6.1. Standard Professorial Titles
There are 217 NTT faculty with standard professorial titles at the CRC, and they account for 39.7% of the NTT faculty. The majority of these appointments are in CFA (71 faculty) and COM (49 faculty), followed by MET, CAS, and SMG with 29, 22, and 21, faculty respectively (Appendices C8, 9, 12, 7, 10). Except for MET, all these colleges have both T/TT and NTT appointments. The Boston University Faculty Handbook stipulates that only appointments with the standard professorial titles can be Tenured, Tenure-Track, or Non-Tenure-Track, while all other appointments are by definition without tenure. Faculty with standard professorial ranks are also expected to contribute to all three traditional dimensions of research, teaching, and service, but we found that the relative importance of these components may vary significantly for T/TT and NTT faculty at different colleges and sometimes in the same college and within the same department. This variability raises difficult questions: What are the differences in the responsibilities for research, teaching, and service of T/TT and NTT faculty who hold the same rank and title? Should the same evaluation criteria and processes for appointment and promotion apply for T/TT and NTT appointments? If not, are differences in responsibilities and expectations justified within the same college or/and across different colleges?
We will discuss these questions for three broad categories: (i) colleges where the majority of the faculty hold NTT appointments, such as CFA, COM, SED, MET, SHA; (ii) colleges where T/TT is the norm and NTT is a significantly smaller percentage, such as CAS and ENG; and (iii) colleges with a significant percentage of NTT appointments. This differentiation is important as it reflects differences in attitudes, culture, and needs, and therefore affects the approaches for resolving the tension between NTT and T/TT appointments with standard professorial titles.
(i) Colleges where the majority of the faculty hold NTT appointments
(ii) Colleges where T/TT is the norm and NTT is a significantly smaller percentage
(iii) Colleges with a significant percentage of NTT appointments
Recommendations
(i) Colleges where the majority of the faculty hold NTT appointments
Prototypical examples of this category are College of Fine Arts (79 NTT out of 92 total, or 85.9% NTT) and College of Communication (56 NTT out of 68 total, or 82.4%). Metropolitan College and School of Hospitality Administration have 100% NTT faculty but do not have the complexities caused by faculty appointed with standard professorial titles and different tenure status. Sargent College, which has 60.7% NTT faculty, has no NTT faculty with standard professorial titles.
Within the College of Fine Arts, faculty responsibilities are defined at the time of initial appointment and, depending on institutional needs and individual circumstances, have varied from one appointment to another. As a general rule, all full-time faculty members in CFA are expected to demonstrate excellence in at least two of the three traditional areas and satisfactory performance in the third: (i) teaching, (ii) research, scholarship, and/or creative activities, and (iii) service to the College and University. This three-fold evaluation is consistent with University-wide practices. Most NTT faculty members in CFA hold professorial ranks without modifiers.
The question of teaching load is of considerable concern to all FT faculty at CFA. Eighteen contact hours is a “target” load, but there are many variations to this standard. CFA aims to set all faculty members’ base teaching load within a tolerable range of this target (e.g., between 16 and 20 hours). The long hours required for rehearsals and the extra time involved in coaching students outside of scheduled classes, necessary for training artists, is not easily accounted for and often not considered at all when determining teaching load. A significant amount of personal mentorship, advising, project and production oversight, and exhibition and performance attendance are implicitly required in order to be an effective teaching artist. The definitions of teaching and service thus overlap in this respect and often are not easily distinguishable.
CFA has T/TT professorial appointments, as well as appointments outside the tenure track. Currently there are 13 tenured or tenure-track faculty members on the CFA roster: one in Visual Arts and 12 in Music and Musicology. Until recently, only musicology faculty have been hired on tenure track. The practice has slowly been changing to include music theory and composition. CFA administration and faculty are working on a Faculty Expectations document (called the Faculty Responsibilities and Protocol Document) that aims at clarifying differences in faculty responsibilities and performance criteria for T/TT and NTT faculty.
For many years, the College of Communication did not hire faculty on tenure-track appointments. A few years ago, this policy was changed and the College began hiring faculty both within and outside the tenure-track system. Balance between theory and professional applications is the College’s strength. Incoming faculty with doctoral degrees and backgrounds in scholarly research have received tenure-track appointments. Non-tenure-track faculty currently under contract may be given the option of requesting that they move to a tenure-track appointment or of applying for tenure through the process established in the Faculty Handbook. Professors with a focus on scholarly productivity have begun to move to the tenure-track option.
