Home
Links
Faculty
Staff
Appointed Personnel
Grad Students
Resources
Credits
Guestbook
CALS Websites
Quotes

Previous Presentations

College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Women's Forum
Thursday, October 5, 2000, 3:30-5:00 p.m.

Valuing All Aspects of Academic Work:
Teaching and Advising, Research, Extension and Service

Does your position description reflect the value of the work you do? Four distinguished panelists led a discussion on the purpose and use of the position description from the various perspectives of departmental faculty, department chair, college and university promotion and tenure/promotion and continuing status committee member, and University administrator. Major points are summarized below.

Elizabeth Ervin, Vice Provost for Academic Personnel

Soyeon Shim, Director, School of Family and Consumer Sciences, former chair of College P&T Committee, member of University P&T Committee

Deborah Young, Associate Director for Programs, Cooperative Extension, former member of College P&C Committee

Wanda Howell, Associate Professor, Department of Nutritional Sciences

Bonnie Barber, Facilitator, Associate Professor, Family and Consumer Sciences

Wanda Howell (departmental faculty perspective)

How many of you have position descriptions that you look at every year and change as appropriate when you do your annual performance reviews? Some people are really surprised that you can negotiate the percentage distribution of effort with the department head depending on what you actually are asked to do. (With the exception of county-based positions which must be 100% extension-per panelist Deborah Young.)

All College of Agriculture and Life Sciences position descriptions have in common the percentage distribution of job responsibilities among teaching, research, extension/outreach and administration/service. The examples I reviewed ranged from a very generic description of the position of a tenure track assistant professor in the School of Family and Consumer Resources to ones with very specific comments describing an individual's key responsibilities. Usually the way we get very specific in our college is in Major Commitments and Plans, Item B of the packet we prepare for the annual performance evaluation. If you would like to see some sample CALS position descriptions, contact Kathleen Miller in the Dean's Office at ukmiller@ag.arizona.edu or Ph. 626-8353.

The other interesting thing I found is that even when the same distributions are indicated there are a variety of interpretations of what constitutes percent effort in each category. The number and frequency of courses to be taught can vary for the same percentage. The work within the percentage distribution is open to interpretation but the individual is only accountable for what is written in the position description.

Having an accurate job description is very important for annual evaluations. They are very important in the promotion and tenure or continuing process as well. Evaluators want to know if you are actually doing what your job description says you are doing. If the job description differs, they can't help but say there is something wrong here.

Soyeon Shim (unit head and P&T committee perspectives at both college and university level)

As a new department chair I have been through one annual performance evaluation cycle. On the other hand just about every year since I came here in 1990 I have had the opportunity to look at promotion and tenure dossiers and position descriptions. Through service on the college and university committees I have looked at hundreds of dossiers and job descriptions. I want to talk about the characteristics of a good position description and how they are used in promotion and tenure and annual performance evaluation.

I. Characteristics of a Good Position Description

Changes should be made with the future goals in mind for the individual and/or the program. Goals at different ranks are influenced by P&T guidelines for that rank.

For new faculty I like to see the duties somewhat generic and broad with percentages specified for teaching and research. The typical split at the UA is 40/40/20 but there is a lot more variation within the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. There is also a great deal of variation in expectations for a given percentage among colleges and departments. Note that 40% in BPA is different than 40% in Agriculture. Within our college we don't specify a service component but the expectation of service is still there.

Examples of distributions from the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences:

a. Teaching 60%/Research 40% *

b. Teaching 100% *

c. Teaching 40%/Research 40%/Administration 20% *

(*with appropriate intramural/extramural service expectations)

Position descriptions can be changed along the way but should be somewhat stable. I would really discourage you from trying to change it every year. The question to ask is 'what is your long term goal'. The position description should fit both your long term goals and your department's goals. Making a major change in distribution, such as from 60% teaching/40% research to 100% teaching, also requires consultation and approval from the Dean because this will really change your job structure.

II. The Role of the Position Description for Annual Performance Review/Promotion and Tenure Review

Hierarchical overview: P&T criteria influence the position description. The position description determines the work load which, in conjunction with APR evaluation criteria, influences annual goals and the annual evaluation. Your workload and goals in conjunction with P&T criteria affect evaluation in the P&T process.

