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This report provides an overview of a new conceptual model of faculty work in the 21st century, one that addresses today’s context, where academic capitalism and the gig academy have impacted faculty’s work and work environments and where demographic shifts have led to a change in the makeup of the academic workforce. This framework explores dimensions of faculty experiences, roles, and working conditions across various societal, institutional, and individual contexts. 

In this brief, we argue that creating avenues to support VITAL faculty is an essential role for leaders within academic affairs, and particularly those in faculty affairs. While we review a host of supports needed, we argue for the importance of sustained professional development opportunities like faculty learning communities and certificate programs as we start to make these roles more long-term and career oriented. We use the term VITAL faculty — an asset-based term — to refer to contingent or non-tenure track faculty (including visiting faculty, instructors, adjuncts, lecturers, research faculty, and clinical faculty) as a way to affirm what they are, rather than what they are not. Our work at the Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success has identified the need for faculty affairs to take responsibility for VITAL faculty, as they often have not had an advocate or any structures to support their work. The absence of leadership positions and structures dedicated specifically to VITAL faculty support has led to the problems we have seen over the last few decades — declines in graduation and retention rates for students, low morale among faculty, and a lack of belonging for students and faculty. 

The purpose of the Faculty, Academic Careers and Environments (FACE) project is to understand who faculty are, what their academic careers look like, and how the environments in which they work shape their ability to thrive as instructors, researchers and public scholars in the community. This report describes the two-year pilot study of how best to create a national study of faculty working at non-profit colleges and universities of all types across the country, given the social media and survey research environment of the 2020s. 

Given the critical role of institutional data collection for the FACE project, we conducted focus groups with institutional researchers from different institutional contexts to inform our institution-level data collection instruments and processes because we were interested in speaking first with the people who would be responding to our requests at the institutional level. We conducted focus groups of institutional data providers to understand the specific data that institutions maintain on faculty (e.g., length and continuity of employment, advancement, office space, instructional load), which institutional offices maintain those data, the format of the data, and institutional policies related to data sharing. The information gained from the focus groups informed the development of our data collection procedures, particularly in terms of identifying survey language and definitions. 

Contingent, VITAL faculty make up the majority of faculty positions in the United States, and their role is primarily instruction. Yet they often face numerous barriers to participating in professional development and engaging in the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL), activities that can support their instructional effectiveness. This study explores how campuses can facilitate participation of contingent faculty in sustained professional development programs and how these programs can foster their engagement in SoTL.