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THE topic of the 2001 ADFL Summer Seminars—Competing Loyalties, Conflicting Identities—highlights one of the great challenges facing faculty members and chairs in departments of foreign languages. As professors, we feel loyalty—or at least accountability—to many groups, including our students and colleagues; our particular language section, if we are in a multilingual unit; our department; and the division or college that houses the department. We also owe fealty to the institution where we teach, and perhaps to the denomination with which the institution is affiliated. We have attachments to our profession (most of us surely belong to our respective AAT organization) and to our field, in which we publish, review, and evaluate scholarship. Circling back toward our own locus, we often feel ties to our state or province and its educational system, to regional teachers’ associations, and to local organizations where our students may carry out service-learning projects.
Is any of this new? Has the competition for the foreign language professor’s time and loyalty grown fiercer? Studies have found that all professionals in the United States are working more than they used to, and professors in our field are certainly no exception. Technology, instantaneous communication, and the corporate mentality that has made productivity and clients part of our working vocabulary: all have effected an enormous speedup in our—excuse the word—industry.1 Other exacerbating factors include the devolution of centralized administrative tasks to the departments, usually without corresponding increases in staff; the peculiar demography of many humanities units, which lack a middle generation and are the site of an uneasy existence between professors within a decade of retiring and assistant professors, who require the shielding and subventions that senior colleagues never enjoyed; ever-renewed demands from legislators, trustees, or higher administrators for faculty members to write grants, to diversify the curriculum into areas for which most of us were not trained (information technology and distance learning, for example), and to create study-abroad programs.
On the positive side of the ledger, opportunities for foreign language professors have also expanded, and while this new range of possibilities may bring some of our identities into conflict, few of us would wish to return to the more circumscribed world of our predecessors. Today, the teacher in us is tempted to spend weeks enriching syllabi with Web-based treasures; the researcher, to accept yet another invitation to participate in a conference. The adviser in us would help organize a job fair or a study-abroad event featuring an interactive media presentation; the administrator has thought of a source of scholarship or grant funding that needs to be developed.
The many demands made on our time parallel the many choices we have about where to concentrate our professional efforts. This situation presents the chair of a foreign language department with the opportunity to help both faculty members and the department, by identifying (and if possible rewarding) activities of particular value to both the individuals involved and the department. In this article I discuss the reward schemes—symbolic and material—developed in my department to guide faculty members through this archipelago of loyalties, and to do so in such a way as to foster the well-being of the department, the college, and the university.
One of my principal goals, when I became chair in 1994, was to recognize and stimulate outstanding performance more effectively. It seemed to me that the best way to accomplish the task would be through symbolic and (when the legislature so disposed) financial rewards. For the latter, I hoped to design a system that could orient and grade the apples and oranges—and persimmons and loquats—that constitute the highly diverse department of Romance languages and literatures at the University of Florida. Orientation seemed imperative, and grading would be necessary for the fair apportionment of any monies we might receive. I knew that a variety of factors would make it difficult to compare faculty members’ performance. Faculty members bring different strengths and proclivities to the workplace; they belong to language groups that have their own tradition and problems; members will experience fat years and lean, and assignments often vary substantially. Such inherent disparity makes comparison difficult, but the task is often further complicated when university or state administrators impose external evaluatory plans.
After outlining the honorary rewards that have been instituted in the department to recognize faculty and TA achievement, I discuss the central issue of a merit pay program that both guides and fairly rewards the faculty members’ diverse activities. Fairness is a vexing goal in such deliberations, because years of unfairness, or caprice, in raise policies have often left foreign language faculty members with salaries that are severely compressed or inverted vis-à-vis younger colleagues.2 The best we can aim for is to reward current achievements equitably. The process our department undertook to arrive at a solid merit plan led to a pay program that has served us very well for seven years. To ground the abstract notions that went into the construction of the scheme, I have included the evaluation sheets used in our deliberations as appendixes 1 and 2.
