Comments from 2005 Faculty Survey

Satisfied Faculty

 The College of Nursing has been supportive of my pursuit of additional education, professional service activities, and career growth.  JagTran is a great idea.

Building/Construction/Environment

 Stop destroying the woods.  Don’t add additional parking lots in front of Alpha East or on the corner where the Allied Health Building is proposed. The North End of the Alpha East/North Parking lots and the North end of the Medical School parking lots are presently underutilized.  When is the College of Nursing going to get a new building? We are long overdue and growing impatient with repeated delays.  We need additional classroom space. Many of our buildings, such as the Life Sciences Building, are exploding at the seams.

Computing/Technology

 The requirement that the Computer Center sign off on all computer purchases bogs down the purchasing process.  Computer security and email service interfere with necessary computer function.  Groupwise is unreliable.  The computer provided for my office is so inadequate I must often bring my personal notebook computer. I have no access to technology in one of the classrooms to which I am assigned and must roll in an overhead projector.  The Novell system is not Macintosh-friendly.

Healthcare

 Add dental and eye care benefits.  Increase premiums for smokers.  The University should have a strong health promotion program. Prevention is the key to reducing healthcare costs.  The 270 day waiting period for pre-existing conditions under the USA health plan is a disaster waiting to happen. Incoming faculty who do not carry supplemental insurance of some type are exposed to catastrophic health risks. The cost of COBRA from previous employers encourages incoming faculty to leave themselves exposed to catastrophic illness for the first year. This feature of the health plan is also a disincentive to recruiting potential faculty to USA.  The health plan discriminates against USA employees who live in Baldwin County. We must pay more unless members of our family come over to Mobile for medical services. This is particularly impractical for families with children.  Optional health plan for part-time faculty.  It seems particularly unfair that a family of two has to pay many times over what a single person pays.  If health care expenses go up again, the expense should come at the level of the co-pay so that those who actually go to the doctor are the ones paying for it. To raise the premium is EXTREMELY unfair to those who don't go to the doctor very frequently.  I would like to see a cafeteria plan offered where you could assume a large deductible and significantly reduce the premiums.

Administration

 The administration should seek faculty advice on improving the atmosphere to attract and retain students, since we are the ones in the classroom.  Dean Hayes is unrealistic in his vision to make the College of Education an international name. We are a regional teaching institution. His alliance with Dr. Feldman is very unfortunate.  The administration should seek and hire chairs and administrators from outside our institution. The current practice of hiring from within leads to excessive intellectual "inbreeding" and crony-ism.  Dean Hayes told the interview committee that he wanted to "empower the faculty", "put women and minorities in high level leadership positions", "address diversity issues", and he asked us "what would it take to make you content in your job?" He has thus far not kept any of these promises.  The reorganization in the College of Education was against the wishes of most of the faculty. The Dean’s decisions were based on his previous institution rather than understanding the needs of the COE. Faculty were told if they didn't like his decisions then "there is the door."  USA is under-funded or under-motivated to attempt new, dynamic changes.  The Dean [which Dean was not specified] is a micro-manager with no concern for policies.  USA needs a Vice President for Research and Graduate study to facilitate interactions between colleges and with the private sector.  The University's response to Hurricane Ivan was slow and confusing.  Problems go unresolved. Several times I've been told to "just wait" until the person posing an obstacle to progress retires. I often feel that the University is striving for mediocrity and has given up on being great. Also that diversity is to be "put up with" and even "put down" rather than encouraged and developed.  If MS Word is the "official" program of the University, why do I keep getting WordPerfect documents from administrators that I can't open?  Faculty comments and attitudes will continue to be negative unless they are given the opportunity to add their own expertise and contribute in creative ways to the development of this University.  The deans need to do less top down management and more collaboration with their faculties.  This recent emphasis on reducing the number of withdrawals seems to be an attempt to coerce the faculty into grade inflation. Withdrawals almost directly correspond to lack of attendance and lack of attention. If the central administration wants fewer withdrawals, then raise standards.  We must stop in-house promotions to top administrative positions.  The central administration promotes people regardless of what faculty committees recommend. Promotion to associate or full professor is the business of the faculty. The basic problem has been decisions to promote some “chosen” faculty to the rank of full professor. This contributes to demoralization.  Our current "faculty" representative to the NCAA is not a member of the faculty, but a central administrator with no teaching responsibilities.  It seems to me we have too many administrators – adding assistant and associate deans – while at the same time we can't add tenure-track lines where needed.  The administration must stop asking faculty to serve as fund raisers in departments. Also, there are now two funds, the Jaguar Fund and the Faculty- Staff Loyalty (or something like that) fund, there should be only one.  The university leadership at the dean and above level has no or little sense of responsibility to provide adequate funds, gift and giving fund raising, foundation funds access or any other parameter that is competitive with even other state institutions. Salary improvement for the faculty is essentially non-existent.  The deans want high performance but provide little impetus to be responsible for getting research funds. They want miracles from the faculty with few rewards.  There is little espirit do corp. It seems the entire university has been on hold for a decade. It is amazing we can provide our undergraduates with a reasonably good education with so little help from the university. Almost all funding for research, even in the College of Medicine, is entirely on the backs of the faculty. Please get a Board that knows how to help the university.

