The Kardia Group

What do you do?

Irregular Faculty Meetings
Faculty meetings in your department are irregular, tending to only be called when significant decisions require a formal discussion. The rest of the business of the department is conducted through informal mechanisms and centralized decision-making. Most senior faculty in the department prefer this model and speak derisively of faculty meetings in general. You’re finding, however, that junior faculty come to you with a lot of questions about the basic functions and policies of the department, and often seem bewildered by how day-to-day decisions get made.

Concerns about Student Evaluations
For as long as you can remember, student evaluations of teaching have hinged on just two questions asked of every student. You have concerns about how these questions are worded, and you also know that existing literature on student evaluations decries the use of quantitative ratings in this manner. Based on your own experience and the experience of some of your colleagues, you also have concerns that students relate differently to male and female instructors, and that this difference plays out in the evaluation system.

Moving in Unsupported Directions
Distance learning gets little attention from most of your colleagues, and clearly is not a core activity at your institution. However, you can see both its potential and its necessity, and are familiar with models being used at other universities. Furthermore, you realize how distance learning technologies can improve the pedagogy of classes on campus, and how related they are to other digitization projects that are central to your field.

Graduate Student Attribution on Papers
In the past month, you've had three graduate students come to you with complaints related to paper authorship involving other faculty. Their situations vary, but in general their experiences highlight the fact that your department has no clear norms in this arena, and that students are vulnerable to both unintentional and even intentional exploitation. Some of the junior faculty in the department are getting a reputation for being unreasonable in their assignments of authorship to students, and you’re also worried about their reputations.

Formal Mentoring Programs
A junior faculty colleague in your department has mentioned to you that he is having trouble with his assigned mentor. He finds his mentor to be a great resource in informal mentoring situations, but this senior faculty member has actively criticized the formal mentoring program and refuses to participate in the departmental expectations such as taking his mentee out to lunch to discuss his overall trajectory. Your junior colleague is hesitant to bring questions to his mentor beyond those associated with specific activities they are working on together, and now feels like he’s not sure if he’s on the right track in sorting out his overall priorities. You know from past comments made by the senior faculty member that his hesitation stems in part from a concern about giving the wrong advice and thus jeopardizing the career of a junior faculty member.

Comparing Academia and Industry
You arrived at your institution recently from another institution, and before that spent some time in industry as well. You are glad to be here and find that its resources, policies, and practices are a significant improvement over your previous institution - and the benefits of being in academia continue to reinforce your decision to leave industry. You like your new department and your new colleagues - however, you are concerned about how they sometimes behave toward each other in and outside faculty meetings (in a manner that never would be tolerated in industry) and by their level of complaint about circumstances at the college. (They clearly don't realize how much better it is here).

Who's Invited to Dinner?
Your department is conducting a search and is bringing in a senior faculty member that would be a great asset to the department. A dinner has been organized with the search committee which includes the candidate’s spouse and spouses of committee members. A female associate professor who is on the committee has come to your office to ask for help. The chair has asked her not to attend the dinner because she is in a lesbian relationship and her partner would not be welcome at this dinner.

Problematic Faculty Member
Professor Hypothetical is causing a number of problems in your department. You suspect that he is trying to directly undermine another senior member of your department and indirectly his actions are threatening or sabotaging a number of junior faculty. Staff complain privately to you about how difficult he is to work with, and you’ve heard that he generally bullies his graduate students and postdocs, several of whom are minority students. An undergraduate in one of his classes has described to you how he uses public humiliation tactics in class when students don’t learn the material quickly.

Measuring Scholarly Success
You suspect that the College's assessment of the scholarly success of your department is not accurate. And you aren’t sure how much their misunderstanding matters At the same time, you're also aware that scholarly output is complicated to measure and not well accounted by internal department mechanisms.

Fostering Faculty Collaborations
It seems that the University is too seldom on the leading edge of new discoveries, projects, or perspectives and that the organization in general does not adequately capitalize on the high caliber of the faculty. You have a sense that the institution needs to take new steps in faculty collaborations, and get better at harnessing the collective energy of top scholars, but you don't see any models that work this way, and you're aware of the many institutional barriers to such an approach (time, money, divisions between units, etc.)

Institutional Competition for Faculty
With budgets getting tighter, it seems like private colleges and universities are increasingly able to offer better deals to faculty and students than your institution. You are worried about how your institution can continue to live its mission and reality as a public university and still retain a faculty that makes it a leading academic institution.