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To understand what life on the tenure track is like, the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education (COACHE) conducts an annual survey of tenure- track faculty. Through surveys and in focus groups and interviews, hundreds of tenure-track faculty members tell us what affects their workplace satisfaction and, ultimately, their success. The clarity and reasonableness of the criteria and standards for achieving tenure, institutional and collegial support for teaching and research, the effectiveness of workplace policies and practices, departmental climate and collegiality, and work/life balance are among the issues addressed.
In 2009, for the first time, COACHE had collected enough faculty respondents who self-identified in each racial and ethnic category (see Figure 1), in proportions similar to their representation in the faculty population nationally, to look at each group separately and see how their experiences of academe differ.
An examination of the different groups’ experiences of faculty life is important to the welfare of our students. The percentage of American college students who are minorities has been increasing: in 1976, 15 percent were minorities, compared with 32 percent in 2007. The percentage of Asian or Pacific Islander students rose from 2 to 7 percent, the Hispanic share of college enrollments rose from 4 to 11 percent, and the African-American percentage went from 9 to 13 percent (Snyder, Dillow, and Hoffman, p. 270).
Cathy Trower is research director and principal investigator at the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education (COACHE) at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
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