Annual goals can be very different for different people. Some people have very ambitions goals; others have minimal goals. Annual goals are a way of establishing expectations for the evaluation period.

The position description in the P&T (or P&C) dossier should describe your role and responsibilities in the department over the past five or six years. It should not be a summary of your achievements. If there have been changes in responsibilities over the years, those changes should be noted. Your position can usually be described in half a page or a full page but I wouldn't recommend any more than one page.

Deborah Young (Extension faculty and P&C committee perspectives)

I wanted to start out by mentioning the Scholarship Redefined Team, which I co-chaired with Sue DeNise. We did a survey to get an idea of what different faculty members in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences thought about scholarship and how we should measure scholarship so we all know what each other is doing. The group that came out as the most dissatisfied was extension specialists. They were the group that really thought other people did not understand what they did. The teaching people and the research people seemed to feel more clearly understood. Although in some departments teaching is more important and in other departments research is more important, across all departments the specialists said 'they don't understand us' and 'they don't rate what we do as high as what other people do'.

I think the way we use the position description could be one way to help. When we serve on committees, whether it is an annual review peer committee or the P&C committee, we should make a commitment to read the position description and try to understand what our colleagues do. Even though I don't teach in a classroom I can understand the stresses of classroom teaching, what it takes to put lectures together, and having to deal with students when you have to go some place but they are standing outside your office door wanting to talk with you. So I can value that even though I don't do it. That's my pitch for all of us to look at what has been said about valuing all the aspects of what we do as a college.

The other point that we talked about was service. I feel very strongly that as a land grant university we all should do service. We are all paid by state dollars and we all should do some kind of position-related service. I have seen people write down that they were coach of a little league team and that was their service to the community. Now unless you are in the P.E. department I don't see how that relates to your position. There should be a mix of extramural and intramural service. For some people it might mean serving on university and college committees. But for other people extramural service might be more important, something really connected to the community, e.g., serving on the Board of Directors of Casa de los Ninos, or something that is associated with what they are doing in their position.

If you want to see a position description for anyone who has an extension appointment, we put all position descriptions up on the web. I brought a couple of examples from CALS continuing track faculty. This person teaches in seminars but not in formal classrooms. I like this one because it is generic enough that as the year goes on if some really important issue comes up that needs to be addressed (e.g., several years ago there was a disease of wheat that showed up unexpectedly in Arizona) his position description is broad enough so that he could take that direction. It also contains a short explanation that as an extension agent he is expected to conduct an education program which would be helpful for an evaluator who doesn't know what extension is.

The other position description I wanted to show you is for a county faculty. (I was in a committee meeting just this morning with someone who did not know we had county faculty before.) This one is for Carol Willis. She is a family and consumer science agent and she is also a county director in Graham County. Of course all our county positions are 100% extension, so she has a really generic description of her extension programs, but she put down a list of some of her major thrusts and then she also has administration. What we asked her to do is highlight the major areas that she works on. We have asked each county faculty member to be able to say what it is that they are really good at. In a county program you can't do everything, so you need to try to focus your activities around what you do best. For reporting purposes, I also like having the program areas up on top. Since we have to report on those areas to the federal government it makes it really easy to sort.

Lastly I wanted to make a pitch for a new APR system called APROL (APR online). If any of you would like to use it we would be glad to show it to you. We will even give you personal instruction if you like. This year all extension faculty will be required to submit their APRs online. Several of the departments have been interested in using it also.

Elizabeth Ervin (University perspective)

I don't have a whole lot to add. I think those who went before me have given you a pretty good overview of what's important and what you need to be thinking about. I have a few overheads that I think help to underscore what Wanda and Soyeon and Deb talked about but they also show what the university level is really looking at. So if you can jump from the College of Ag level to picturing yourself as a member of the University committee, imagine somebody who is not from the College of Ag trying to figure out what it is you do, particularly for an Extension person.

