Getting Started › Preface
The quality of an academic institution depends heavily on its faculty. As teachers, scholars, participants in shared governance and the purveyors of institutional culture and history, faculty are at the heart of the best work being done in higher education today. Not surprisingly, supporting faculty in all the work they do is a central focus for successful academic leaders.
By enrolling as a member of the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education, you have already shown a commitment to improving the faculty workplace. In fact, just the act of asking your faculty to participate in the Faculty Job Satisfaction Survey helps communicate concern for and support of your faculty. Today, with the delivery of your institutional report, you take the next step towards improving the academic workplace on your campus.
This report contains the data necessary for you to understand where your institution thrives and where it struggles in the key components of faculty life. Considering faculty satisfaction within your campus as well as comparatively will provide you with a robust sense of where your campus supports faculty well and where there is work to be done.
Given hundreds of survey items disaggregated by race, gender, tenure status and rank for your institution and all others in COACHE, we have used the best of our abilities to synthesize, organize, and prioritize millions of data points in a thorough yet accessible format.
We encourage you to share this report with other senior administrators, faculty leadership, institutional researchers, and other constituents. In fact, your report portfolio includes communication models and milestones to consider in your dissemination strategy. We also recommend that you participate in one of COACHE's regularly-scheduled cohort webcasts.
Keeping your audiences in mind, we designed your report with components that can be distributed together or individually around campus. Your COACHE portfolio contains:
- the CAO Report, summarizing your results overall and according to key subgroups at your institution relative to the five selected comparison institutions and to the faculty labor market writ large;
- supplementary materials to assist you in engaging your campus community in making the most of your investment in this research.
The "Guide to Report" introduces you to each of these portfolio pieces and provides you with recommendations for maximizing the utility of your results.
Just as your work with the data has just begun, so has your work with COACHE.
Partnership in the Collaborative, however, does not conclude with delivery of this report. Our mission to make the academy a more attractive place to work is advanced only when supported by institutional action. To that end, COACHE is your partner and a resource for maximizing the ability of your data to initiate dialogue, recruit talented scholars, and further the satisfaction and success of all faculty at your institution. For our advice on making the most of your participation, please review the supplementary material provided with this report. Then, contact us with any questions or ideas that have emerged.
Your three-year membership means that we will continue to support your exploration of the data. We sincerely hope that you will take advantage of COACHE-sponsored opportunities to learn from the most promising practices of your colleagues and to share your plans for using COACHE data to improve faculty workplace satisfaction.
