Survey of Academic Department Chairs, Outlook for Faculty Retention

Survey of Academic Department Chairs, Outlook for Faculty Retention

We gave four potential answers to this multiple choice question; they were: don't teach generally, pretty manageable, generally manageable, and onerous. 40.98% chose pretty manageable followed by 37.7% for generally manageable. 4.1% did not teach and 13.93% considered their loads onerous. Department chair in allied health, visual arts and performing arts were the three fields most likely to report onerous workloads for department chair. In addition, all of those reporting an onerous workload were US based institutions and none were Canadian or from any other country. None were from community colleges and few were from research universities; most were from BA granting and MA or doctoral granting institutions. Also, it was far more common for a chair of smaller departments rather than larger ones to report that they had an onerous teaching workload.

122 department chair drawn from more than 100 colleges and universities provide data and commentary, enabling this report’s end users to answer the following kinds of question: Which academic fields have experienced the greatest outflow of tenured faculty in recent years? What kinds of college and universities expect the most problems with faculty retention in the future? What do department size, length of tenure of department chair, and other factors have to do with faculty retention? Do public or private colleges have the greater problem in retaining adjuncts? What about non-tenured faculty? Are trends for retention the same or different for adjuncts and non-tenured faculty than for tenured faculty? How satisfied are department chair with their own situations? How do they perceive the level of competition for new faculty in their fields over the next three years?