Standard 4
Contents
Faculty
Introduction
The faculty members at the college – the backgrounds they bring to teaching, their understanding of learning, their commitment to interdisciplinary teaching and learning, and their skills to do such teaching – are at the heart of the our academic success. All of these elements intertwine as faculty members enter into relationships with teaching partners, students and the material they intend to investigate in their programs. Thus to teach at Evergreen is not only an academic experience but also deeply relational.
The most powerful learning within an interdisciplinary curriculum comes only in part from the range of area of studies included; it is in the act of inquiry into matters where members have a stake in the ideas - the basis for reflexive thinking - that members draw together historical (from academic disciplines) and current (from public life) perspectives into more integrated learning. Interdisciplinary teaching rests, simultaneously, on active inquiry with colleagues and students, and ongoing planning and refinement of their programs.
Teaching, like all learning, is based in a capacity for reflexive thought. In the process of teaching faculty members change what they know and how they think; their interdisciplinary and disciplinary knowledge and insight expand, and their skills of inquiry sharpen. By its nature, interdisciplinary teaching invites faculty members into unfamiliar areas of study. It can lead to unexpected and surprising new learning. Students make it abundantly clear, in their evaluations of their own learning, that faculty members who are similarly engaged in genuine inquiry are key to their learning.
Faculty issues and concerns
There are a number of conditions present within the faculty that today provide sources of creativity as well as strain. Two stand out for special attention. First, we are a very different faculty group from who we were at our last reaccreditation. Close to fifty percent of our current faculty members have been hired in the last ten years; an addition fifteen percent have been here for 15 years or less; and the remainder have taught at the college since its earlier years. Many of the faculty in this latter group will be retiring within the next five years.
The current faculty has a different disciplinary distribution than at our last review. Most notably we have hired more faculty members for our professional graduate and undergraduate programs; we have fewer faculty members in the humanities (21% of the faculty in 2005, down from 25% in 1997) and greater numbers in the sciences ( 35% in 2005, up from 26% in 1997). The following shows the number of faculty members hired and those that retired by planning unit over the last ten years.
| Planning unit | CTL | EA | ES | SI | SPBC | NAWIPS | GRAD |
| Hires | 13 | 12 | 16 | 21 | 10 | 8 | 10 |
| Retirement | 26 | 9 | 16 | 10 | 14 | 5 | 4 |
The change in demographics among the faculty has had a direct effected on curricular offerings, as well as approaches to pedagogy and epistemology. These changes can be viewed in a variety of ways. For some, they are an unsurprising change in student interest and academic priorities in higher education. But we should also consider how these changes affect our ability to do interdisciplinary studies.
There are other interesting demographic changes that help tell the story of the current faculty members at the college. The regular faculty has grown by 6% since 1997 – from 153 to close to 180. 51% of our faculty members are women, 49% males. And 23% are persons of color. In terms of age distribution, the following shows numbers and percentage (based on 180 regular faculty members in spring of 2007) in five major age categories.
| Age Range | Number of faculty | Percentage of faculty |
| 30 - 39 | 22 | 12% |
| 40 –49 | 44 | 24% |
| 50 – 59 | 64 | 35% |
| 60 – 69 | 52 | 28% |
| 70 – 79 | 1 |
There are interesting observations to make about these numbers. The majority of our faculty members are mid-career; we have a very small percentage in their 30s. With almost 60% 50 or older we must expect continued high rates of retirement and hiring over the next 10 to 15 years. This will make our processes of socialization and orientation to the college a very high priority for us.
