The Impact of Appointment Type on the Productivity and Commitment of Full-Time Faculty in Research and Doctoral Institutions.

Introduction At a time when nearly half of the nation's higher education faculty will soon be retiring, (1) many colleges and universities are making unprecedented changes in the personnel systems into which new faculty will be hired. Rather than filling vacated tenure-track appointments to meet multiple needs (teaching, research, and service/outreach), institutions are increasingly shifting toward hiring faculty into "nontraditional" appointments for specific responsibilities, which are often on contracts that can be readily terminated in response to revenue decreases or programmatic changes (Finkelstein & Schuster, 2001; Gappa, 1996; Jones & Gold, 2001; Middaugh, 2001; Project on Faculty Appointments, 1998; Trower, 2000; U.S. Department of Education & National Center for Education Statistics, 2002a). Of concern is that this paradigm shift in the faculty appointment system is occurring with little understanding of its potential impact on core higher education outcomes such as teaching quality, research productivity, faculty commitment, faculty diversity, or the attractiveness of faculty careers. Understanding the effect of this shift before many more faculty are hired is especially important: In an American Council on Education report entitled "The new professoriate: Characteristics, contributions, and compensation, " Anderson (2002) provides a description of faculty hiring based on the most recent data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). He concludes this report with a call for studies on two questions: "To what extent should institutions rely on nontraditional faculty? How can colleges and universities employ these individuals in a way that is fair to all faculty and that strengthens institutional capacity to serve students and advance knowledge?" (Anderson, 2002, p. 24). These and other questions have guided us in a series of analyses using the 1999 data collected during the NCES National Study of Postsecondary Faculty (NSOPF). The overall objective of our series of studies is to elucidate how the use of an array of academic appointment types influences important measures of both individual and institutional vitality, within and between institution types. In this article, we present findings from our first study--an examination of the influence of appointment type on individual faculty productivity and commitment levels at Research and Doctoral institutions. Our study mitigates the influence of institutional mission and appointment hours by holding institution type constant and focusing solely on full-time faculty in Research and Doctoral institutions as found in the NSOPF 1999 dataset. We investigate appointment type influence (i.e., tenure versus non-tenure) on all full-time faculty in the 1999 NSOPF dataset as well as on a subset of these faculty who have been in the academy less then 7 years, thus holding constant their experience as an academic and their exposure to the norms and procedures of Research and Doctoral institutions. It is our hope that leaders in academia, armed with our empirical findings, will be better able to take advantage of the increasing array of faculty appointment options available to them--applying these options in ways that successfully balance their institutions' scholarly missions and new faculty members' goals with the overarching need for productive and committed faculty and institutional financial flexibility. Background We premised our study on the relationship between faculty appointment type and (a) faculty productivity and (b) faculty commitment. Thus, we begin our report with a brief synthesis of the productivity and commitment literature as it relates to our research questions and hypotheses. Next, we present published information on the changing nature of faculty hiring procedures in higher education, along with a summary of important, unanswered questions related to this documented paradigm shift. …