DEAN'S CORNER

By Jan R. Williams, Dean, College of Business Administration, University of Tennessee

Faculty Evaluation:  Lessons Learned

Evaluating the faculty is an important and critical task for all business school deans. At the University of Tennessee, our faculty evaluation processes through the granting of tenure have been reasonably well defined through the years. However, as I look back over the last 25 years, our evaluations of all faculty throughout their careers—which could best be described as informal—clearly were not as well developed as we would have liked. 

Much has changed in the last three years. Because of an emphasis on improved performance evaluation for all university-level personal, as well as our own emphasis on efficiency and performance in the College of Business Administration, we are doing a much better job of evaluating faculty and have learned some important lessons in the process.

Because faculty performance expectations and processes vary so significantly among institutions, my focus here will be on what we have learned, rather than on what we have accomplished. To briefly summarize, about 20 months ago we began to prepare faculty evaluation standards that were more carefully coordinated with a new university faculty handbook. This spring, the business faculty voted to approve a set of performance standards to be implemented in 2005-2006.

Four distinct lessons stand out as the most important and transferable to other institutions.

First, faculty involvement is paramount. We asked our dean’s faculty advisory council―a group of six departmentally-elected and four dean-appointed faculty members―to draft a set of standards. While the draft was completed in a semester, the process of guiding the document through the larger faculty took nearly a year. After numerous discussions, small-group meetings, and multiple drafts, the faculty suggested amendments. The final result was near-unanimous approval by the council on each amendment and the final document.

A second lesson was that we found it necessary to clearly segment the writing of the standards from the process of implementation. It was imperative that we pay special attention to how we would put the standards into practice. We did this by designing a simple eight-unit workload analysis that established for each faculty member a profile of expectations for teaching, research, and service. We allowed work across these categories to vary among faculty members, within limits, but with targeted goals for each department.

Going through the process clearly enhanced the faculty’s understanding of how the performance standards would be implemented. It was a critical factor in each faculty member’s consideration to support (or not support) the standards.

The third lesson was that rushing the faculty evaluation process probably is not a good idea. Deans are doers who, typically, admire businesses that act quickly―much more quickly than we do in academe. However, we realized early on that we had to operate at a pace that was acceptable to the faculty, but keep everything moving so that no individual or group could “filibuster” to stall the process. While this was at times frustrating, the payoff was worth it. More careful thinking about the standards, we are certain, led to a greater acceptance of the final product.

We also learned that measuring the effectiveness of the evaluators must be a part of the actual faculty evaluation process. Since our department heads are the primary point persons for faculty evaluation, this is a key area where I evaluate their individual performance―how well they handle their faculty evaluations.

Management education is very much a “people business.” The collective talent of the faculties within our schools is our greatest asset. University administrations increasingly expect, and our faculty members deserve, well developed standards and evaluation processes. We are pleased with our progress at the University of Tennessee and hope our experience is helpful to others who work toward the same goal.       

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