Collegiality—the ability of faculty members to get along with each other and contribute to the collective good—is a key component of success within the department and the higher education institution as a whole. It is largely up to the department chair to promote collegiality, but everyone plays a part. In an email interview, Robert Cipriano, chair of Recreation and Leisure Studies at Southern Connecticut State University, explained the importance of collegiality, strategies for encouraging collegiality, and the role of collegiality in personnel decisions.

The major benefit any conscientious professor seeks in course evaluations is in gaining useful student feedback. Yet most rating instruments generate vague, unjustified student comments. Quantitative scales provide ambiguous statistics for such generic instructional areas as preparation, fairness in grading, etc., but they don’t include any formative commentary. Open-ended questions ask students what things the instructor should continue to include in or eliminate from the course, and students list items but often without any kind of rationale.

Until recently, George Mason University’s tenure requirements were typical of most research institutions: research was the primary activity; teaching and service, though important, were secondary. During the past six years, GMU created new paths to tenure that recognize the different types of contributions that faculty can make to the university.

In the early 1990s, higher education researcher James Fairweather used data from the National Survey of Postsecondary Faculty to explore relationships between teaching, research, and faculty pay. Five years after this first analysis, Fairweather repeated the study to see if a growing emphasis on teaching was being reflected in faculty salaries.

In yesterday's post, it was argued that perhaps student evaluations were not, in Martha Stewart’s famous phrase, “a good thing,” given doubts about the qualifications of students to judge instructors, questionable validity of the evaluation instrument, threats to academic freedom, and misuse by administrators. Every college instructor subjected to student evaluation, myself included, has probably mused about these possibilities at one time or the other. But before we throw out the evaluation with the bathwater, let’s take a look at the other side of this double-edged question of the value of student evaluations.

My students have always given me positive evaluations of my undergraduate and graduate courses. I still teach four courses a year because I love the classroom and believe academic administrators are well served by ongoing connections with students in instructional settings. As a department chair, dean, provost, and vice president, I have found these student evaluations informative as I considered questions about tenure, promotion, and yearly raises for faculty.

The University of Missouri recently implemented its system-wide Faculty Accomplishment System, an electronic database that provides a convenient way for faculty members to document their achievements for themselves and for administrators.

At a workshop on learner-centered teaching, a participant told us that philosophically she couldn’t agree more with the need to make students more responsible for their own learning, but she couldn’t go there because her ratings would take a hit.

The challenge of faculty evaluation is to simultaneously foster faculty development and fulfill the institution’s goals and mission, says Larry Braskamp, professor of Education at Loyola University Chicago and advocate of a humanistic approach to faculty evaluation.