumstances for staff were equally troubling. Stories of temperamental supervisors and testy encounters with faculty were common among staff, and the lack of effective workplace policies left little recourse in dysfunctional or unfair work situations, eventually contributing to the vote for union representation. It was in many ways a campus where no one seemed to be “minding the store,” rich in cultural assets and talented individuals, but beneath the surface sometimes seething with intrigue, anarchy, and failure to rein in shamelessly self-serving behavior.

I have seen many gradual changes and improvements over the years. The College now has a regularized and open process for prioritizing faculty hiring, there are well-articulated employment policies and a professional HR department, a harassment policy, improved accounting and budgetary practices, and more equitable distribution of resources. Efforts to resolve conflict and encourage professional decorum are more frequent. Many profound problems persist, but the Vassar of 2012 is in many ways a much better place to work than the institution I came to in 1984. And throughout, Vassar has attracted talented students and faculty, provided excellent staff and technological support, and maintained a large and diverse curriculum of well-taught courses. There are very good reasons for Vassar’s continued strong reputation and high placement in national ranking schemes.

However, Vassar continues to fall short in several important regards, perhaps the most salient of which is a systemic discrepancy between the Vassar’s educational mission and the priorities of the faculty. Faculty priorities are best defined by the criteria for faculty assessment, scholarly productivity (primarily the form of professional publication or artistic presentation), teaching (based on CEQs and self-reporting portfolios), and service. I was unable to find a rationale for these criteria in the Governance, Faculty Handbook, or College Catalog, so I can only surmise what the authors were thinking when this policy was adopted. From conversations with long retired faculty my sense is that the focus on scholarship was intended to promote professional development and maintenance of disciplinary expertise, both highly laudable goals.

The role of scholarship in higher education and its relation to teaching is complex. An intense emphasis on scholarship began in earnest after World War II and by the 1950s the term “publish or perish” had come to characterize a system whereby faculty are promoted with tenure or dismissed, based largely on publication records. Scholarly activity is clearly an effective path for faculty to engage in continued intellectual growth, creative innovation, and discourse in a broad professional community. By fostering scholarship, educational institutions have become centers for transformative ideas and technologies. Faculty “productivity” is now usually equated with scholarly publication and at many universities it is the primary metric by which faculty are assessed. There has long been an assumption that faculty success in scholarship is crucial for maintaining engaged vibrant educators, but at many educational institutions scholarship has thrived while faculty attention to undergraduate education has diminished. For faculty, investment of time and resources in scholarship has evolved into a high-stakes enterprise, the measure of a successful career. The concomitant escalation in academic publication has overwhelmed library shelves and budgets, and stretched thin the voluntary peer review system charged with maintaining standards of quality.

Over the past fifty years, a number of prestigious undergraduate colleges, including Vassar, adopted policies encouraging or requiring faculty scholarship. There is no question that Vassar has a vibrant and professionally engaged faculty, with an impressive record of scholarship and a reputation for superbly taught classes. But, as at many institutions of higher education, Vassar’s faculty have failed to reconcile the value of personal scholarly achievement against many of the activities essential to providing students with the best possible liberal education.

The consequences of this imbalance are evident in a variety of ways:

A faculty that rarely engages in collective reflection and consensus building on curricular priorities

• A curriculum that has been relatively static for over thirty years. There has been fluctuation and growth of multidisciplinary programs, but little substantive change in policy or systematic innovation
• A failure to address concerns over the limited curricular breadth experienced by many students
• A failure to prioritize and incentivize faculty mentorship and high-level transformative learning experiences for students
• A failure to address educational strategies for first-generation-to-college students and an increasingly diverse student population
• A failure to create coherent and innovative educational experiences for first-year students
• A compressed, oddly asymmetric, and inequitable course schedule frequently driven by faculty choice, often without regard to pedagogic or student priorities
• A course schedule that creates a “three-day weekend” for many students, with the associated partying and alcohol use
• A failure to confront persistent grade inflation and promote consistent academic standards
• Compensating substantive service with released time from teaching, without comparable release from scholarly expectations
• Many faculty increasingly work away from campus, presumably to minimize interruptions, but significantly diminishing student access and collegial community
• Newly hired faculty are often advised and acculturated to prioritize scholarly work and minimize community service or mentoring activity
• A persistently flawed and inadequate system for teaching assessment (but hopefully to be revised soon)
• Substantive service to the College is persistently undervalued, perceived as an altruistic sacrifice, rather than as a shared commitment to educational mission and collegial community
• The primacy of the faculty assessment and governance committees over the curriculum committee.
• A failure to engage in debating and rethinking Vassar’s increasingly obsolete departmental structure

