Assessing Differential Faculty Contributions and Aligning Faculty Advancement with Mission Values

NSF ADVANCE Grant. Institutional inability among U.S. institutions of higher education to recognize, measure, and evaluate a comprehensive and inclusive range of activities is a significant barrier to advancement for women and faculty of color who engage disproportionately in activities that directly benefit students, universities, and communities, but which are not easily captured in traditional measures of “impact.” This project aims to reimagine the “impact factor” by realigning evaluation of faculty contributions with the broader range of activities that constitute the foundation of higher education.

We have concluded that there are three inter-related elements within the general work of revising advancement processes to be more comprehensive and mission aligned. These are: recognition by faculty and administrators within an institution of a broader more inclusive range of faculty contributions; the development of a toolkit for assigning merit to and evaluating these activities; and intentional faculty development in alignment with a more comprehensively recognized range of career pathways. The proposed ADVANCE Partnership provides an ideal opportunity to experiment with variations on implementing revisions, variations that might be more suited to different types of universities, thereby making the initial SU ADVANCE IT project more widely generalizable.