Chairs of foreign language departments, as one quickly learns at an ADFL seminar, do not have uniform job descriptions, or even similar authority to adjudicate raises or devise reward schemes. Thus it is prudent to begin a discussion of rewards by addressing those most widely available to chairs: honorary or symbolic kudos. At many institutions, opportunities regularly arise to nominate individuals for teaching, advising, or research honors. In some cases, a monetary award is associated with such designations, but even purely symbolic ones are appreciated. Few professors would disdain the honor of being featured as adviser of the year on the college marquee or in the departmental newsletter. Some schools have rotating semester- or year-long appointments to named professorships or to such entities as humanities centers. These designations afford a lighter teaching load and considerable status. A chair may have to persevere in the nominations and be prepared to weather several rejections. Even when a nominee is not selected on the first go-round, his or her name—and the department’s—should begin to have a positive ring for the committee members. Another way to accord recognition to outstanding faculty members is to nominate them for membership on a high-profile committee: intramural, regional, or national.
At the most local level, I have made abundant use of a bulletin board prominently placed at the entrance to the departmental office. I keep it current with congratulations to faculty members and graduate students on their particular achievements. I also send regular e-mail memos to faculty members and graduate students, listing distinctions won by members of the departmental family, including undergraduate majors. On display in the main office is a plaque on which are engraved the names of each year’s winner(s) of the university-wide Graduate Student Teaching Award. This sort of town-crier activity is especially necessary to spread news in a unit as large as ours, with thirty-six faculty members, seventy-plus graduate students, and more than two hundred majors. The homespun form of recognition the bulletin board represents is immediate and seems to be effective, to judge from the jubilant exclamations I have overheard in the main office: “Yessss! I finally made the board!” Colleagues, too, have come by to ask when this or that attainment will be announced on that little rectangle. Evidently, even the smallest pat on the back is appreciated.
There is no doubt that symbolic recognition has its place and that it serves the function of fostering esprit de corps. Given the choice between kudos and tangible rewards, however, most of our faculty members would prefer the latter. In a world in which status is so clearly pegged to income and in which our graduating students may start out at salaries remarkably close to those of some faculty members, material rewards mean more—even in the ivory tower—than perhaps they used to. The widespread application of corporate models to higher education has contributed to a growing conviction among the professoriat and the administration that the only true rewards are monetary. The symbolic laurels that might once have seemed ample recompense—honorary titles, the presidency of the faculty senate—look like Cracker Jack prizes in the global marketplace. It is in recognition of this fact that our department spent so much time designing a system of tangible rewards.
Like many chairs and heads of departments, I have nominal control of the system of financial rewards. Unfortunately, “system” is a misnomer at the University of Florida: each year the legislature specifies the amount of money that may be distributed as raises and the type of raise that may be given. Recently, the privileged category has been merit raises, but since the early 1990s there have been discretionary raises (decided by the chair alone), across-the-board raises, market equity raises (based on a faculty member’s calculated market value), compression raises (to redress salaries that have grown so slowly that they are well below regional means for rank and discipline), productivity bonuses, special teaching awards (a $5,000 raise), and Professorial Excellence Awards (a $5,000 raise for meritorious full professors). In 2001, a new scheme was implemented to give a 9% raise to full professors who had demonstrated particular merit in teaching, research, and service. It would be churlish to complain about this largesse, but such targeted increases often exhaust the funds for general raises, leaving professors who do not fill the criterion du jour without a cent in any given year. These short-lived programs, successive avatars of corporate models championed by this legislator or that university president, have succeeded in exacerbating salary inequities and muddying the fairness waters.3 All have contributed to a trend toward quantification that makes it difficult for chairs to keep uppermost the qualitative mission of the department and the well-being of students and colleagues.
This complicated background information underlines the obvious: it is not easy to devise equitable plans to reward departmental faculty members, with their diverse assignments, incommensurable achievements, and patchwork salary levels. But I was determined to make an attempt, at least in the area of merit raises. In the Florida state system and under the collective bargaining agreement, a merit pay raise is the only type that must be awarded in accordance with a plan previously drawn up in each department. The union strongly favors this class of raises, as do I, because the chair then implements the faculty-approved guidelines for distribution of raises and no longer stands as sole arbiter of the colleagues’ worth (or as the single target of their wrath).