A longer or more detailed list of issues would be easy to construct, and no doubt there are examples of exceptions. But the important point is that when collective responsibilities are not sufficiently valued, the burden of meeting those responsibilities languishes. We end up with institutional stasis, a faculty resistant to change, and efforts to meet those responsibilities born by relatively few members of the community or turned over de facto to the administration. The narrow focus of the current assessment criteria encourage faculty to disengage from students outside the context of classroom teaching and to minimize personal effort toward collegial community. The fact that a number of faculty do engage heavily with students and community speaks to the strong educational ethic of those individuals, not to an institutional ethos. The fact that a member of the faculty can, in theory, schedule all classes on two weekdays, otherwise be absent from campus, and be well rewarded as long as the publication record and CEQs are good, raises all kinds of issues. The institutional message to faculty is to publish quality work, get good CEQ scores and construct good teaching portfolios, and do moderate committee service, as if that is all it takes to engender a robust academic community. So the faculty do well at scholarly publication and classroom teaching (based on CEQs), but treat mentoring, community building, and substantive service as altruistic activities. Another important consequence is that Vassar fails to cultivate a student-centered faculty culture. These problems play out in many complex ways, as exemplified by Vassar’s history with the HHMI grant program.

Every four years, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) invites a large number of undergraduate institutions to propose innovations for undergraduate science education. Vassar has garnered three of these grants since 1990, bringing close to four million dollars for new faculty positions, professional and curricular development programs, community outreach, student research experiences, collaborative work among faculty, state of the art scientific instrumentation, and Vassar’s national reputation. A number of colleges are consistently more successful than Vassar with HHMI grants, and much of this success comes from maintaining standing faculty/administrative committees that start coordinating proposals several years prior to the next deadline. Their administrations make sure they have resources and acknowledgement for their work. The research, creative thought, writing, and coordination across departments that goes into these proposals is recognized as a substantial contribution to the educational mission of those colleges. In contrast, the practice at Vassar has been to start work on HHMI proposals relatively late, often less than six months before the deadline. A faculty coordinator has to be recruited, and must in turn organize a faculty steering committee. Faculty participants can be hard to come by because everyone is incredibly busy, many already have summer commitments, and there is little incentive from the College to take time out from regular scholarship to research and pull ideas together into a compelling proposal. The effort can be all consuming for the faculty coordinator. On one occasion a faculty coordinator could not be recruited and an associate dean had to prepare the proposal. One of the biggest impediments is confusion over how faculty effort fits into faculty assessment. Is it service, teaching, or scholarship? Past practice has been to classify these efforts as service, thus providing substantial disincentive to faculty participation. Surely a major grant proposal can “demonstrate incisiveness of mind, felicity of expression, and control of materials” as well as the scholarly publications called for in the Faculty Handbook.

A colleague recently reminded me of a sentiment I’ve heard expressed on multiple occasions. “If faculty stop publishing, Vassar could continue to graduate well-educated students, but if the faculty stop teaching…” One cannot characterize Vassar’s mission statement as overly concise or singular in focus, but the emphasis on high quality undergraduate education as the primary mission of the College is clear.

The equal weight the faculty assessment criteria give to scholarly publication and teaching might make perfect sense if Vassar maintained graduate programs where scholarly activity represents the bulk of student engagement. But Vassar is an undergraduate college, not an Ivy League university. The College needs a well-articulated rationale for scholarship, one that enhances the engagement of faculty with students and promotes the interplay between scholarship and teaching. For an undergraduate institution, the most cogent justification for scholarly activity is the role it can play in serving the education of undergraduates, through professional development, maintaining disciplinary expertise, integration of research and creativity into classroom teaching, and for mentoring students. Mentored undergraduate participation in research and creative endeavor represents one of the best possible venues for high-level transformative learning. Vassar already has two such programs, URSI and Ford, but neither sufficiently meet student demand and many faculty opt not to participate, at least in URSI, because investment of time and resources in a student fellow are more often than not an impediment to generating publishable research results.

This disparity between Vassar’s primary mission and faculty priorities is compounded by the way that “scholarly activity” is narrowly construed, as publication or presentation of creative work. This excludes and devalues a wide range of scholarly activities important for undergraduate education, many of which like URSI, blur the distinction between scholarship, teaching, and service. These include mentoring student research and theses, researching and developing curricular or pedagogic innovations, research to keep up with rapidly evolving disciplines, research and mastery of topics for teaching outside one’s regular discipline, mastery and curricular adaptation of new technologies, leading or participating in interdisciplinary faculty discussion/learning groups, researching and preparing institutional and individual grant proposals, developing and administering academic programs for students outside the traditional classroom, training for and mentoring first-generation-to-college students, and so forth. Many student-centered activities are superb venues for professional development, enhancing or expanding disciplinary expertise, and participation in a larger academic milieu.

