THE NATURE OF SCHOOL OF EDUCATION FACULTY WORK AND MATERIALS FOR PROMOTION AND TENURE AT A MAJOR RESEARCH UNIVERSITY

A critical issue facing university administrators and faculty, especially in professional schools, is the mismatch between promotion and tenure criteria and daily demands on faculty time. The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationships among institutional and personal expectations of faculty about the relative importance of teaching, research, and service activities as criteria for awarding faculty promotion and tenure in a School of Education, and its relationship to faculty work. By documenting the nature and extent of school of education faculty activities and products and relating them to institutional expectations and faculty members' own perspectives on the relative importance of the three roles of research, teaching and service, the nature and degree of mismatches were described, and a better foundation for more appropriate promotion and tenure guidelines could be developed.Although individuals varied greatly, overall faculty reported spending 44.4% on teaching-related activities, 35.2% on research, and 20.3% service. They generally agreed that the promotion and tenure process weighted them as 25.6% teaching, 65.6% research, and 8.7% on service. Faculty recommended that these weightings be changed to 37.2% teaching, 49.3% research, and 13.5% service. These suggested changes still kept research as the most highly rated, with teaching second, and service a distant third. Although the changes made teaching more important in promotion and tenure decisions, how the individual school of education faculty spent their time varied greatly.It was recommended that professional schools review these relationships in their settings, and find ways to make promotion and tenure decisions more consistent with the work faculty carry out