Roles the Faculty Members Perform
It is my understanding that academician has an important role in society. The first thing that the meaning of a faculty member can do is to address the issues in his inner society. He can do this in lectures, in publications, and mass media.
Guess we need to respond to society needs and sense the issues… Still, do we have some things/actions that academicians can do and influence society that might not be related to their role in university.
We don’t see our role in society separate from our profession. In classroom we should guide our students not only about the subject but also give opinions about what is going on in our surrounding comment government actions, tell them how they can contribute toward better society.
In research, we can research problems that are of the interest of the society and publish results.
The Teaching Role | Faculty Member
The teaching role of academician reflects their centrality in addressing the primary educational mission among colleges and universities. As faculty members teach, they disseminate and impart basic or applied knowledge to students and assist students with the learning process and applying the knowledge.
In this construction of the teaching role, the teacher is the content expert, and students are regarded as learners or novices to the academic discipline or field of study. Faculty member meaning are expected to follow developments in the field so their expertise and knowledge base remain current.
At many universities, academician are also expected to participate in creating the new developments that are taught, which sometimes leads to tensions about appropriate priorities for research and teaching roles.
Faculty members employ a variety of teaching strategies based on the institutions where they work.
In a large undergraduate lecture section, a meaning of a faculty member may deliver lectures that are complemented by regular and smaller recitation sections led by graduate teaching assistants.
At a community college, faculty members may work side by side with students diagnosing and addressing a mechanical problem in a piece of machinery. At a liberal arts college, faculty members from different disciplines may team teach a small first-year survey course on human civilization.
The Research Role
Many university faculty members engage in research, thereby contributing to the knowledge base of the discipline or academic field.
Research commonly is associated with conducting empirical studies, whether confirmatory or exploratory, but in some academic disciplines research also encompasses highly theoretical work.
The extent to which faculty members have a research role as part of their work responsibilities depends largely on the mission of the employing institution, with larger universities more likely to have research and knowledge creation as a significant part of their missions.
Although higher education institutions are most often the sites for and sponsors of faculty members’ research, the primary audience for most academic researchers is their national and international community of disciplinary colleagues.
Faculty members with active research agendas and involvement in their disciplinary communities have been regarded as more cosmopolitan in orientation, with stronger allegiances and loyalties to their disciplines than to their home institutions.
The Service Role
Institutional service performed by faculty members includes serving on internal committees and advisory boards, mentoring and advising students, and assuming part-time administrative appointments as program or unit leaders.
In some cases, faculty members also assume term appointments in full-time roles as mid-level or senior level institutional administrators. Some level of faculty members’ service to the institution is expected, although tenure-track academician may be discouraged or exempted from heavy service commitments to permit greater focus on their research and teaching.
Integration of Faculty Roles and Responsibilities
The teaching, research, and service roles of faculty members overlap conceptually and practically. For example, instruction in a particular discipline or skill yields a service in the form of educated or appropriately trained persons, and outreach to a farmer or small business owner may lead to an applied research project undertaken by the faculty member.
Some attempts have been made to validate the various forms of faculty work and unify them conceptually. Perhaps the most famous recent model has been the American educator and government official Ernest Boyer’s 1990 stipulation of discovery, application, integration, and teaching as separate but related forms of scholarship. Among other outcomes, these models address concerns regarding the implicit hierarchy that grants the most prestige to research and the least to service.
The Collective Faculty
Although the faculty of an institution is traditionally considered to refer to full-time academicians, part-time and adjunct faculty members meaning at many institutions have assumed a larger proportion of teaching responsibilities.
Although the proportions of women and minority group members in the full-time faculty ranks grew slowly in the last quarter of the twentieth century, women and minority group members also are concentrated in the lower faculty ranks such as instructors and part-time and adjunct faculty positions.
Some blame this slow progress on inadequate numbers of diverse students in graduate programs, market factors that make other career choices more attractive or lucrative, or individual lifestyle choices.
However, focus also has been shifted to institutional structures and norms, professional socialization experiences, and tacit assumptions that serve as barriers to progress within faculty ranks.
Faculty collective bargaining units provide faculty members with a formal voice in institutional deliberations and decision-making, and many faculty members regard collective bargaining as a check against the growing degree of professional administrators’ authority.
A wave of faculty labor organization in the 1960s and 1970s has been followed by a period of less organizing activity by non-unionized faculties. However, more recent participants in academic labor organizing have been graduate students, particularly teaching assistants, in the 1980s and 1990s at relatively prestigious, research-oriented universities.
This turn to collective bargaining measures by graduate teaching assistants may presage a resurgence of academic unionization as these teaching assistants become future faculty members at colleges and universities.
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