Vassar’s assessment policy denotes equal weight for scholarly publication and teaching, but there is a strong perception among many faculty that scholarship is more important. Perceptions remain unabated by assertions from members of FASC stating otherwise, and might be exacerbated by the fact that members of FASC (who work very hard at considerable personal sacrifice), routinely talk about the time and effort they put into reading and comprehending all of the scholarship of every candidate for promotion. Commentary on teaching assessment or the quality of course instruction is sparse by comparison. Publications are tangible products, readily measureable by a variety of metrics, and easy to visualize. Teaching is much harder to assess. CEQs can reduce student opinions to simplistic numerical scores, easy to rank and difficult not to reify. The reality is that many components of high-quality teaching are much more ephemeral than scholarly publication, a mixture of process and learning outcomes with facets that resist objective assessment and vary with each group of students. Student questionnaires and self-reporting portfolios can provide useful information, but hardly convey the quality of learning or degree of lasting impact experienced by students. We are a species that responds attentively to entities that are easy to measure and readily quantifiable, even when the underlying data is inadequate or flawed. This bias dominates national efforts to assess learning and instruction, to the detriment of public education, and is readily evident in Vassar’s faculty assessment criteria. The faculty have not been willing or given incentive to invest the time and effort required for more effective teaching assessment.

People are attracted to professorial careers for a variety of reasons. Many faculty value the highly autonomous and creative natures of classroom teaching and scholarship. In a healthy academic climate, that autonomy is balanced by commitment to the shared responsibilities of educational mission and collegial community. Scholarly activity is part of what can make such careers intellectually rewarding, providing a forum for continued learning, creativity, and intellectual fellowship. But when scholarship becomes the primary gateway to professional and financial advancement, the educational enterprise can suffer. Vassar has evolved a faculty culture that often seems libertarian, afraid to adopt any rules, requirements, or standards that might impose a bit on professional autonomy. It is more than a little ironic that a group with so many liberal individuals is collectively quite conservative when it comes to change in the curriculum or policies that might contribute to a more student-centered culture. Over the years I have watched the faculty defeat or severely dilute many efforts to address serious curricular concerns. Proposals to require that students actually acquire some educational breadth, or to construct a balanced course schedule are blithely dismissed with “it’s not the Vassar way.” A balanced course schedule would require faculty who like to compress their own teaching schedules to occasionally spread their courses out over the week. Such a change would contribute to more equitable distribution of the teaching schedule across the faculty, decompress and reduce scheduling conflicts for students, hopefully diminish the Thursday night “weekend” culture among students, and perhaps contribute to a better overall learning climate. It might also lead to faculty spending more time on campus, interacting with students and colleagues, facilitating the “personal interaction with faculty” touted in Vassar’s admissions literature. The down side is that a decompressed teaching schedule might detract from time for scholarly efforts and make it more difficult to work away from the distractions of campus. These should not be bad trade-offs, but current faculty assessment policy punishes faculty for not maximizing time devoted to scholarship, and does so at the expense of good educational practices and collegial culture.

The only way resolve the conflict between scholarly productivity and educational mission is to place proportionate value on activities that contribute not only to faculty development, but also to the primary educational mission. Activities like high-impact mentorship of student scholarship or innovative course and curriculum development should be central to faculty assessment. Teaching should be the single most important thing we do. The best way to foster excellent teaching is to encourage continued professional engagement in teaching development. We should support strong teaching with robust development resources and incentive to engage them, with learning assessment resources that can facilitate pedagogic experimentation, and with learning from one another through focus groups, department discussions, team-teaching, and other forums. Second, the balance between classroom autonomy and overriding College or department/program goals should be formally and regularly discussed. Grade inflation, for example, might be attenuated if departments/programs actually sat down together and analyzed their grading patterns at the beginning of each semester. We should consider elevating the status of the Committee on Curricular Policies to the level of FASC and FPCC in the college committee hierarchy. The charge of CCP is central to the educational mission of the College, and especially important as the College begins to confront issues associated with technology and on-line education, financial constraints, and an ever-evolving student population. Finally, the faculty might attempt a serious look at the structure of the curriculum and see if there is room for improvement. For example, what if we did something radical and created an interdisciplinary team-taught yearlong multi-unit course for all freshmen, which teaches writing across disciplines, research skills in library and field, facility with statistical data, and mixes disciplines in unusual ways. Students could get an evolutionary psychology perspective on art and literature, or mix physics, history, and anthropology to look at how work has been done in different eras or cultures, or examine the interplay of linguistics and genetics in documenting history, etc. There are many wonderful innovative models for first-year student experiences, models that breakdown departmental and disciplinary barriers, that foster collegial community, and that promote professional development by enabling faculty to learn from one another or by seeding collaborative work. The College Course program was an attempt to engender these kinds of innovations, but never got sufficient resources or broad community support to have widespread impact.

