In this document:
We seek to recruit and retain a diverse, high quality faculty and staff, to orient these new campus citizens toward the university’s mission, and to ensure the alignment of our personnel policies and practices to encourage their active participation in a learning-centered institution that envisions itself as an “outstanding teaching-intensive, research-driven” university.
One of CSULB’s core strengths is the quality of its faculty and staff who are loyal to the institution and supportive of its mission. We need to sustain and strengthen the campus community’s dedication to, and orientation toward, student learning in the face of numerous challenges, as we strive to increase excellence in research, and creative activity, grants and contracts, and outreach to the community. With the retirement of large numbers of senior faculty, junior faculty are often expected to take on major leadership responsibilities. Our faculty struggle to balance excellence in both teaching and scholarship while assuming leadership roles in the university; some even hope to have time for both family life and community participation.
A combination of lean budgets, burgeoning enrollments, and a seemingly endless supply of new initiatives have increased de facto workloads. Years of budget reductions have produced stagnant salaries, increased workloads, and have contributed to an erosion of staff morale. Southern California’s high cost of living, excessive housing costs, and market competition have, together with salary inversion and compression, negatively affected both the recruitment of new faculty and staff and the retention of our current employees. The campus collective bargaining environment imposes an additional challenge that affects our ability to direct or make meaningful compensation and policy changes. We acknowledge that our faculty, staff, and administration are currently not as diverse as our student body. We also struggle with questions of how better to include the voices of all faculty and staff in our governance processes.
CSULB currently faces several key staffing challenges that are particularly urgent at this point in time:
Recruiting and retaining dedicated and diverse faculty and staff,
Aligning personnel policies and practices with the university mission and core commitments that are consistent with the constraints of our collective bargaining agreements and Chancellor’s Office directives.
The strength of the campus comes from its staff and faculty. Each faculty recruitment is an enormous investment of time and resources; the university has a strong interest in retaining these new appointments, supporting their teaching and scholarship, and in developing a talented stable workforce. We also place value on a diverse workforce that reflects the demographics of both our student body and the larger southern California community; but, in fact, the faculty, and to a lesser degree staff, are not as diverse as either of those populations. In the Capacity and Preparatory Review we will use existing data plus a national instrument (the COACHE survey) to evaluate the success of our plans and strategies for faculty employees. For staff employees, a similar survey instrument will be developed.. (Criteria 3.1, 3.2, 3.3)
Three major factors affect our ability to recruit and retain our personnel, workload, the cost of living/salary competitiveness, and personnel policies/employee recognition and development, and each will be addressed separately.
Workload issues emerged as a leading concern of many faculty members in the WASC campus survey. In spite of budget reductions, the university has maintained its commitment to supporting faculty scholarship and teaching development, and in recent years has substantially increased the amount of funding available for assigned time, summer stipends and support for newly hired faculty. We need to evaluate the impact of new initiatives, from increasing numbers of faculty searches to curricular reform, community service learning, increased advising, and increased reporting requirements, on faculty workload, and find ways to streamline them. We also need to develop an effective mentoring system for junior faculty to ensure that they are able to maintain a realistic workload in their probationary years. It is quite clear, for example, that we will not be successful in our efforts to create a culture that uses assessment to support student success unless we find ways to minimize the impact on faculty workload. In addition to orienting both new and continuing faculty toward student success, we must promote best practices in assessment in ways that can be integrated into the normal workload of faculty. We will examine the impact of student success initiatives and assessment on faculty workload as a case study. In terms of staff workload, we will evaluate appropriate organizational size, impacts of unfunded mandates and new, increasing work requirements stemming from new initiatives, as well as process efficiencies and other considerations that optimize and or improve the staffing effectiveness of non-faculty employees. This may include the degree of employee empowerment/engagement, decentralization/centralization and decision making processes (Criteria 2.8, 2.9, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4)
A well-documented affordability crisis exists in Southern California.. Increasingly, we hear anecdotal reports that housing costs discourage potential hires from other parts of the country, or are cause for recently hired faculty and staff to look elsewhere for employment. Many employees must live far away from the campus and commute long distances/hours so they are able to purchase affordable housing. Faculty and staff salaries have not kept pace with the cost of living, and many employees have experienced salary compression with new hires who must be paid more to accept employment at CSULB. The University is collecting data from this year’s faculty searches and resignations to identify the reasons individuals do not accept offers or leave the university after a few years. In Fall 2005, the University surveyed all employees regarding their current housing situation and interest in various types of housing programs. Many respondents expressed interest in one or more types of housing assistance programs. The University is actively pursuing several opportunities to develop housing that could be made available at below market rate to CSULB employees.
We want to ensure that our personnel policies and practices are oriented toward the University’s mission, emphasize professional development and mentoring, and communicate clear expectations to faculty. We are currently revising our Retention, Tenure and Promotion (RTP) Policy. Once the new policy is adopted, we need to assess its effects. We need to study how we acculturate our new faculty to this campus’ vision, how we communicate our expectations for teaching, research and service, and how we mentor them during their first few years. At the same time, we must examine how we provide support and mentoring for our continuing faculty as the University makes the transition toward a learning-centered institution. These two complementary but different processes are both vital to assure that all university personnel are thoroughly oriented toward the University’s mission and vision. We must also find out if our faculty feel they are supported for scholarly and creative achievement as well as for curricular and instructional innovation and service. Finally, we need to assess how well the new personnel policies reward efforts to improve student learning outcomes and student success.
For non-faculty employees, we will examine employee recognition programs, professional development, staff/management effectiveness and related personnel policies.(Criterion 2.8, 3.3, 3.4)
Following are the questions we propose to study in our Capacity Review. With each of these questions, our focus will be upon examining the processes and organizational structures that underlie our capacity to be effective.
What are our current challenges with respect to recruiting, retaining, and supporting a highly qualified and diverse faculty, particularly as they relate to workload, salary, and satisfaction?
Following are the questions we propose to study in our Effectiveness Review. With each of these questions, our focus will be upon examining the ways in which our activities contribute to our efforts to “graduate students with highly valued degrees,” by which we mean both ensuring the quality of the learning attained and the degree awarded, and fostering student retention and graduation.
Based on the evidence gathered in the Capacity and Preparatory Review, how can we be more effective in recruiting, retaining and supporting a highly qualified and diverse faculty and staff who are committed to the institutional goals of student learning?
As a result of examining these issues, we expect to attain several results. We expect to develop a recruitment strategy that attracts and retains diverse, high-quality faculty and staff with a genuine commitment to the university’s mission. We expect to better align our personnel policies and practices with the university’s current mission. We expect to better align our reward system to support curricular and instructional innovation grounded in the assessment of student learning. We expect that program assessment plans will integrate the assessment of student learning into the faculty’s existing workload to the fullest extent possible.
