I know I have been bad at keeping the blog up-to-date. I usually miss December due to the SACSCOC annual meeting and then the holiday break, but I also missed January. Apologies.
Anyway, I have spent considerable time with clients recently working on the SACSCOC faculty sufficiency standards (6.1 Full-time faculty and 6.2.b Program faculty). Let’s look at each one and then end with the pattern for compliance.
6.1 The institution employs a sufficient number of full-time faculty members to support the mission and goals of the institution. [CR]
Start 6.1 with the institutional mission and then describe your institution in terms of degrees offered. The beginning of the narrative needs to include a description of your full-time faculty. How many, rank/tenure distribution, contract length, teaching load, other duties, etc. Paint a picture of the full-time faculty for your reviewers.
Tell your reviewers how you measure faculty sufficiency. This typically starts with a measure of the course coverage by FT faculty. This requires a goal that must be justified. You might also include other measures like student:faculty ratio. Yes, this requires a justified goal as well. Once all that is explained, you need to provide the data that hopefully is at or above your goal. Don’t forget to discuss overload. If it is negligible, document than and then don’t mention it again. If it is more substantial, you need to include overload as a piece of the “do you have enough FT faculty” puzzle. Also include the factors that you review when considering if new faculty are needed.
There is a secret bit that should follow the data, but I’ll save that for client institutions.
6.2.b For each of its educational programs, the institution employs a sufficient number of full-time faculty members to ensure curriculum and program quality, integrity, and review.
Start 6.2.b with the institution mission and describe your institution in terms of the degrees offered. The beginning of the narrative needs to include a description of your full-time faculty. How many, rank/tenure distribution, contract length, teaching load, other duties, etc. Paint a picture of the full-time faculty for your reviewers. How do you define a “program” for which you need to have sufficient FT faculty? This needs to be consistent with and should include a link to the Institutional Summary Form.
Address the faculty role in program quality, integrity, and review. This may be done with examples from and links to narratives for other standards. I’m sure you know which ones, there are many.
Tell your reviewers how you measure faculty sufficiency for each program. This typically starts with a measure of the course coverage by FT faculty. This requires a goal that must be justified. You might also include other measures like student:faculty ratio. Yes, this requires a justified goal as well. Once all that is explained, you need to provide the data that hopefully is at or above your goal for each program. Don’t forget to discuss overload. If it is negligible, document than and then don’t mention it again. If it is more substantial, you need to include overload as a piece of the “do you have enough FT faculty” puzzle. Also include a list of factors that you review when considering if new faculty are needed for a program.
There is a different secret bit after the data, but again, I’ll save that for client institutions.
Did you see the pattern? I’m sure you did. These two narratives are very similar. In fact, I recommend writing the first part of one, and then doing a copy/paste to start the other. The beginning of these narratives can be identical. Data presentation is similar, but 6.2.c has a longer table with a row for each program. And, of course, the secret bits are different.
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