I had particular motivation to work out a fair system of merit awards when I became chair, for reasons both existential and circumstantial. I have an ineradicable, sometimes uncomfortable sense of justice; like an eight-year-old, I want things to be fair and right in the world. But perhaps because I am no longer eight, I also recognize that I share the human tendency to have biases and preferences. I find some areas of intellectual endeavor more worthwhile than others, and some colleagues more enjoyable than their peers. It was a sine qua non, then, to devise a system that would guard against subjective judgments in apportioning raises. The circumstances surrounding my selection as chair provided further incentive to construct a plan that would be transparently fair. Because the department was sharply divided over the two candidates who sought to become chair, whomever the dean chose would automatically have half the department in opposition. That has been the case. I was, moreover, the first chair in thirty years from Spanish, rather than French, and the first woman to serve in the position. The ground was fertile for controversy. Dear readers, there has been no lack of petty and not-so-petty conflict in my years as chair, but I am pleased to say that in eight years we have made approximately 360 salary decisions and have had only two grievances.
The process by which we developed the merit pay plan was straightforward. We started with the department’s tenure and promotion guidelines. This document, somewhat outdated but still serviceable, consisted principally of lists of activities arranged in descending order of importance under the three classic areas of endeavor: teaching, research, and service. Working from this outline, and adding a fourth area, Other Instructional Activity, the committee prepared a draft merit pay plan for ranked faculty members.4 It was debated in departmental meetings over several months, extensively revised, and finally passed. The following year we devised a plan for nonranked faculty members, a numerous group that had never previously been considered for merit raises. The plan for nonranked instructors focuses on rewarding excellence in teaching and other instructional activities, in consonance with typical assignments. Each scheme has since been amended slightly, through the addition of activities. The collective soul-searching that went into the task of listing, categorizing, and then ranking our professional activities was arduous but salutary, even exhilarating. Junior faculty members in particular benefited from the discussions, which made explicit the relative value that different professional activities have in a department and in an institutional setting like ours.
The implementation of the department’s well-laid plan was smooth. Whereas previously the chair had been the sole arbiter of raises, our first-ever departmental bylaws—finished the same year as the merit pay guidelines—instituted a two-person merit pay committee, composed of one elected representative from French and Italian, and one from Spanish and Portuguese; both must be tenured.5 This committee is advisory to the chair, but I have been more comfortable in making shared decisions with its members.
To simplify the process of evaluating individual faculty members and to ensure uniform standards, we drew up score sheets. The sheet for ranked faculty members is reproduced in appendix 1; appendix 2 contains the sheet for lecturers. The score sheets reflect, in rank order, all the activities listed in the merit pay plan. Staying within the gradations set by the department’s ranking of each activity, I assigned a reasonable number of points to each. The adjudication of points to individual activities is a judgment call, one of many that a chair is charged with making over the course of an academic year. The committee members, for their part, used the same list of activities, but assigned their own points. In a few cases their evaluations differ from mine, but not substantially. Indeed, one of the pleasures of this type of professional activity is the confirmation it provides of our shared values.
The process whereby we arrive at each professor’s merit ranking is not complicated. First, using the score sheets, each committee member and the chair read and evaluate the annual activity reports turned in by faculty members. The committee then convenes, talks out discrepant evaluations, and assigns a score to each professor’s file. The chair meets with the committee to compare scores, which are usually—and reassuringly—similar for most faculty members. In the case of significant differences (4-5 points out of 100), the file is discussed in detail until the scores can be more closely reconciled. The committee’s score and the chair’s are then averaged to arrive at the final total for the file.
This system has worked well because each activity report is rated several times against the same guidelines. Oversights and “Santa Claus” tendencies are easily corrected when three people work individually and then discuss their results. The score sheet has turned out to be an important part of the process. It expedites evaluations because it provides a standard against which the files can be read and compared. One knows exactly what to look for, where each activity should be entered, and, more or less, how it should be evaluated. Highly divergent activities—the competing loyalties of the seminar’s title—all have their place and their points. The score sheet functions like an examination key, which simplifies test grading and helps ensure that the same points are given for answer 6 on test 1 and test 32. When final scores for a file diverge, it takes only a moment to see which activity has been marked differently or overlooked. Finally, the score sheet can jog the memory in the case of inquiries, and it provides a paper trail should a formal grievance arise.