Comments about Students

 Concentrate on attracting quality students, not quantity.  Rather than focusing on student retention, the University needs to focus more on student involvement and student learning. I have too many senior students who do not know how to study, how to think critically, and how write using proper grammar and punctuation. Most students' math skills and problem-solving skills are poor at best.

Comments about Instructors

 I was alarmed this semester to find out from new freshmen that many students choose other universities because of the public perception that most introductory level courses at USA are taught by adjuncts or instructors.  Instructors are asked to teach courses that they are not trained to teach. Just because they took a course in their master's education does not mean they are ready to teach the course.

Faculty Issues (pay, work load, service commitments, etc.)  Salary compression.  Faculty are not adequately supported given the workload.  Distance learning will not work until the faculty are adequately rewarded for their expertise in designing and operating courses.  Communication between administration and faculty is often poor. I never know what's happening at the computer center or what facilities and programs are available for our webpage. The OLL sessions are offered only at 4-6 pm on Fridays and E-College and E-Companion classes are offered during the semester on class days--both times, I can't or won't be able to attend. Faculty development sessions around campus are not coordinated with each other.  If the administration really wants faculty to write and secure grants and to publish, the teaching load requirement must be changed. I often feel like I am not doing all that I could be doing professionally in terms of publishing because of the course load and the enormous amounts of grading associated with teaching so many courses. I don't feel that USA provides enough full-time, tenure track teaching lines, so faculty can work toward the ends of publishing and grant writing.  I would very much like our Dean to examine his insistence on holding a day-and- a-half faculty retreat at the end of both the Spring and Fall semesters. These retreats are a HUGE morale buster just at a time of the year when the stress of completing the semester is highest and everyone's morale seems lowest. Furthermore, the retreats rarely result in significant change or improvement.  Too many things in my department are done in an ad hoc way, not because anyone is trying to get away with anything, but just because there's a lack of concern about doing them better.  Faculty are loaded with hours and do not have time to develop their courses. It is sometimes all that I can do to just put out the fires and keep up with emails, much less develop new lectures and write new test questions. We need more support staff to enter our online exams, etc.  Salary inversion. Those hired since me have been brought in at much higher salaries (with lots of rationalization of why they need to be paid more...and their pay is kept secret as much as possible).  I am expected to do research and publish to get any miniscule raise and to get promoted, but I have a 6/5 course load. This is more than a full load at colleges that DO NOT REQUIRE research and publication! When am I supposed to do the research and publishing? And now the new dean tells us that we can just teach fewer sections but with more students per section to "reduce the class loads”...this is NOT a real reduction of load, only a paper reduction.  The faculty are overworked. Teaching loads exceed 42-44 hours per year with no overload pay. I have taught overloads with no overload pay when I was expecting it.  Tenure and promotion policies need to be transparent. If University truly wants to attract quality candidates, research releases (e.g., summer stipends) need to be offered.  Tenured/tenure-track faculty should only be teaching 33 hours and some are teaching 40. Non-tenure track faculty should be teaching 42 hours and many are teaching well above that without compensation. Overload pay should be given because this takes away from the time faculty could be performing research or other scholarly activities. If teaching loads are increased, then scholarly activities should not be required or weighted as heavily on the evaluation. All colleges should be teaching the same load and maintaining the same office hours. I think there is too much inconsistency. Some colleges teach the max and then some (without compensation) and are in the office 4-5 days a week whereas other colleges teach below the hours and serve 6 office hours per week. It is very frustrating.  Faculty should be treated respectfully and should be allowed some freedom to work on line from their home as long as they teach their classes and maintain office hours and are available to students.  Teachers should be allowed to develop teaching strategies in a limited number of courses instead of being given parts of multiple courses to teach. The emphasis seems to be on quantity rather than quality. This is not good for students and it is not good for teachers.  Student evaluation of faculty surveys should include an item on the usefulness of the course to the student’s prospective career.  There is too much emphasis on basing faculty evaluations on student evaluations of faculty. While I think student evaluations are useful, one has to remember that there is an inherent bias against faculty when a student doesn’t get the grade they feel they should have.  Advising of students is a complete mess. Members of the faculty should be giving advice and counsel about a good program and a career path and not be asked to determine which courses someone needs to meet the general requirements. It should be the student's job to take care of the requirements (after all they are adults) or someone in an office somewhere whose responsibility is precisely that. Moreover, the faculty are not provided the proper information to evaluate quickly what a student has taken and not taken to meet general requirements. It takes 20-25 minutes to just get the student's file in order because for some reason the university cannot provide a single sheet that at a glance that lets me (better, the student) know what has and has not been taken -- especially in terms of general requirements. It is a professional insult that the faculty have become clerks, without adequate information at that.  It would be good to have one day a week free for activities not related to teaching, such as meetings, faculty collaboration, service projects, and field trips.

