High Quality Faculty and Staff
Provide students access to a highly qualified, motivated, and diverse faculty and staff.
Faculty
- Develop and implement plans and processes to hire faculty of exceptional quality.
- Develop and implement plans and processes to retain high quality faculty and reward the exceptional work of faculty.
- Advance faculty development to provide and support.
- Training that provides professional development
- Relevant training and certifications
- Scholarly and career development
- Rewards for professional public service
- Strategically employ and effectively support non-tenure track faculty and adjuncts to address program and student needs.
- Increase the number of faculty holding a terminal degree.
Staff
- Develop and implement plans and processes to hire, retain, and reward the exceptional work of staff.
- Advance staff development to provide and support
- Training that provides professional development
- Relevant training and certifications
- Scholarly and career development
- Rewards for professional public service
- Increase the number staff holding a Bachelor’s degree and beyond.
Several keys: (1) hire more established faculty–Full and Associate Professors (2) Encourage and allow time in their schedules for non-tenure track instructors to earn terminal degrees (3) Provide significant avenues for staff to earn degrees (4) pay for quality
These are great! I really hope you invest in these items you have outlined and not just at the administrative level. The lack of these initiatives is starting to wear on your staff. We can no longer blame the budget impasse, it’s time to start making these changes and invest in the staff.
Invest in your staff! I do not understand how I am celebrated for having my masters and pursing doctoral studies but yet my pay does not reflect that. This is part of the problem. We have high turn over because lack of development and investment into your student facing positions. I feel appreciation and celebration of your student facing professionals is lacking.
The Summer Institute used to be focused on teaching and learning. Now its focus is on the administration of higher education. This represents what has gone wrong at GSU – administrative executives use virtually all the resources to enrich themselves and leave crumbs for everyone else. Travel funds are another example – a week doesn’t go by without senior administrators posting pictures on LinkedIn of their latest “work”-related travel but funding for faculty and staff travel has become more and more limited. It seems like the administration of higher education has become more important than higher education at GSU.
Faculty development at GSU is a joke. It is not enough to cover for a single conference. And the amounts do not carry over. How are we expected to present at conferences and learn what is leading edge if we cannot attend academic conferences?
HR department is the worst department at GSU. Faculty and staff get no support from HR. That is far from conducive to keeping hi quality faculty and staff. It is also demoralizing.
How can a public university that has been in business for 50 years not have processes in place to hire, retain, and reward faculty and staff? I think this should be a given for any organization that is as large and developed as GSU.
For faculty, GSU should have a process in place to mentor, nurture, and develop tenure-track faculty so that they can enter tenure and succeed. Using adjuncts should be limited to non-core courses and low-risk student populations. Online courses should be assigned to the faculty who is most qualified to teach online and who prove through peer-evaluations that they provide engaging and meaningful online learning experiences.
A major function of all staff at GSU is to provide excellent customer service to students and faculty, emphasizing problem-solving, collaboration, and efficiency. We should make these aspects part of how we develop and promote excellence in our staff.
If we value professional development, public service, and career development for our staff, we should provide paid time and resources to fund such initiatives. Valuing something is nice, actively doing something to fund and promote these values is even better. Do we have an institution-wide training program? Not talking about staff onboarding, but rather true professional and career development.
Also, leadership development is crucial for any organization. We should strive to provide staff with opportunities to develop leadership skills, to put them in positions where they can be leaders, and to give them the opportunity to expand their awareness of leadership and followership dynamics. Maybe an internal leadership development program for GSU staff? Let’s develop a clerical staff member into a supervisor. Let’s help those who are in leadership positions to become more effective and responsive leaders.
Finally, we can’t know where we are going if we do not know where we are. We should be surveying faculty and staff to set a baseline for the campus climate, organizational cultural values, and perceptions about fairness, diversity, and job satisfaction. This will allow GSU to better understand what it needs to work on to promote high-quality staff and faculty. Let us not focus only on some staff achievements and token measures, let us be active participants in helping faculty and staff succeed.
These are laudable goals, but to achieve them the Human Resource department needs to be central, not peripheral, to this goal.
How did GSU do in terms of achieving the goals for 2020? There hasn’t been a great deal of information shared about whether these goals were actively pursued.
It seems like we have gone backwards on this goal. Many high quality faculty chose to leave GSU in recent years. The Center for Active Engagement and Scholarship has gone from a staff of 5 to a staff of 2. Morale seems to be lower because of micro-management by senior administrators and financial decisions by the institution that undermined the financial well-being of faculty and staff.