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MU faculty reported dissatisfaction with senior university leadership and shared governance, according to a committee report on the 2022 Collaborative on Academic Careers in Education survey.
The Collaborative on Academic Careers in Education (COACHE) survey involved a variety of open-ended and Likert scale multiple choice questions, which were then divided into 25 broader benchmark categories seen in the report. Benchmarks from the survey were rated on a scale of 1.0 to 5.0.
Scores of the lowest-ranked categories ranged from 2.36 to 2.54, all of which decreased from scores on MU’s last report in 2019.
The COACHE survey defines senior leadership as the provost and president/chancellor, said Shelly Rodgers, strategic communications professor and co-chair of the COACHE committee.
“Senior leadership is measured in terms of quality of senior leadership overall, pace of decision-making, faculty input, stated priorities and presentation of priorities,” Rodgers said.
She further explained that shared governance is measured in terms of adaptability, shared sense of purpose, productivity and understanding the issue at hand. These four categories, along with senior leadership, made up the five lowest-scoring benchmarks in the report.
In comparison, the top-scoring benchmarks of faculty satisfaction were Departmental Collegiality, Departmental Leadership, Teaching, Collaboration and Departmental Quality. These benchmarks held average scores ranging from 3.61 to 3.83.
Additionally, scores for both faculty and departmental leadership notably increased since MU’s last COACHE report in 2019. The benchmark for faculty leadership grew by nearly 11%, while satisfaction with departmental leadership grew by almost 6%.
According to the report, MU scored first or second in these two categories among five peer universities and in the top 30% of 82 institutions across the country for 2022.
A review of findings from a Collaborative on Academic Careers in Education survey showed MU faculty were dissatisfied with senior leadership and shared governance.
Katie Gallaway
Although the survey report allows for comparison of benchmarks between current and former years, differences in faculty response rates should be taken into account.
The overall response rate to this survey was 51%, higher than MU’s 2019 response rate of 41% and the average response rate of other universities that completed the survey in 2022, which was 42%.
MU’s response rates of non-tenure track faculty, faculty of color (defined by COACHE as people who identify as non-white), Asian/Asian-American faculty and underrepresented minority faculty (people who identify as non-white and non-Asian/Asian-American) were all above the overall average rate of cohort institutions.
However, it should be noted that this survey was completed in spring of 2022, and a large turnover of Black faculty at the university occurred that year.
Another subject the report highlighted pertained to MU’s organization of course structure during the pandemic. According to the report, 60% of faculty marked that they were satisfied or very satisfied with support for developing online or hybrid courses, and 62% answered that they were satisfied or very satisfied with the subsequent teaching of those courses. Both scores were higher than the cohort mean.
