This Institutional Community Transformation grant built capacity for Rice University and other research-intensive (R1) universities to ensure that labor environments for non-tenure track STEM faculty are effectively structured and supported to advance STEM student success. To that end, the primary goals of the project were: 1) to complete a self-study of Rice University, a small R1 university in Houston, TX, to understand the institutional factors affecting contingent faculty work experience and their impact on STEM education; 2) to build community among R1 institutions to collaborate and identify mechanisms for improving labor conditions towards STEM student success. The key outcomes of the project were knowledge to inform labor policy and professional development for contingent faculty and institutional change efforts, especially in an R1 context; new instruments to evaluate learning and faculty climate; and new collaborations across R1 institutions interested in improving the labor climate towards STEM student success. 

Our self-study produced new knowledge regarding the role, impact, and attitudes of full-time contingent faculty in both promotable and non-promotable roles, which have increasingly become the norm in R1 contexts. Our self-study affirmed the need to focus attention on the role of promotable teaching faculty (PTF) by documenting their outsized impact on teaching enrollments in STEM foundation courses and advising students, two job responsibilities critical for increasing student persistence in STEM. An audit of fall 2020 syllabi in STEM disciplines found that teaching faculty are more likely than tenured/tenure-track (TTT) faculty to use evidence-based instructional practices, such as active learning, which is associated with improved student learning. Furthermore, our research demonstrates that full-time contingent faculty understand their roles to be distinct from those of research faculty, desirable to pursue as a profession, necessary to institutional and student success, and deserving of respect. Faculty understand themselves as career employees of the institution, but receive mixed signals of commitment from the institution that contribute to their complicated feelings regarding workplace justice.  

In particular, our research found that policies and practices that structure the PTF positions are insufficient for creating an environment for STEM teaching faculty to thrive and may contribute to negative climate perceptions. We distributed the first climate survey to Rice contingent faculty in 2021 and found that PTF have significantly lower perceptions of procedural justice than their TTT and non-promotable colleagues. The adapted versions of TTT policies for PTF result in a deficit framing of the teaching faculty role as a lesser version of TTT faculty roles. Interviews documented that both promotable and non-promotable teaching faculty regard the policies that govern the PTF as insufficient for governing the specifics of their work experiences. These findings point to the need to institutionalize the professional role of PTF—norms and standards, expertise, education and training, and professional associations—and attend to the structures that support the role to equitably facilitate the reciprocal relationship between this important class of employees and universities and advance STEM student success.  

Recognizing the impact of peer institution behaviors on past faculty reform efforts at Rice, the project team hosted the Advancing R1 Teaching Faculty for Undergraduate Learning (ARTFUL) Conference at Rice University, which convened eight R1 institutions to discuss the PTF role and to solicit interest in collaboration on an NSF IUSE ICT Level 2 grant proposal. The conference resulted in interest to establish the ARTFUL Networked Improvement Community to research interventions to improve PTF labor towards STEM student success. Subsequently six of the eight attending institutions collaborated on development of the proposal submitted to NSF in July 2024.  

The capacity building work of this project contributed to the training of one graduate student, who produced a Master’s thesis related to this topic, and 10 undergraduates, and resulted in eight presentations, with three additional presentations and publications in preparation. The project will have a direct impact on STEM faculty and students as a result of fostering new collaborations across institutions, developing new instruments to evaluate learning and faculty climate, and generating new knowledge to inform labor policy and professional development focused on teaching and learning.