newsadvancements and initiatives - Faculty Matters

From the desk of the senior vice president of academic operations
True or false
I
n my role at the University, I’m fortunate to have
the opportunity to communicate with a lot of
faculty members on a regular basis. While some
of you reach out to me electronically, I meet many
more of you in person when I attend faculty meetings
and events across the country.
You share your great ideas and constructive
feedback with me, but you also share some common
misconceptions about your role as a faculty member
and about the University. I’d like to debunk a few of
the most frequent myths I hear.
Myth: If I fail a student, I won’t be offered as many
teaching contracts.
Truth: Many faculty members believe there will be
negative consequence for them if they fail a student,
but nothing could be further from truth. At the
University, we expect you, our instructors, to grade
our students appropriately based on their academic
performance in the classroom. Sometimes that will
mean you must issue a failing grade.
While we don’t penalize our faculty members for failing
students, we do, however, pay attention to variance
in grading. If we notice that the average grade an
instructor gives students is 4.0, then we know that
instructor is not providing an appropriate level of
feedback to the students and is not discriminating
between higher and lower quality work. If there is zero
variance in an instructor’s grading, we will typically
have an administrative faculty member work with the
instructor on his/her grading skills and technique.
Myth: The University purposely schedules less senior
faculty members with lower pay grades to save money.
Truth: Though this is a common myth, there’s not
an ounce of truth to it. The University staff members
responsible for scheduling are completely blind to
the pay levels and categories of our faculty members.
Because of this, it’s impossible to discriminate against
our more senior, higher earning faculty members when
scheduling instructors for our classes.
On the other hand, sometimes we intentionally seek
more senior faculty members for our more advanced
classes because their higher level of knowledge and
experience is the best fit. This is done prior to the
actual scheduling of classes and is usually handled in
the course approval process. In other words, when
approving a faculty member to teach a course, we will
decide who is the best fit for teaching the course and
add that faculty member to the pool of faculty that are
eligible to be scheduled.
Myth: The anonymous Faculty Engagement Surveys
aren’t really anonymous.
Truth: This is another common myth. Sometimes
we receive letters from faculty members who believe
their courses were cancelled because of feedback they
provided in the Faculty Engagement Survey. Again, this
myth is completely baseless. I want to reiterate that the
Faculty Engagement Survey is absolutely anonymous.
University of Phoenix hires a third-party company
to conduct our survey and analyze the results, which
they provide to us without revealing any identifying
information about faculty members. We only receive
the aggregate scores.
Sometime our survey administrator will break the
survey responses into categories for us. However,
when there is a survey category with fewer than 10
responses, we are not given that information because
of the possibility that we could determine the source
of the comments. Again, this measure provides an
additional layer of protection for our faculty so you can
feel confident that the Faculty Engagement Survey is
completely anonymous.
Editor’s note: See the results of the latest Faculty Engagement Survey in
The HR Column which starts on page 72.
facultymatters.com
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“ I’d like to
debunk a few
of the most
frequent
myths I hear.”
Answers to your questions
I encourage you to contact your college campus chair or director of campus
affairs with your own questions about the University and its policies. Online
faculty can send their inquiries to facultyassist@phoenix.edu.