 Library

 I am alarmed by the reduction in journals (both print and on-line) by the biomedical library.  I am disturbed that we now have to pay for interlibrary loans for materials not held at our own library.  There need to be more paper (hard copy) journals. Electronic access to journals is far from ideal.

USA Medical Care/Cancer Center  The University needs to proceed expeditiously with the Cancer Center. It has lost a fair amount of credibility because of all the delays.  I waited months for an appointment with my physician (USA facility) and then was kept waiting for 1 1/2 hours and had to leave without ever seeing her.  There are many medical services currently not provided in this geographic area. They include bone marrow transplant, liver transplant and many others. We refer unstable patients with hematologic malignancies for definitive treatment to UAB or St. Jude. In this respect, USA is not the tertiary care institution it should be.

Online Courses

 Numbers of students in online courses should be standardized throughout the university  Online software (eCompanion) used is not a good product; try Black Board.  USA loses a lot of students because of a lack of distance learning and alternative learning programs.

Focus of the university

 There is NO dishonor in being a good teaching university. Not every institution has to be, or can be, a major research institution.

Cultural Activities

 I never hear about events until either the day after the activity or the day of the activity when I have plans I can't change. This happens often with activities I'd like to attend on campus.

Survey Suggestions

 Please add more questions about salary, dental insurance, vision, out of pocket expenses, diversity.  Wish this survey was anonymous.

Parking

 Get students out of the faculty/staff parking lots. [Note: this was the most common comment on the survey].  Increase parking fines.  Enforce the parking regulations.  Since there are no parking problems at UCOM, why not let students select a zone color for the traditional main campus and then let those with UCOM classes drive their cars there. This new system -- with no change in the 15 min. between classes is causing too many students to arrive late for their UCOM classes.  Allow faculty to issue parking tickets.  Build a large parking lot on the campus perimeter and make all students park on perimeter and use the new Jag Tram services.  Build a multi-level parking garage and don't charge renewable, annual fees for faculty to park. It is an essential part of the job and not a PERK.  Charging faculty for parking is not respectful to their status as employees.  Keep students from obtaining faculty parking permits. Some of these permits are given out to students as “rewards”.  Expand the Jag Tran routes on campus.  I can find parking SOMEWHERE, but students are often illegally parked in faculty spots during the day and there is no recognition of the fact that faculty teach nights. If you leave for dinner, you cannot get a spot near the building when you return. You are usually carrying more material and dressed in high heels and leave AFTER most of the students have left. This is not only inconsiderate and unhandy, it's downright dangerous.  Elevate graduate students to staff parking status.  Make tram work for student by being on time.  More faculty spaces.  No tickets for faculty at UCOM for parking on campus.  Online renewal of parking stickers.  Parking decks.  Increase fines for parking in faculty spaces.  In colleges that have significant night classes (e.g., education) faculty parking zones should be enforced until 10PM.  Write tickets in the rain.