[cross posted to Faculty Retreat Listserve and Truman AAUP Discussion Forum.

Colleagues,

I thought you might be interested in the excerpt below, from the Chronicle, on Williams College's apparent difficulty in holding faculty. If a Williams, which asks faculty to teach five courses, has such problems, perhaps we should give more attention to faculty retention here, particularly in light of the high number of tenured and tenure-track faculty who are leaving us this year.

An administrator here once told me that Truman might simply have to accept that it would be unable to hold talented, productive faculty. I find this frightening. For one thing, we cannot ignore the dollar costs of all the hiring that this necessitates, not only in advertising and travel expenses, but more importantly in the investment by faculty and administrators in our most important resource of human time. More importantly, however, would be a view by young faculty of this as a transitional job that would undermine the possibility of forming the core community of scholars critical to a liberal arts ethos.

dfg]

http://www.chronicle.com/weekly/v45/i42/42a05701.htm

The Chronicle of Higher Education From the issue dated June 25, 1999

PEER REVIEW

Penn Finally Succeeds in Luring Noted Princeton Criminologist; Williams College Ascribes 11 Departures to 'Bad Luck,' but Professors Cite Teaching Loads

By SCOTT HELLER and ROBIN WILSON ....

Williams College says there is no smoking gun behind the departures of 11 of its faculty members this academic year.

David L. Smith, dean of the faculty, attributes the unusually high number of resignations to "bad luck."

But faculty members cite a few problems that helped push them out the door. At the top of the list: the teaching load at Williams. Many liberal-arts colleges require professors to teach four courses a year, while research universities generally require fewer. Williams requires five. Professors at Williams must also fit in time for research if they want to earn tenure.

"When they want us to produce university-level research, then they are competing with universities in terms of course load," says Diane J. Macunovich, who was supposed to head the economics department at Williams next year but instead will move to Barnard College.

Ms. Macunovich says the high course load and stiff research demands scared off junior professors at Williams, who didn't feel they had time to do it all. Four of the 11 professors who are leaving Williams are members of the economics department, which Ms. Macunovich says may have trouble attracting new professors who might be worried about what the departures mean.

Williams officials say the college's workload requirements are similar to those of other selective liberal-arts colleges. Mr. Smith attributes the high turnover this year to Williams's talented faculty. "We have a lot of folks who are well established enough that they are attracting feelers," he says.

Mr. Smith says the college will fill in with visiting professors and adjuncts in the fall, and then focus on hiring permanent replacements.

In addition to Ms. Macunovich, those leaving Williams are: Gil Anidjar, an assistant professor of religion who has accepted a tenure-track job at Columbia University; Dennis C. Dickerson, chairman of the history department, who will move to Vanderbilt University; Cheryl R. Doss, an assistant professor of economics who will move to Yale University to direct its master's program in international relations; Edward A. Epping, a tenured professor of studio arts who is moving to the University of Illinois at Chicago to direct its studio-arts program; Grant A. Farred, an assistant professor of English who will move to Duke University; Samuel W. Fleischacker, chairman of the philosophy department, who is moving to the University of Illinois at Chicago; Minako Ishikawa, an assistant professor of Japanese who is entering missionary work; Robert D. Johnson, an assistant professor of history who will be an assistant professor at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York; Vijayendra Rao, an assistant professor of economics who will go to work for the World Bank; and Richard H. Sabot, a professor of economics who is taking early retirement to work full time for a high-technology company he founded.

---------- http://chronicle.com Section: The Faculty Page: A57

---------- Copyright ) 1999 by The Chronicle of Higher Education

-- Anonymous, June 22, 1999

Answers

AAUP is conducting a survey of faculty and staff members who have left Truman State University over the last five years. Please pass on to me the names and contact information for people who have left Truman. If you have left Truman recently, we would appreciate your time in briefly responding to the following questions.

1. What was your position at Truman State University (tenure-track, tenured, staff, etc.)?

2. When did you leave Truman State University?

3. Why did you decide to leave Truman State University?

4. What could Truman State University have done to keep you at this institution?

5. In retrospect, how do you feel about your decision to leave Truman State University?

6. What advice would you give to Truman State University to retain high quality faculty and staff?

Please return this questionnaire to:

Marc Becker Truman State University Division of Social Science McClain Hall 214 100 E. Normal Kirksville, MO 63501-4221 fax 660-785-4181 marc@truman.edu

-- Anonymous, September 09, 1999

How does the university track faculty retention (or the lack thereof)? In what format? Although specifics of this issue would likely fall into the category of personnel matters, and be confidential, surely the statistics are public information. What percentage of non-tenure-track faculty do we retain each year? More critically, what percentage of tenure-line faculty? Of faculty who are actually tenured? Of course, in the latter categories a distinction would need to be made between those retiring and those quitting Truman to go somewhere else. The Communication discipline lost more than a third of its faculty over the spring and summer of 1999 -- three non-tenure line, and three tenure-line (Jack Hart, Neil Ralston and Mike Chanslor). Since this issue has been raised, appropriately, by AAUP, I wonder if an AAUP officer would be willing to pursue the specific statistical answers to these specific questions of faculty retention from the VPAA? Say, for the last five years. The answers, if ever forthcoming, might be illuminating. - Gary Jones, Assoc. Prof. of Communication

-- Anonymous, September 03, 1999