The Department Chair's Role in Developing New Faculty into Teachers and Scholars

With the ranks of new incoming faculty likely to swell in coming years, hiring new tenure-track instructors and seeing them through to tenure is a department chair’s responsibility that carries significant departmental and institutional consequences. The Department Chair's Role in Developing New Faculty into Teachers and Scholars is designed to help chairs with the three critical stages of new faculty socialization:

 

• Recruitment and Hiring, including organizing the search, negotiating the job offer, providing information, fielding professional/institutional questions, and planning an effective orientation
• Developing Faculty in the First Year, including orienting new faculty to teaching, addressing service concerns, developing full-year orientation programs, and creating mentoring relationships
• Evaluating New Faculty Performance by demystifying the promotion and tenure process, developing productive researchers and effective teachers, monitoring service obligations, and explaining evaluation procedures

The authors offer concrete advice and activities; model real-life situations; and provide examples of letters, checklists, and orientations that can be adapted to individual contexts. This book provides the tools chairs need to adapt habit and intuition into effective management practices. The authors’ advice will help new faculty succeed in their goals of teaching, research, and service and their new institutions, while ensuring department chairs achieve the mission and objective of their own units and the campus and college as a whole.

ESTELA MARA BENSIMON is the associate dean of faculty at the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education and codirector of the USC Center for the Urban Education, an interdisciplinary research center focusing on urban education issues in Los Angeles. She is also coprincipal investigator of the Project on Faculty Evaluation and compensation and professor in the division of Education Policy and Administration. Prior to joining USC, she was the principal investigator on a five-year study on organizational changes for the National Center on Postsecondary Teaching Learning, and Assessment. Her current research and teaching focus on faculty compensation, academic leadership, organizational change, and urban colleges and universities. Her publications have appeared in Change, Review of Higher Education, Journal of Higher Education, Liberal Education, and Harvard Education Review. She is the coauthor of Redesigning, Collegiate Leadership: Teams and Teamwork in Higher Education (with Anna Neumann) and Promotion and Tenure: Community and Socialization in Academic.

KELLY WARD has been an assistant professor of higher education at Oklahoma State University since fall 1999. Prior to that, she was on the faculty at the University of Montana where she was also the director of faculty development for the integration of service learning throughout the higher education system in Montana. Her areas of scholarly interest are junior faculty development, the service role of faculty, and the integration of service into the curriculum.

KARLA SANDERS is the director of the Center for Academic Excellence at Buena Vista University in Storm Lake, Iowa. She is responsible for the university-wide assessment efforts, meeting the needs of students with disabilities, managing the tutoring and study skills center, and coordinating the learning community program. Her PhD is in English from The Pennsylvania State University where she was the editor/conference coordinator for the National Center on Postsecondary Teaching, Learning, and Assessment.