The greatest conceptual challenge in designing the department’s merit pay plan was to reconcile—and assign a quantitative value to—different areas of professorial endeavor. The traditional model at a Carnegie Research I university like Florida would assign most or all merit on the basis of publications (this was the system in the department before I became chair). Yet a department like ours—whose mission encompasses small, medium, and very large elementary language programs; anemic and robust undergraduate majors; and a sizable graduate program—must make sure that faculty members devote time and intellectual effort to professional activities in addition to publishing. It is here that the guiding function of the reward scheme can be seen most clearly. As we worked on it, we asked ourselves which yearly activities should be encouraged; they would have to be significantly recognized in the reward system. Were there activities slighted in our annual evaluations in the certainty that they would be requited over the long term, through promotion or other periodic adjustments that evaluate achievements over the previous three- or five-year period? We came up with a global model that allots 30% of merit to teaching, 20% to other instructional activity, 40% to research, and 10% to service. For purposes of our annual evaluations, the most deserving professors would be those who performed most creditably in many areas, that amassed a high number of points in each category; there is no carryover from one category to another.
This allotment of merit does not track the faculty member’s official semester assignment (set by the chair), because the department considers some activities more meritorious than others. For example, ranked faculty members in our department rarely have research assignments that exceed 25% of their full-time employment (or load), but since research productivity is a measurable and prestigious activity (and an important part of our mission in a Research I university), it may garner up to 40% of the merit points. At the same time, approximately 70% of the typical assignment is teaching and other instructional activity (including advising and thesis direction), but since these are less measurable pursuits, with somewhat lower professional status than research, they account for 50% of our merit points.6
The decision of the faculty was to allow the highest evaluation to be earned by the “compleat professor,” one who is active and meritorious in every desirable professional arena. A look at the instrument in appendix 1 shows that a professor who has no research activity, lacks service, or made no particular contribution in teaching cannot achieve 100 points. Here we see the social engineering aspect of this plan: it materially encourages faculty members to engage in those activities that they and their peers have judged significant for the overall health of the department. This should not be interpreted as discouraging publication—it is an activity that will be rewarded over the longer term. Publishing more will enhance individuals’ reputations and, as a result, qualify them eventually for promotion, a special sustained performance raise, or an honorary professorship. Beyond a certain point, however, it will not improve their chances for an annual merit raise in our department. Those who teach classes that are larger than our mean, or who direct more theses and dissertations, are given recognition for the quantitative effort such activity entails. This stipulation attempts to compensate for the fact that these professors may not be able to publish as much as others who teach small classes or direct no theses or dissertations, semester after semester.7
Having outlined the major considerations that went into the design of this reward scheme, I encourage you to look at your reward system and to evaluate its effect on your faculty members and department. Does it recognize professional merit in all its guises? Does it orient faculty members toward activities that will help the department fulfill its mission? Can it give apples, oranges, and persimmons a fair shake, and guide them as they try to sort out their competing loyalties? If the answer to any of these questions is no, then I urge you to engage your department in a discussion of the issue. It will probably be one of the most satisfying and productive activities you and your colleagues have ever undertaken.
1Roger W. Bowen, president of the State University of New York, New Paltz, and professor of political science, has commented perceptively on this aspect of higher education today. “Capital now reigns supreme, the laws of supply and demand serve as the mechanism for who gets what, and success is measured in net income and levels of productivity. The prevailing attitude in our culture is: If something is not measurable, then it lacks value. The spread of that ideology has turned university presidents into chief executive officers, provosts into chief operating officers, and vice presidents for administration into chief financial officers. Deans have become middle management and department chairs lower-level management. Faculty members are now labor, and students are consumers, or clients” (B14).
2A salary becomes compressed when it has grown so slowly that it is barely above the salary paid to incoming professors; it is inverted when it actually falls below the salary of professors of lower rank.
3Another morale buster imported from the business world is the “competitive” wage for beginning assistant professors. It ensures that the starting salary for newly hired PhDs is raised yearly, sometimes quite handsomely. The lack of a similar program for senior colleagues means, however, that each year the gap narrows between the salaries of new assistant professors and those of full professors. From a business or market perspective, this practice is justified: the value of associate and full professors is depressed relative to assistant professors because the former are generally less mobile and few universities authorize humanities hires above the assistant professor level.
