Senate Reference No. 05-4

Question Time

The circulating draft of "Examples for Documenting and Evaluating Faculty Research, Scholarship, and Creative Endeavor" lists campus-wide rubrics, presented as a series of juxtapositions, for identifying "excellent" versus "satisfactory" accomplishments. It is, for example, "satisfactory" to receive an award that does not allow facilities and administration costs, and "excellent" if overhead is part of the grant.  It is "satisfactory" to publish in a peer reviewed professional journal, but "excellent" if the same scholarly work is invited to be published. It is, of course, necessary to achieve 'excellence' to be promoted to the rank of full professor at IPFW based on excellence in scholarship or creative endeavor.

Questions: Does the administration believe that faculty at IPFW, a mature educational institution, should be promoted to the rank of full professor at roughly the same rate as colleagues at other institutions in the IU and Purdue systems? Should the types of scholarly accomplishments needed for promotion at IPFW be similar to those at IUB and PUWL? If the types are not identical, can you explain some ways the document in question draws distinctions between campuses with different missions, opportunities and limitations? How does the document in question assist IPFW faculty in achieving promotion?

Anne Argast

Geosciences