Non-Tenure Track Faculty Professional Development Opportunities

With the growth of academic programs to include online coupled with the requirement to provide full benefits to adjunct faculty who are teaching more than 9 credit hours in a semester, The Citadel, a primarily teaching focused college, has begun to shift from a nearly complete tenure track faculty to a faculty model with 25 percent of the faculty non-tenure track. This change in faculty structure has also been driven by the State controlling the number of full time equivalent (FTE) lines available which requires annual evaluation and approval of increased full-time equivalents while faced with increased enrollments. Normally faculty development, presentation, and small research grants were limited to the tenure track faculty, but now the School of Engineering at The Citadel is providing for the first time this year these funds to non-tenure track faculty which not only improves the potential for a non-tenured track faculty moving into a tenure track line in the future, but also increases the overall faculty scholarship production (non-tenured faculty skills being pulled into scholarship), augmenting the quality of non-tenured track faculty activities as well as their future transportability (i.e., skill development) to other opportunities; thereby enhancing the entire program. The obvious downside is the spreading of already limited faculty development funds over an ever increasing faculty population. The School of Engineering at The Citadel will outline its faculty development programs as well as co-teaching models that are producing a more cohesive department. Non-tenure track faculty changes will be presented, analyzed, and possible best practices being pulled from the current data.