Initiatives of the CAS Strategic Plan

Faculty and Staff Workload and Job Satisfaction

CAS Strategic Plan Home

The college will address misalignments between institutional needs and allocation of work.

The college will address misalignments between institutional needs and allocation of work, focusing on areas such as workload, reward, community, and fairness. The college will meaningfully decrease unnecessary workload burdens on staff and faculty, and develop new resources to support necessary work. In order to promote the intellectual life among faculty, the college will create and support opportunities for faculty to gather, both formally and informally, to share their own pedagogy, research, scholarship, and creative practice, and to support innovation, promote intellectual risk taking, and foster academic excellence.

Why Is This Important?

Unnecessary work, inefficiencies, and a paucity of opportunities for faculty to gather informally to share their teaching and professional engagement ideas, concerns, and successes contribute to low morale among faculty. Addressing these issues will enhance faculty morale, engagement, and espirit de corps, which will translate to positive impacts on faculty recruitment and retention, academic excellence, and innovative and enthusiastic engagement with our mission.

What Does Success Look Like?

Improvements are seen in faculty and staff morale and job satisfaction; faculty and staff feel supported and valued; the esprit de corps of the faculty is enhanced. The college will have a variety of intellectual and social engagement events that are of broad interest and that are widely attractive and widely anticipated, that involve general engagement by the college, alumni, and/or wider community.

First-Year Goals

Identify misalignments and initiate planning for how to address them.
Articulate a strategy for fundraising for faculty and staff support needs identified via community input and discussions with department chairs.
Facilitate opportunities for faculty to gather informally and identify mechanisms and incentives for faculty to share their work with each other across disciplines.