The majority of the NTT faculty at COM come from a professional rather than an academic background and will probably opt to remain on non-tenure-track appointments. Most of these NTT faculty do not perform scholarly research, and see teaching as their primary duty at COM; they also continue professional work in their chosen fields. They further contribute to their fields by speaking at professional conferences, consulting for businesses and organizations, and publishing a variety of professionally oriented materials. Regardless of appointment type, all faculty are currently evaluated by the same standards of teaching, research, and service to the College. The uniformity of evaluation criteria is not, however, matched to a uniform distribution of job responsibilities: the standard teaching load for most NTT faculty is 3/3, but for T/TT faculty 2/2. This mismatch between performance criteria and teaching responsibilities has created difficulties in the evaluation process. In the 2009/2010 academic year, the College of Communication plans to develop a new Faculty Expectations document formalizing the teaching, research, and service responsibilities for COM professors. The new document will establish clear and consistent guidelines for T/TT and NTT faculty and thereby create a level playing field for the faculty regardless of their appointment.
The overwhelming majority of Metropolitan College faculty (100% NTT) hold standard professorial titles and are expected to contribute to the traditional triad of teaching, research/scholarship, and service. Unlike schools in which tenure is the norm and which typically rely on a predictable stream of full-time undergraduate students, most MET students are professionals pursuing a master’s degree. To attract students, MET graduate programs must address current industry needs and incorporate the latest technology trends in the curriculum at the graduate level. Faculty must be knowledgeable about new developments in their field as well as professional certifications, and have the ability to bring this knowledge into the classroom by constantly developing new courses and programs. Thus, there is a strong emphasis on teaching, advising, and academic leadership, as well as on maintaining an active professional record. The teaching load is six courses per year and responsibilities include program administration (three of MET’s MS programs have over 300 students); recruiting and mentoring of part-time faculty; new course and program development in response to changing industry needs; and presentations and publications at professional conferences and journals.
In summary, we find that a key issue for those colleges in which the majority of faculty appointments are off the tenure track is deciding if and when there is a need for T/TT positions. If the college decides to introduce T/TT appointments, academic titles and ranks must be applied consistently and there must be a fair and transparent statement of the responsibilities and expectations for both T/TT and NTT faculty. It is difficult to see how the same rank can carry different responsibilities or be evaluated by different performance criteria within the same college, and we recommend that colleges work to remove such differentiations. Thus, introducing T/TT positions in colleges with predominantly NTT faculty will also require establishing a process for handling current NTT appointments at the standard rank so that new inequities and imbalances do not arise. Discussions on these issues are under way at COM, CFA, and CGS.
(ii) Colleges where T/TT is the norm and NTT is a significantly smaller percentage
Representative of this second category are College of Arts & Sciences and College of Engineering. In both colleges, NTT faculty with standard titles are the exception. Responsibilities of NTT faculty vary among individual appointments.
In the College of Arts & Sciences (Appendix C7), only 12% of NTT faculty hold unmodified professorial titles, and since no new appointments of this type are being created, the category should diminish over time and will eventually disappear. There are approximately 5 legacy faculty with NTT appointments whose duties consist in teaching and service only (like Lecturers) but who carry unmodified professorial titles. Most hold the PhD. Their teaching load is that of T/TT faculty rather than that of Lecturers, even though they are not asked to do research; there is an expectation of significant service. These were idiosyncratic appointments of past administrations and are no longer being created; their number has been reduced through retirements or conversions over the past year. The College also has about 10 NTT faculty with unmodified professorial titles who were appointed with research expectations and the rights and responsibilities of tenure-track or tenured faculty. Formerly, CAS offered some people such long-term contracts as an alternative to tenure (most had held tenured or tenure-track positions elsewhere). Now, when they come up for renewal, these appointments are being considered on a case-by-case basis for possible conversion to tenured, professor of the practice, or lecturer appointments, as appropriate.
The College of Engineering (Appendix C15) has 14 NTT faculty. Of these, 9 have unmodified professorial titles (4 Professor, 4 Associate Professor, and 1 Assistant Professor). Of the remaining five, four are research faculty and one holds a Lecturer title. The appointments are slightly different from each other and the responsibilities vary with the individual appointment. The NTT faculty with standard titles are all considered to be “teaching faculty.” Teaching faculty in ENG, whether tenured or NTT, teach more courses than research-active faculty. The College of Engineering Faculty Expectations document clearly delineates the roles and responsibilities of teaching vs. research-active faculty. However, this document describes a promotion process only for T/TT faculty.