Accordingly, I propose that Vassar’s faculty engage in discussion and revision of the faculty assessment criteria, to reconcile conflicts between faculty priorities and primary educational mission, place explicit value on mentoring and other activities associated with high quality education, advocate for shared responsibilities and collegial community, and endorse well-founded approaches to teaching assessment and development. Scholarship should continue to be a prominent part of faculty effort, but in a way that complements rather than conflicts with a student-centered faculty culture, and in a way that accommodates overlap with teaching and service. I present a model below, not as a proposal, but as a list of activities for discussion. As CCP and its subcommittees flesh out proposals for new CEQs and criteria for teaching assessment, we will hopefully get a clearer idea of how to construct a more effective teaching assessment policy.

Faculty Assessment

1. Excellent classroom teaching assessed by multiple approaches, which might include:

• self-reporting in the form of a teaching portfolio, that addresses well articulated criteria
• general adherence to the academic standards and practices specified in the Catalog
• peer assessment through extended observation, video recording, or co-instruction (faculty should have some training in peer assessment)
• learning assessments
• feedback from graduates
• well-conceived student course evaluation questionnaires

2. Contributions to the mission of the College through engagement in student-centered educational and mentoring activities, curricular development and innovation, professional development and scholarship, and academic administration. Activities can include but are not limited to

• intensive mentoring of student scholarship and other comparable activities
• engagement in teaching development
• professional development and maintenance of disciplinary mastery through scholarly research and creative activity
• publishing peer-reviewed research or presenting creative work
• participating in peer-review of scholarly work
• innovative course and curriculum development, including the integration of scholarship with classroom instruction
• preparing grant proposals for individual scholarship or institutional programs
• presenting at professional conferences and attending professional training workshops
• mastering or innovating with new research and teaching technologies
• interdisciplinary teaching
• organizing or participating in faculty discussion/learning groups and faculty wide retreats
• serving as a class advisor, director of teaching or research development, director of Exploring Transfer, administrator of a major grant program, or comparable academic administrative position
• serving as a department or program chair
• teaching in Exploring Transfer or comparable programs
• substantive leadership and service as a House Fellow

3. Contributions to shared governance through committee service or comparable activities

In the absence of any change, Vassar will continue to graduate bright well-educated students, offer superb courses, and attract talented faculty. The members of Vassar’s faculty represent an impressive group of creative, hard-working individuals. I have been privileged to know a number of faculty members who have been selfless in their dedication to their students and the College, putting endless hours into advising, mentoring, committee meetings, and making every effort to affect a well functioning educational community. If there is any failure in this community, it is not with the work or effort of those individuals. Vassar’s faculty might best be described as an association with many separate pockets of excellence, but failing to unite around a shared mission. It is easy to blame such a failure on administrative leadership, but Vassar’s faculty frequently resist administrative efforts in this vein.  I firmly believe that the principal responsibility for educational mission belongs to the faculty, which has primary authority over academic policy and educating students. We have perpetuated a system that has served Vassar well in fostering scholarly achievement and strong classroom teaching, but poorly at engendering student-centered educational practices and coherent community. I have been encouraged by recent administrative efforts to promote collective discussion and to support curricular experimentation, but such efforts must overcome a strong cultural inertia and an assessment system that discourages shared engagement.

We have entered an era that portends significant change in higher education. Both financial constraints and escalation of online educational resources bring the role and viability of traditional liberal arts colleges into question. For institutions like Vassar to remain vibrant and attractive to students, we have to offer an educational experience that is beneficial in ways that are distinct from other venues. Collegial community, mentorship, and personal access to a student-centered faculty are among the most valuable and distinctive assets we can offer.

Most of my perspectives on Vassar’s faculty were influenced by conversations with many thoughtful colleagues – faculty, staff, administrators, and students. This essay is a distillation of those conversations and my personal experience. I have nothing but respect for the faculty members that I have worked with over the years, and there is no part of this critique that is meant to single out or criticize any individual. Every faculty member that I know works hard and strategically to succeed at teaching and scholarship, as called for in the faculty assessment criteria.