In recent weeks, the campus community, and particularly the student community, has been invested in determining where power is located and how it is deployed. Who holds power and who is able to deploy it? The annual faculty staffing plan–a document that students rarely see or know about, is one of those sources of power. Although there is no rule that keeps students from seeing it, according to Dean of the Faculty Abigail Van Slyck, there is also no established practice of sharing it with students – even though such a practice would be in keeping with shared governance and increase student understanding of how decisions are made at the level of the senior administration.
Due to sabbaticals, retirements, resignations and other departures, temporary and otherwise, Connecticut College’s faculty is in a state of perpetual flux. To manage this state, the Dean of the Faculty draws up a faculty staffing plan each year. Phrased not in terms of specific professors, but rather in terms of human resources and tenure-track lines that are moved in and out of departments based on perceived staffing needs, the plan determines how each of the currently 162 lines gets distributed across the College, as well as how the visiting faculty budget is allocated. Each department has a maximum of twelve Full-Time Employment (FTE) lines, and a minimum of three. Each FTE faculty member teaches the equivalent of five sections a year. As faculty searches can take an entire academic year, with the hired faculty starting the following year, the plan is drawn up in advance; this year’s plan primarily addresses the 2016-2017 academic year.
The staffing plan is in four parts and performs four different functions. It contains a prioritized wish list of new positions that the College would like to fill in the next five years if staffing lines became available due to reallocation or new financial resources. The plan also categorizes both openings and anticipated openings in faculty positions during the next five years. It places these openings in one of the following three groups: positions most likely to remain in departments, positions subject to further evaluation, or positions that might become available for reallocation. Projecting over five years, the plan assesses and governs departmental staffing needs and resources other than tenure-track lines. Finally, the plan contains a list of the approved faculty searches, which ultimately lead to hires.
“Our staffing plan process is very unusual … [for] the extent to which it is consultative,” said Dean Van Slyck. At other institutions, the plan is usually the provost’s decision alone. At Conn, the plan is written in consultation with President Katherine Bergeron and the Faculty Steering and Conference Committee (FSCC). They take into account the Educational Planning Committee’s (EPC) “five-year curricular plan,” which is “renew[ed] and revis[ed]” each year, said Dean Van Slyck. Faculty vote on the plan. In the fall, the Dean of the Faculty also meets with the chairs of departments that will submit staffing requests (by December 1) on that year. Whether she approves the requests or not “depends so much on the size of the department and what department it is,” said Dean Van Slyck. In that meeting, Dean Van Slyck said that she and the department chair talk about defining departmental quality at Conn. She asks, “How do we think about quality of a department at an institution of our size?” The university method of having every subspecialty of a field represented in a department simply is not feasible at Conn, so the College has to define “quality” differently, she said. Students are involved in this process in a couple of places: in the Priorities, Planning and Budget Committee (PPBC), which advises the president and includes faculty, staff (both hourly and salaried), and students. Departmental Student Advisory Boards (SAB), which involve students in the hiring process of tenured and temporary faculty, are also invovled. On student involvement in these capacities, the Dean Van Slyck said, “I think it’s really important that students have an opportunity to share their experiences and reflect [on them].” When asked about the effectiveness of the current staffing plan process, she responded, “I continue to think it’s working well.” She maintained that using the existing committees and procedures “really vigorously” for conversation among faculty, staff, students, and administrators will continue to yield fruitful results.
Previous years’ staffing plans influence each subsequent year’s plan. The plan written last year emphasized the on-going nature of curriculum reVision, and that the new general education curriculum, when it eventually comes into effect, will affect departmental curricula as well. Each department, it argued, needs to align course offerings with the goals, whatever they may turn out to be, of the new general education curriculum. However, as both last year’s and this year’s plan reiterate, no one is able yet to predict how the new general education curriculum will affect enrollment patterns, which is largely what the staffing plan responds to.
Drawing upon previous years’ plans, 2014-2015’s plan emphasizes, apart from curricular reVision, strengthening or establishing interdisciplinary connections across campus, and strengthening or maintaining majors’ offerings. The History Department, for example, asked to retain a vacant 1.0 FTE tenure-track line “to hire a specialist in sub-Saharan African history.” It was approved, according to the plan, because it “will maintain the current geographical scope of their curriculum, while also building the department’s capacity to offer comparative, global, and transnational approaches to the study of history. In addition, the position will play a major role in the revitalization of the College’s Africana Studies program and support Global Islamic Studies.” The plan uses Conn’s admissions peers and other NESCAC schools, as well as the direction that a given discipline is moving in, as a barometer. It also considers “enrollment pressures,” and how assigning a faculty line will improve “the College’s diversity efforts” and its “initiatives to weave principles of inclusive excellence throughout an increasingly internationalized curriculum.” Of course, ultimately, all of this is dependent upon financial resources. Dean Van Slyck declined to give the size of the budget for hiring and retaining faculty, saying that the number is not “usually share[d] outside of PPBC.”
Though Computer Science, Economics, Human Development and Physics all asked for additional tenure-track lines, none were granted this year due to lack of resources. This year’s plan generally authorized that departments could retain their unfilled tenure-track lines, as well as authorize certain departments to hire temporary faculty or staff. Religious Studies, for example, will lose a tenure-track line after a retirement, and at the moment is only authorized to search for and hire a full-time visitor. Assuming the hiring process goes as planned, that person will be here during academic years 2016-2017 and 2017-2018.
About temporary faculty, Dean Van Slyck said, “I’m so proud of us.” Where the national trend is to increase the reliance upon temporary faculty, she said that “our line is flat.” Dean Van Slyck also commended the “quality” of adjuncts and visitors. However, regardless of temporary faculty members’ quality, and ability to maintain what this year’s staffing plan calls “institutional flexibility,” what we gain in flexibility at the institutional level by employing any temporary faculty members, we lose in long-term growth, particularly at the departmental level.
