Reporting Fractional Appointments

Cathy here are my recommendations for addressing reporting for fractional faculty appointments. It came up during our DataWeb meeting yesterday. From that discussion, it was clear there is a lot of work to do educating people about this issue.

I didn't do a few bullets as you requested. As I looked at the issue, I realized it's more complex than I anticipated and writing is a good way for me to explore ideas. Reporting is tied to what the departments are using the reports for. There is a whole new area of need for reports, faculty and their chairs and directors need to be able to evaluate and manage the faculty effort against what they feel they need to get for the fraction of the appointment. Even after considering this, I still come to essentially the same conclusions I did previously, but the arguments to support them are richer to take this into account.

The college and departments do several types of reporting that will be impacted by fractional appointments. They can be broken down into four general categories: reports where the unit of analysis is the individual faculty member; reports where the unit of analysis is the department (or program, in the case of interdisciplinary programs); reports where the unit of analysis is the college as a whole; and finally reports where the unit of analysis is the effort a faculty member expends in support of each department they are appointed in. We'll address this last one first.

Unit of analysis is the effort a faculty member expends in support of each of their departments:
In addition to college reporting, departments will need to track and evaluate the faculty effort that supports their department against the expectations they have of the fractional appointment. They will want to track the faculty member's teaching and research effort and their effort on committees, etc. and how that effort is related to the department's goals. Agreements will clearly need to be negotiated between the directors of the two departments and it is unlikely that these agreements will reflect the fractional effort across all the domains of faculty effort. A, perhaps far fetched example that illustrates this point would be an agreement where a faculty member will to do all their undergrad teaching service in one department and have all their graduate students and research in another. The college does not want to penalize departments for making decisions such as this as long as it is to the faculty member's and the college's best interests which implies that the college may want to have it's effort reporting neutral to the specifics of these sorts of agreements. At the same time, departments will need to evaluate the actual work load being done in support of their department and will need different reports that are not neutral to the agreement's outcome. A slight augmentation and careful consideration of the faculty member's annual report may provide enough detail for this sort of report.

Unit of analysis is the individual faculty member:
Reports that are currently produced in this area include the Faculty data summary, research expenditures by faculty, teaching load by faculty, faculty member's annual reports, CV's, etc.

Generally these reports are used to evaluate faculty. The frame of reference is other faculty members or the same faculty member over time. To allow easy comparison between faculty members, it would be most appropriate to reflect the faculty member's full effort.

Faculty with appointments split between two departments may suffer from a lack of visibility in one or both departments. For instance partially appointed faculty may not teach as much for a department or be on as many department committees as their fully appointed peers. Space and graduate student allocations may be similarly impacted. We would want to reporting mechanism to act as a corrective for this impression, not exacerbate it.

The closest current analogy to this situation currently is faculty belonging to research centers. Currently the college expends a great deal of effort gathering research expenditure data from research centers in order to reflect their effort fully.

I propose that, in all reports used to evaluate individual faculty effort, the college includes all effort, regardless of where it is expended.

Unit of analysis is the department:
These reports include, TA allocation reports, Faculty data summary rolled up by department, research expenditures by department, etc. Generally these metrics are quantitative and divisible. The frame of reference is the other departments, or the same department over time.

Metrics for fractionally appointed faculty could be broken up a number of ways. Some of this has been addressed above, but they are worthy of addressing more explicitly below.

1) They could be maintained whole in both departments. In other words, a faculty member who is appointed 20% in one department would have all their effort reported for each department they are appointed in. This would create perverse incentive to create lots of partial faculty and makes evaluating output by FTE meaningless. I don't think anyone would support this model.

2) The faculty member's effort can be divided based on actual effort for each metric in each department. While this may be possible to do in some cases, for example, space, or in some cases, teaching effort, it is harder to do in other areas like research expenditures particularly when many of the expenditures may be in a center. In all cases how each metric is split between departments would have to be negotiated for each faculty member for each type of metric. As described above it may also limit the department and faculty members flexibility in managing their resources most effectively.

3) A third option, and the one I propose, is to multiply these metrics by the percentage of the fractional appointment. This is easiest option to manage, the meaning of the resulting numbers is clear, it allows flexibility to maximize faculty output by allowing departments to negoitate work agreements that optimize faculty output, not the share of the output the department recieves, and it avoids difficulty with backing out double counted numbers when calculating college totals.

Unit of analysis is the college:
Examples of this type of report are the US News and ASEE surveys, total college research expenditures, etc. Here the frame of reference is other engineering colleges or our college over time. A common presentation is the metric per fte. Here it is clear that we do not want to double count faculty effort.

Existing Fractional Appointment Agreements
The only agreement we have currently in place regarding reporting effort by fractional faculty appointments is a draft agreement between TAM and MAE posted at http://www.intranet.engr.cornell.edu/home/prd9/DraftofMAETAMagreementresharedfaculty.htm . This agreement follows the tenets of my proposal for places where the unit of analysis is the individual faculty member.

When the unit of analysis is the department things are more complex. For course effort reporting and TA allocation it follows the second option provided. For research expenditures it does not follow any one of the options. In effect it follows the first option for the home department and the third option for the secondary department. This requires that the overage be backed out for college wide reports.

-Paul