Additional Input-1

From WolfWikis

Topic 1: Opportunities and challenges: recruitment, retention and retirement

• Based on your experiences at the departmental level, what workforce-related issues (faculty and staff) need to be addressed now and in future planning (e.g. strategic functions, retirement, salary compression, attracting and retaining high talent, etc.)? Why are these of concern?

• What is a desirable proportion of tenure/tenure track faculty age cohorts? How many in their 30s, 40s, 50, etc.? Provide rationale for your proposed distribution.

• What ratio of tenure-track and non-tenure-track faculty should NC State aim for in its long-range planning, and why? Should that ratio be different in your own department than across the entire institution?

• What strategies (resources, policies, programs, …) can be employed to help address the challenges you have identified?

• Received from Prof Michael K. Stoskopf, DVM, PhD, Dipl. ACZM

Topic 1: Opportunities and challenges: recruitment, retention and retirement •Based on your experiences at the departmental level, what workforce-related issues (faculty and staff) need to be addressed now and in future planning (e.g. strategic functions, retirement, salary compression, attracting and retaining high talent, etc.)? Why are these of concern?

Salary compression is counter productive and a force to encourage exit of particularly desirable senior faculty. Of primary concern is the lack of staff support for functional faculty. Most faculty expend a considerable fraction of their effort on matters better and ably handled by good clerical and accounting staff and or teaching and research technicians. The university should be trying to optimize faculty productivity and this is accomplished with competent and adequate support staff at the faculty level.

•What is a desirable proportion of tenure/tenure track faculty age cohorts? How many in their 30s, 40s, 50, etc.? Provide rationale for your proposed distribution.

In any successful population demographic one needs an excess in the areas where attrition is expected to impact productivity. For the university this would mean there should be more junior faculty either Associate or Full professors. How high this excess needs to be is best determined by the expected attrition rate of junior faculty. Better junior faculty survival is economically a benefit to the institution so long as it is not accomplished by lowering the standard of performance required for survival. Similarly there should be some excess in Associate professors over full professors and the true ratio of this relationship needs to be based on the general philosophy of whether or not all faculty should be expected to become full professors. I do not think that is a particularly good functional model for an institution seeking to achieve excellence.

• What ratio of tenure-track and non-tenure-track faculty should NC State aim for in its long-range planning, and why? Should that ratio be different in your own department than across the entire institution?

I believe the major problem underlying this question is how non-tenure track faculty are treated. If a second class citizenship is allowed to develop in the faculty over the tenure question it will not be a stabilizing force. The clear trend seems to be away from tenured faculty and if this strategy is pursued then the university will need to be careful to develop policies and approaches to faculty that will remediate the natural tendency for poor retention when faculty feel they are being treated as contractors. This is possible, but is not being achieved by NC State.

•What strategies (resources, policies, programs, …) can be employed to help address the challenges you have identified?

The opportunity for input is appreciated, but of course these are complex issues. With regard to retention: salary compression which is an embedded impact because of unstable legislative support for salary increases across the years needs to end. Gender based inequities in pay (which continue and are quite large in some cases) need to be eliminated. Resources need to be directed to increased staff support for faculty by. To accomplish this administrative positions without a teaching and/or research component need to be eliminated and we should seek to reduce administrative positions back to numbers in place perhaps 2 decades prior, thus increasing spheres of influence of individual administrators, but accommodating larger scales through effective use of support staff.