FOR ALL FULL-TIME TENURE-TRACK AND NON-TENURE-TRACK FACULTY
Last week, full-time faculty were invited to participate in a survey of faculty job satisfaction. Although there are many surveys that faculty are asked to complete, this one is unique because it was designed entirely to examine current job satisfaction compared to faculty at peer institutions. This survey research is part of a national program called the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education (COACHE), which has been operating from the Harvard Graduate School of Education since 2003. Other climate studies conducted at Kent State have focused on all faculty, students, and staff. In contrast, COACHE specifically focuses on faculty themes including, but not limited to, department engagement, mentoring, research, shared governance and tenure and promotion.
Participation entails completing a 25-minute, web-based survey; a unique link to the survey is emailed to faculty directly from COACHE. To protect confidentiality and guarantee that the results of this survey cannot influence personnel decisions about individual faculty members, institutional research staff will disseminate survey results only with data aggregated in cells of five respondents or more, so that individual faculty and individual departments cannot be identified.
We welcome this opportunity to learn from an independent, research-driven, comparative study. Faculty views are especially important as Kent State University strives to attract and retain the best and brightest scholars and teachers and increase the satisfaction of all faculty. We believe that Kent State has the potential to be one of the best places for scholars to work, and with your help we can learn how best to support that goal. However, data from the COACHE study will be meaningful only if we have broad participation.
Thank you in advance for helping us through your participation in this study.
If you have any questions about this survey, please contact Dr. Susan Perry, Assistant Provost, Accreditation, Assessment and Learning at sperry31@kent.edu or 330-672-3931, or COACHE at coachefaculty@abtassociates.com.