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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. 

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. 

Campuses are seeking ways to address two major issues: racial equity and ongoing pandemic-related challenges. One approach to addressing these issues that few leaders have considered is liberatory design thinking (LDT). LDT is a well-established process that is uniquely positioned to mitigate these issues. In a recent research study that investigated how campuses designed improved supports for non-tenure-track faculty, we found that design teams used LDT to create innovative solutions to equity-related issues that affect non-tenure-track faculty. The LDT process has also been used in other social settings with similarly favorable results. 

Higher education faces a number of wicked problems, including the inequitable work environment for non-tenure-track faculty (NTTF), that require innovative solutions. This study examines the potential of liberatory design thinking for creating new policies, programs, and practices in higher education, including how the professional bureaucratic environment might shape the design process. Using data from three campuses where changes related to NTTF were successfully implemented, we extend the conceptualization of design thinking toward a model that adapts existing phases of design thinking and identifies new phases where the work of design is particularly influenced by the higher education context. We identify three dimensions that particularly contribute to these differences: politics and power in professional bureaucracies, structural and cultural constraints, and centering equity. This model has practical implications for supporting equity-minded change processes in higher education and may be of particular interest to policymakers, institutional leaders, design teams, and researchers. 

In recent years, critics have pointed out the poor working conditions of non-tenure-track faculty (NTTF), but less attention has been paid to the lack of investment in them as teachers and how that shapes the teaching and learning environment. Engaging NTTF in professional development is a critical dimension of helping them develop teaching effectiveness and campus connectedness. Thus, it is important to understand the expanding suite of professional development options that offer NTTF sustained engagement and how administrative policies and practices shape the successful engagement of the new faculty majority in such initiatives.