In summary, NTT appointments with standard professorial titles are the exception in these colleges, and there is no significant incentive to continue these appointments for incoming faculty.
(iii) Colleges with a significant percentage of NTT appointments
This category includes the School of Education (55.8% NTT), College of General Studies (39.2% NTT), and School of Management (33.9% NTT).
NTT faculty constitute 55.8% of all faculty at the School of Education. The majority (15 faculty) hold clinical professorial titles and an additional six faculty have standard professorial titles (Appendix C13). The College faces the challenge of clarifying responsibilities and expectations for T/TT and NTT faculty with standard professorial titles, as well as clinical faculty. After the appointment of Professor Coleman to the dean’s position last year, SED began a process of reevaluation of teaching loads, research, and service criteria to clarify the differences by rank, title, and tenure status.
With 39.2% of its faculty non-tenure-track, the College of General Studies lies at the intersection of the two categories discussed so far. Its two-year general education undergraduate program emphasizes teaching excellence and prides itself on the close contact its instructors have with their students. As the College’s Faculty Expectations document states, the CGS faculty is “above all a teaching faculty,” and the evaluation/review/promotion process emphasizes that “excellence in teaching is indispensable for continuation as a faculty member.” CGS faculty include T/TT as well as NTT appointments, and all appointment types have exactly the same teaching responsibilities. Unaided by teaching assistants, all faculty conduct and manage classes averaging 100 students. While scholarship expectations are higher for those on tenure track, contract non-tenure-track members must also show evidence of scholarly activity for their annual divisional reviews.
Until this year, all CGS faculty held standard professorial titles. At the conclusion of the 2008/2009 academic year, the titles of 17 existing faculty appointments were changed from Assistant Professor to Lecturer and Senior Lecturer. As a result of the change, CGS currently has only one NTT with standard professorial title at the Associate Professor rank. Future appointments are expected to be both within and outside the tenure-track and appropriate titles and appointment procedures are under discussion.
This Lecturer category was introduced to CGS with the statement that the primary responsibilities and contributions of Lecturer and Senior Lecturer are teaching and service. But renewal and, now, promotion from Lecturer to Senior Lecturer do, in fact, consider candidates’ level of scholarly activity. This possible discrepancy is of concern to faculty. The title change also provoked faculty concerns about the status of NTT faculty within the University, representation in faculty governance, and recognition by the academic community outside BU. These concerns underscore the need for clarification and differentiation of responsibilities and performance criteria for faculty with standard professorial titles and with lecturer titles. CGS plans to rework the Faculty Expectations document to include clear guidelines for Lecturer roles, reappointments, and promotions.
The School of Management has 38 NTT positions that constitute 33.9% of all faculty (Appendix C10). There are 21 faculty with standard professorial titles of all three ranks, 15 Lecturers (of which 9 are Senior Lecturer and 2 Master Lecturer), and 2 Research Professors. The task of clearly differentiating the responsibilities and evaluation criteria for the different ranks and titles is made more challenging by the need to do this in ways consistent with the accreditation requirements of the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB). SMG has a Faculty Expectations document that acknowledges the role of non-tenure-track faculty as teachers and contributors to the mission of the School, and has developed guidelines for evaluating different types of publications, professional activities, teaching, advising, and curriculum development, and their relative importance for different ranks and titles.
Recommendations:
- Standard professorial titles should be given only to faculty who are expected to contribute in all three areas of research, teaching, and service, as specified by the Faculty Handbook.
- Individual colleges may balance their emphases on teaching, research, and service differently depending on the mission and institutional needs of the college. This weight should be reflected in each college’s Faculty Expectations document. There should be no difference, however, in expectations for T/TT and NTT faculty holding the same rank and title within the same college.
- NTT faculty who hold appointments at standard professorial titles that have been given in the past with responsibilities for teaching and service, a higher teaching load, and no expectation of research, should be allowed to retain their rank if they so wish and upon recommendation of their department and college.
- Going forward we recommend that in colleges with a tradition of tenure, standard professorial titles be reserved for tenure-track or tenured appointments only.
- The school/college and University administrations should consider, on a case-by-case basis, converting to T/TT those NTT appointments that are indistinguishable in their responsibilities and expectations from T/TT. In colleges where tenure is the norm, these cases will be reviewed by the College Tenure and Promotion Committee. In colleges where tenure is rare, a review process should be established that is consistent with University criteria and with the tenure requirements and procedures of other BU colleges.