As you develop your job description and review it each year, particularly for your P&T/P&C reviews (your 2- and 4- and especially the 6-year review), be sure that the job description does describe your workload. Another very important part of that is that the department head somehow conveys the importance of your position to the unit, what special unique function your position has. It is very important, as has been said over and over today, to translate what your courses and activities contribute to the unit. As was pointed out, 40/40/20 means something different wherever you go in the university. In some units a 40% teaching load is one course per semester but I have seen cases where a 40% teaching load is one course per year, so (and I am not saying this hypothetically) if you are in a unit where the latter is the norm then it would be very important to make that point big time.

You really need to describe your position in the context of your unit and your college, what does your workload mean, what exactly are you supposed to do. Because the committees do look first at your job description, then they look at what you have been doing and whether the work corresponds to the position description. I have seen cases where you read the position description and then you went a little further into the dossier and you saw that what the person was doing had absolutely no connection at all; in fact, you wonder if they have somehow mixed theirs up with somebody else's.

Does the job description accurately reflect your role in the department? Is there additional work in your department that you should get credit for, particularly the issue of advising, committee work, mentoring and all the kinds of things that many women faculty are asked to do that take a lot of time. That should somehow be addressed either in the candidate statement or in the letter written by the department head. So just be sure that all those things that fall within your position but may tend to fall outside of the normal teaching and research are noted.

Another place that we see women doing an unusual amount of work is in the independent study category. This is some data we have been looking at out of my office on differences in workload between different ranks and between men and women. Now it may not be true for all of you or you as an individual but this is the university average. You will notice that associate professors teach a whole lot more credit hours per FTE than faculty in the other ranks. Women teach fewer regular hours per FTE on average than men. There are a few exceptions to that and I'll show them to you. Women teach smaller classes than men. There is a common assumption around campus that women are stuck with all the big classes but it is not true. Actually the data show that it is the other way. In a few regular areas women do teach a little bit more than men. But the assumption going around campus that women teach a whole lot more than men is not true.

Across the board women teach a higher portion of independent studies than men. Sometimes it is quite dramatic, almost twice as many independent studies per FTE. What that sort of tells me is that independent studies are like advising and mentoring, one of those areas that you do not get load credit or teaching credit for so it tends to fall into the female domain rather than the male. But the point of all this data is to say that if you are a woman you want to be sure that your position description reflects a holistic gestalt of what you do. And very often for women that looks different than it does for men, especially if you've got a whole lot of advisees or a lot of graduate students. Both tend to take a huge amount of time and do not always tend to show up as dramatically as a course or a particular research activity. So just be sure that those things are expressed in your dossier. Also be sure that when you have an opportunity to talk about your work load with your department head that these things are figured in and not just expected of you on top of everything else. They should be factored into how your load is determined.

I wanted to close by saying that I have been thinking about this a lot lately. The President has been asked to begin thinking about differentiating our mission from the other two schools, NAU and ASU. I think this is a really good sign because we have always been treated the same even though we are very very different. Finally the Board of Regents has respected that and said let's start talking about the differences in institutions and what each one needs.

One of the things that has really characterized The University of Arizona from the day it opened its doors is that it is a land grant institution and this college, of course, is what makes it a land grant institution. The work that is done in the college affects the entire state and it has always been one of the identifying markers of this institution. There are other things of course. I think the interdisciplinary work that goes on here in the IDPs is another thing that increasingly is identifying the U of A as a particular kind of institution. In fact many of our faculty say they came here because of our interdisciplinary approach. Optical sciences has put its stamp on us; lunar and planetary sciences and the fine arts have also been very important characteristics of this institution. But nothing characterizes us more than the work you do in your college.

I think that the position descriptions and the promotion and tenure/continuing process and the recognition of what the faculty do here both in extension and on campus really play a much more important part in telling the world what the University of Arizona is all about than almost anything else. You should keep that in mind and feel very proud of it. The work you have done in developing such well thought out position descriptions and how to use them is very important and really serves as a model for the rest of the university. Very often when departments have asked us to provide them with examples of what a good position description should look like, we will go to an Ag one. I am not saying they are perfect and maybe you feel that there are ways that you want to improve them but they are certainly very good .