In the spring of 2007, the faculty included those with as much as 33 years of teaching at the college to those in their first year. 49% of the faculty have been here for ten years or less, 21% for five years or less. 32% have been here between ten and twenty years.
| Years of teaching at TESC | Number of faculty | Percentage of faculty |
| 1 – 5 years | 38 | 21% |
| 6 – 10 years | 51 | 28% |
| 11 – 15 years | 26 | 14% |
| 16 – 20 years | 34 | 18% |
| 21 – 25 years | 14 | 7% |
| 26 – 30 years | 6 | 3% |
| 31 – 33 years | 11 | 6% |
A second important condition effecting faculty teaching is the increase in our faculty to student ratio largely as a result of state funding. The actual classroom ratio is 25 to 1, although the majority of faculty tend to carry something closer to FTE when sponsoring contracts is added to the mix. We have also had a significant change in the length of programs. In 1998 …….were three quarters and now only ….. programs are year long. [Matt has these numbers] Thus within a single year, a typical faculty member is interacting for shorter periods of time with twice as many students as was the case ten years ago. This poses serious tensions and constraints for the faculty attempting to create the conditions for engagement and complex learning.
For many faculty members, we have reached or exceeded a tipping point in being able to include activities that require close faculty involvement (e.g. responding to student writing, amount of time faculty members can spend one-on-one with students, time for faculty seminar, evaluation conferences). For those faculty members who include studio, field research and lab work, many feel they can’t teach in programs with more than 50 students, thus we have seen a pattern of more two-person teaching teams and a more narrow academic breadth. This pattern is having a direct impact on our ability to provide well-integrated, interdisciplinary programs.
These two factors exert enormous influence on the faculty’s decisions about program content and approach. But there are other forces that need mention:
- We have planned programs for the last ten years within our most traditionally defined planning structures (e.g. Environmental Studies, Expressive Arts, Scientific Inquiry). Many faculty members are experiencing unintended consequences of that structure: a fracturing of the curriculum in more traditional ways and a centrifugal force that seems to pull faculty members back into their disciplinary origins.
- The orientation of new faculty members had rested with their first teaching partners. We had been able to assume that most of what a new faculty member needed to know would be addressed in the course of team teaching. But many new faculty members report that it is very difficult to get information (e.g. narrative evaluations) from team members on our most basic processes. This may reflect any number of problems – a heavy work load among teaching partners, an inattention by the faculty (and deans) as a whole to ongoing articulation of key values and practices, and movements away from what we assumed were well established practices (here a change in pedagogy).
The faculty as a whole has much more work it must do collectively not only for the overall guidance of the college but also for the assimilation of new members. The intensity (and some would say isolation) of teaching partners has to be balanced by broader deliberations by the faculty on matters of both principles and practices.
Such a change requires us to be much more deliberate and mindful of our common work. We have been informal and varied in our approach to welcoming new faculty members as well as in our processes as a faculty. These changes call for a more broad-based and integrated discussion among the faculty. To that end, faculty development is now a major desk assignment for all the deans who work to urge more faculty discussion.
- We have a younger faculty attracted to teach at Evergreen because of the autonomy and collegiality of teaching, and less so because of an interest in educational reform. Many of the original faculty were seasoned in the protests on college campuses in the 1960s. The planning faculty settled on interdisciplinary studies as our pedagogical innovation as both more educationally sound and better suited to develop the insights and skills useful for participation in a democratic society. In other words, Evergreen was meant to be a better and more civic-minded education.
- One of the manifestations of this change is a heightened concern by faculty members to stay well connected to their “fields.” Many express difficulty in teaching broadly, as they understand interdisciplinary to mean, and being able to focus on the details they know are key to specific areas. This tension is partially a reflection of the faculty members; but it must also be recognized as a change that has happened within disciplines and departments over the last decades. In graduate study today there are more “disciplines,” and with greater amounts of content to be mastered. And, as noted above, more recent graduates did not complete their studies within the same critical framework as did many of the original faculty at the college. In other words, we may be seeing a change in the relationship our faculty has with their original academic preparation. This may be bearing on what they find pertinent and of interest in teaching.
- The current negotiation for a faculty union must also be seen as a fundamental change in the relationship – actual and assumed – between the faculty and the administration. While negotiating for higher salaries is assumed to be a key incentive to form a union, many faculty members are also interested in having faculty authority established through a legal contract rather than presuming collaboration with the administration