4We revised and greatly increased the activities in this category at a time when the administration and the legislature were pressuring for an increase in teaching loads or other instructional activity. Many of the activities that have traditionally been called “service” are in fact part of our pedagogical mission. We decided to categorize them accordingly (see appendix 1 for details).
5Having discussed the issue of merit pay committees with many colleagues across the country, I came to believe that it would be preferable to have a large committee, and one that included a representative of the nontenured faculty. The department recently amended our bylaws to increase the committee to three, with one to be selected from the assistant professor rank. An elected member of the nonranked faulty will also participate in deliberations on merit among that group.
6We discussed having the reward structure track assignments, but on further reflection, we deemed that approach unworkable, because 70% of the average faculty member’s merit points would have derived from teaching and other instructional activities, which are notoriously resistant to evaluation and contribute little to an individual’s or a department’s national standing. In the case of a faculty member who publishes a book, only 25% of his or her total merit points—those apportioned to research—could reflect that great accomplishment. Thus research is overvalued with respect to assignment, and teaching is undervalued. The two grievances were based on this discrepancy between valuation and assignment. Neither went to arbitration, for the dean thought it was less expensive to settle than to become involved in litigation.
7Faculty members in multilingual departments often have very different instructional loads because of the enrollment discrepancies among languages. A merit system that makes no effort to compensate for this differential can only generate discontent. See Nichols for a further discussion of this issue.
Bowen, Roger W. “The New Battle between Political and Academic Cultures.” Chronicle of Higher Education 22 June 2001: B14–15.
Nichols, Geraldine C. “Spanish and the Multilingual Department: Ways to Use the Rising Tide.” ADFL Bulletin 31.2 (2000): 39–43. [Show Article]
| Category 1. Teaching (maximum 30 points) | Points | |
|---|---|---|
| 1. teaching award (college, university, other) | 10 | _______ |
| 2. class evaluations [for each class significantly above departmental mean] | 2.5 | _______ |
| 3a. extra load (large class; extra section; composition class; independent study; honors thesis) [for each] | 4 | _______ |
| 3b. direction of MA thesis or PhD dissertation [for each] | MA 1, PhD 2 | _______ |
| 4. outstanding direction or coordination of language program | 5–10 | _______ |
| 5. course or curriculum development; instructional improvement [for each] | 2 | _______ |
| 6. positive peer or individual evaluations | 2 | _______ |
| Total points for category 1 | _______ | |
| Category 2. Advising and Other Instructional Activity (OIA) (maximum 20 points) | _______ | |
| 1. award for advising (college, university, other) | 10 | _______ |
| 2. excellence as undergraduate, graduate, or program coordinator | 0–10 | |
| 3. direction of study-abroad program | 4–8 | _______ |
| 4. chair of an OIA committee (adjunct faculty evaluation, graduate awards and placement, etc.) [for each] | 2–4 | _______ |
| 5. member of MA or PhD committee; participation in study-abroad program, FLAC (Foreign Languages Across the Curriculum), or OIA committee [for each] | .5– | _______ |
| 6. nomination for advising award | 2 | _______ |
| 7. preprofessional development (workshops, mock interviews, etc.) [for each] | 2 | _______ |
| 8. organization of lectures, exhibits, related events [for each] | 2 | _______ |
| Total points for category 2 | _______ | |
| Category 3. Research and Publication (maximum 40 points) | _______ | |
| A. Most meritorious | _______ | |
| 1. book: major critical edition, textbook, or comparable work (sole author) | 15–25 | _______ |
| 2. book prize or other professional award or distinction | 10 | _______ |
| 3. major outside research grant or fellowship (NEH, Fulbright, etc.) | 10 | _______ |
| B. Highly meritorious | _______ | |
| 1. book-length monograph or major critical edition (coauthor) | 8 | |
| 2. brief monograph, book-length edition, or annotated translation | 8 | |
