Academic Administrators and Faculty Retirement in a New Era

A Centralized Strategy to Collect Comprehensive Institution-wide Data from Faculty and Staff about Community Engagement and Public Service

“…As we look to the future, we have identified the need to continually raise awareness, clarify, and update conversations about community engagement and public service (why, what, how) -across all stakeholders. This is particularly pressing in light of rapid turnover of administrators and faculty as the baby boomer generation continues to retire in large numbers (Sugar et al 2005). We also expect to continue to build and draw upon relationships with other offices including university relations, institutional research, enrollment management, development and advancement, and alumni relations, to facilitate updates and efficiencies across systems and activities.…”

Future of the Professoriate

“…For some researchers, the future this shift from full-time to parttime labor will cause is bleak. (Hess, 2004;Bartram, 2018;Nelson, 2010;Sugar et al, 2005). If college and university administrators and Boards continue to see the professoriate as the place where costs can be cut by using transient labor, and the faculty fail to understand and embrace the role of the higher education experience versus simply the value of the classroom, the heart of American higher education could be irreparably damaged.…”

“…In all of these cases, the role of the contingent faculty has been the delivery of material. Sugar et al (2005) state "To avoid significant new problems in their institutions, administrators will want to increase their planning for the changing demographics of faculty" (p. 410). The balance between full-time and part-time faculty labor is institution dependent; however, it is difficult to imagine a sustainable model where course development, pedagogy development, student recruitment and placement, as well as advising, fall to an ever-shrinking full-time faculty population.…”

Retaining Intellectual Capital

“…Additionally, senior faculty often have national or even international reputations to bring to their departments and universities, and their prestige influences how the institution is viewed externally. 8 Even more to the point, however, a core mission of research universities (their raison d'etre) is to generate new knowledge-knowledge that is open and freely distributed to people outside of the organization. It is the faculty whose job it is to produce this knowledge.…”