The recruitment and retention of faculty are major concerns for the academic community given present trends in the academic workforce. This Institute-funded project aims to explore the expectations, perceptions, and concerns of faculty within the University of North Carolina (UNC) system on issues related to faculty recruitment and retention. The recruitment and retention of faculty is of concern because in 2001, the University projected that UNC campuses will need to hire approximately 10,000 FTE faculty over the next decade. This estimate is based on the impending retirements of senior faculty and growth in faculty positions at a time of unprecedented enrollment growth. Thus, UNC campuses must ensure that they are sufficiently competitive to recruit talented faculty and that they are able to retain and develop the skills of the faculty that they employ. In light of this challenge, the UNC system is developing strategies for faculty recruitment and retention. This project will provide information necessary for the development of these strategies that will guide the legislative agenda and policies relevant to this issue.
By conducting a survey of early and mid-career faculty within the UNC system, the study aims to:
- Identify the broad range of factors that are perceived as supportive of the recruitment and retention of faculty at the 16 campuses within the UNC system.
- Identify the broad range of factors that are perceived as barriers to the recruitment and retention of faculty at the 16 campuses within the UNC system.
- Identify similarities and differences in the expectations, perceptions, and concerns among individuals from different types of campuses at different stages in their careers and with different types of appointments-that is, between early- and mid-career faculty; tenure-track/tenured and full-time non-tenure track faculty.
- Develop a targeted survey that will be distributed to recently hired and recently tenured faculty members.
- Use this information to guide the development of a legislative agenda and University policies.
Results of the survey will be analyzed at the system level and will be provided to individual campuses if there are sufficient responses from each campus to prevent identification of individual respondents. The survey results will be of interest to university campuses across the country as well as to other researchers who study the factors that influence potential faculty to accept academic positions and remain at their institutions. The results will also constitute an important contribution to knowledge about the faculty workforce across the age and appointment spectrum.
A preliminary paper based on data collected from the first phase of the survey is now available; the paper is titled Developing Best Practices: Responding to the Concerns of Early and Mid-Career Faculty.
