Arts and Sciences Proposes Accelerated Leave Policy
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
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Durham, NC -- Arts and Sciences is recommending a new accelerated faculty leave policy that Dean George McLendon said puts the university’s money where its values are.
The policy proposes to let arts and sciences faculty apply for an accelerated leave if they propose an intellectual program, have taught both undergraduate and graduate level courses since the last sabbatical (with a minimum of 10 of the courses being undergraduate) and have “performed significant service beyond the classroom” for the university. The latter could mean a range of efforts from mentoring to departmental duties to serving in university governance.
“What we are trying to do is to align our rewards systems with the things we say we value,” McLendon told the Academic Council in April. “If we say we value undergraduate teaching and university service, we should have a reward system that is in line with that.”
The policy, which must be approved by trustees, applies only to tenured and tenure-track faculty members in the arts and sciences. (A similar policy is being developed for non-tenure-track faculty.)
It is set to begin with the 2009/10 academic year. McLendon said the proposal is an experiment, and he expected to tinker with it as faculty and school administrators discover its strengths and flaws.
“The proposal is imperfect,” he told the Academic Council. “But I don’t know which parts are imperfect. We will probably have to run the process for several years to find out the unintended consequences. Some will be good, some will be undesirable, but we just don’t know what they are right now.”
Normally, faculty members become eligible for a sabbatical on a seven-year cycle, but a number of ad hoc policies make it more complicated. McLendon said one value of the proposal is making the process for accelerated leave more transparent, setting specific criteria that faculty members must meet.
If a chair approves an eligible faculty member for an accelerated leave, the proposal goes to the dean for final approval. However, meeting the criteria does not guarantee an accelerated leave, McLendon said.
If accelerated leave is granted, the faculty members’ leave clock is “reset” with the year after the sabbatical serving as the first year in a new seven-year cycle.
McLendon said the need for a new leave policy became evident as pressures rise on faculty to balance their already significant research obligations with greater teaching, mentoring and university service expectations. He said arts and sciences administrators didn’t want those increased pressures to come at the expense of teaching or university service.
“In arts and sciences, the reality is we are a school whose revenue is highly dependent upon the engagement and quality of undergraduate teaching,” McLendon said. “In no way do we want to diminish the quality of graduate programs, but we need people to understand how much undergraduate education matters.”
Economist Craufurd Goodwin led a committee that wrote a first draft of the plan. The current version of the proposal has been approved by the Arts and Sciences Council.
To read the policy in full, click here.