| 3. substantial article in refereed publication [for each] | 6 | _______ |
| 4. anthology; collections of acts, issues (sole editor) | 6 | _______ |
| 5. review article [for each] | 5 | _______ |
| 6. plenary or keynote address [for each] | 5 | _______ |
| C. Meritorious | _______ | |
| 1. anthology; collection of acts, issues (coeditor) | 4 | _______ |
| 2. conference paper, invited lecture, submission of book ms. [for each] | 2 | _______ |
| 3. university research grant (extradepartmental) | 2 | |
| 4. other publication: review, translation, article reprinted [for each] | 2 | |
| 5. submission of major external grant proposal | 2 | |
| 6. recognition of scholarly achievement: Humanities Citation Index, nomination for book or scholarly prize, published mention, interview, etc. | 1 | _______ |
| 7. publication in nonrefereed journal; submission of article to refereed journal [for each] | 1 | _______ |
| 8. leadership role in professional organization [for each] | 2–4 | _______ |
| 9. organizational role at meetings, symposia, workshops, or sessions, or at local, national, or international conferences [for each] | 1–3 | _______ |
| 10. active participation at such conference (other than reading a paper) [for each] | .5 | _______ |
| 11. active work on advisory or editorial board [for each] | 1–3 | _______ |
| 12. assistance to public schools, other state or national government [for each] | 1 | _______ |
| 13. receipt of intradepartmental research grant | 1 | _______ |
| Total points for category 3 | _______ | |
| Category 4: Service (maximum 10 points) | _______ | |
| 1. general organization of major conference (also credit for planning year) | 8 | _______ |
| 2. evaluation of external programs, dossiers (tenure, promotion, hiring) [for each] | 5 | _______ |
| 3. chair of department, center, college or university committee (non-OIA) [for each] | 2–4 | _______ |
| 4. member of same [for each] | .5–1 | _______ |
| 5. evaluation of book manuscript [for each] | .5–1 | _______ |
| 6. evaluation of articles (excluding editorial board work) [for each] | .5 | _______ |
| 7. promotion of extracurricular activity | .5–2 | _______ |
| 8. other activity judged worthy by chair or merit pay committee | variable | _______ |
| Total points for category 4 | _______ | |
| Grand total | _______ |
| Category 1: Teaching and Other Instructional Activities (maximum 90 points) | Points | |
|---|---|---|
| 1. teaching award (college, university, other) | 30 | _______ |
| 2. class evaluation [for each class significantly above departmental mean] | 5–15 | _______ |
| 3. coordinator or assistant coordinator of language program | 5–20 | _______ |
| 4. supervisor or assistant at assembly exams | 3–10 | _______ |
| 5. TA mentoring | 3–10 | _______ |
| 6. class visitation reports | 2–10 | _______ |
| 7. development or teaching of honors or FLAC course | 5–10 | _______ |
| 8. peer or individual evaluation | 4 | _______ |
| 9. outstanding portfolio: syllabi or self-evaluation (1 p.), course or curriculum development, instructional improvement | 5 | _______ |
| 10. nomination for college or other teaching award | 3 | _______ |
| 11. teaching-improvement activities | 2–5 | _______ |
| 12. adviser of own students | 1–10 | _______ |
| 13. organizer of or contributor to instructional workshops; participation in OIA committees | 1–10 | _______ |
| Total points for category 1 | _______ | |
| Category 2: Service and Other Professional Activities (maximum 10 points) | ||
| 1. assistance to public schools and school boards | 4 | _______ |
| 2. adviser for extracurricular activities | 4 | _______ |
| 3. promotion of off-campus or study-abroad programs | 1–5 | _______ |
| 4. organizer of lectures, exhibits, related events | 4 | _______ |
| 5. active committee membership | 4 | _______ |
| 6. other activities judged worthy by chair or merit pay committee | 2 | _______ |
| Total points for category 2 | _______ | |
| Category 3: Research (maximum 5 points) | _______ | |
| 1. book or textbook (sole author) | 5 | _______ |
| 2. article in peer-reviewed journal | 3 | _______ |
| 3. article in other publication | 3 | _______ |
| 4. conference paper | 3 | _______ |
| 5. other significant conference activity | 1 | _______ |
| Total points for category 3 | _______ | |
| Grand total | _______ |
© 2003 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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