Key points:
- Faculty should use broader metrics to tell a more complete story in their self-evaluations
- Redefining the role of faculty and AI in higher education
- A practical publishing playbook for new faculty
- For more news on faculty, visit eCN’s Campus Leadership hub
College faculty are all aware of the three pillars of professorial work: instruction, scholarship, and service. Faculty are generally assessed on peer review publications, academic presentations, grants authored, and service on university and professional committees. The question is: Are they the best indicators of successful professional practice?
Though peer review articles are usually considered the gold standard for professional status, they are often not widely read by practitioners. If professors want to make sure their research and theories make it into the hands of practitioners, they would often be better served by publishing in practitioner journals. That makes one wonder if there are other criteria that might be solid measures of professorial productivity and practice.
The obvious one mentioned above is to take a broader look at publication beyond peer reviewed publications, but to be more inclusive of professional-facing literature and even public-facing literature, podcasts, and other methods of disseminating the knowledge generated by the university. Another publication metric to consider is how many students and colleagues a faculty member has assisted in getting published, either through collaborative work or through editing and support. This publication metric is as important as personal publications because it can be used to measure the faculty member’s impact on the institution’s scholarly culture. A similar review of presentations done collaboratively with students or other faculty and/or supporting others in the development and submissions of presentations could be considered.
A potential data point that should be considered, particularly in the current environment where many are looking at systemic grade inflation, is grade distribution. A professor’s grade distribution should show that they support student success, but should not be too skewed towards As or Fs. While a high failure rate can sometimes indicate rigor, an anomalously high rate can signal a need for pedagogical adjustment, while a remarkably low failure rate one might trigger a review of grade inflation.
Another consideration for faculty should be the “glue work” that keeps a department or college running effectively. Glue work refers to the administrative and social tasks that keep a department or team running smoothly but don’t explicitly advance an individual’s career. Examples include organizing workshops, mediating interpersonal conflicts, onboarding new hires, or fixing broken internal documentation. One example would be organizing new faculty and staff to participate in new student move-in day. That example allows folks to work together in an informal environment, get a service item on their CVs, and meet new students and their parents. People who do this work hold organizations together, but they are often passed over by those who focus solely on metric-driven goals.
Student mentoring and advising should also be considered more deliberately. Faculty often spend substantial time guiding students through research projects, licensure requirements, career decisions, internships, and graduate school applications. These efforts may not always appear in traditional productivity metrics, but they have a direct impact on student persistence, professional readiness, and long-term institutional reputation. Measures might include the number of students mentored, student research supported, alumni outcomes, and evidence that advising helped students successfully navigate academic or professional pathways. Similarly, mid-career and senior faculty should be expected to show how they are mentoring the junior members of their department or team.
Instruction itself is often overlooked. While many universities have some type of end-of-course survey of students, those are often either not completed or skewed based on low response rates. Faculty could be asked to provide evidence of course redesign, assessment revision, adoption of inclusive teaching practices, use of emerging technologies, and participation in professional learning related to pedagogy. This would shift the focus from whether a course was popular to whether the faculty member is actively improving student learning over time.
Another potential measure is the faculty member’s contribution to community, professional, and practitioner partnerships. In many fields, especially education and the applied professions, the value of faculty work is partly reflected in how well it connects the university to schools, agencies, professional associations, and community organizations. Examples might include consulting with schools, serving on professional boards, creating resources for practitioners, developing school-university partnerships, or helping translate research into usable tools for the field.
Program and curriculum leadership should also be included in a broader evaluation system. Faculty frequently sustain academic quality by revising programs, aligning courses to accreditation standards, analyzing assessment data, updating curriculum to reflect current practice, and mentoring adjunct or new faculty. This work is often invisible because it does not always result in a publication or presentation, yet it directly affects student experience, program viability, and institutional effectiveness.
These measures suggest that professorial work should be evaluated in ways that more fully reflect its actual impact. These suggestions focus on the collaborative ideal where faculty are a true community of learners. Publications, presentations, grants, and committee service remain important, but they do not capture the full range of contributions faculty make to students, colleagues, programs, institutions, and the broader professional community.
A more holistic evaluation system would recognize not only what faculty produce individually, but also how they build capacity, improve learning, sustain programs, mentor others, and extend the university’s knowledge beyond campus. Faculty should use these broader metrics to tell a more complete story in their self-evaluations, and supervisors and institutions should intentionally incorporate them into review processes so that the work most essential to academic quality is visible, valued, and rewarded.
Baule’s scholarly interests focus on online student engagement, educational technology-- particularly the impact of 1:1 implementations, social-emotional learning, and the history of education. Baule led several efforts to improve student emotional health and reduce discipline issues prior to moving into higher education. He also writes on aspects of early American history.
Baule has held memberships in the American Association of School Administrators, the American Library Association, the American Association of School Librarians, the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, the Consortium for School Networking, the International Association of School Librarians, the National Association of Secondary School Principals, the National Staff Development Council, and many of their state affiliates. He has served as a consultant in the areas of educational technology, facilities design, library program development, team building, and communications.