Advancing Equity in Faculty Workloads & Rewards

Our next steps in Advancing Equity in Faculty Workload and Rewards aim to address the challenges to recognizing all the work that faculty members do to support our public mission. We also aim to tackle the challenges of workload equity, particularly concerning service and teaching across rank and series. Achieving equity in faculty evaluation and career advancement requires greater institutional attention. Additionally, as we strive to recruit, retain, and ensure the success of a diverse faculty, we need to focus on counting what matters, rather than what is easier to measure. This is crucial to promoting equity in faculty workload and rewards.

The pandemic highlighted inequities present in academia and beyond, illuminating how our systems can perpetuate inequity. We must address the structures that underlie inequity in evaluation and career advancement.  In that spirit, we are undertaking the important task of building capacity across DU to reward  important work that is often not as rigorously and robustly valued as scholarship and grant activity. We now have an opportunity to reexamine how faculty work is recognized and rewarded in, tenure, promotion, and reappointment decisions, annual reviews, merit, and the distribution of day-to-day workloads in departments and programs.

This initiative is based on the idea of shared governance. The Senate has played a crucial role in leading the way by creating important committees and task forces to address these issues from an institutional perspective. These committees conduct important and deliberate thoughtwork, informed by research and national best practices. The Provost’s Office, through the VPFA, has partnered with the committees to support their work and programming. This approach embodies an ecosystem approach to institutional modification. We must examine everyday practices such as “hallway asks” for service work that can disproportionately burden certain faculty while excluding others. We continue to provide training for chairs, directors, associate deans, deans, academic units, and departments to ensure that we are making progress in practice and piloting new approaches to promote equity in faculty workloads and rewards.

This website further articulates the values, processes, and work of these “next steps” and offers ways for faculty to get involved in related initiatives.

*Policies, Procedures and Practices (Annual Review, Tenure, Promotion and Reappointment)

† Impacts of Research, Scholarship and Creative Works; Teaching; and Service