Joe
Cuseo - Approximately one-half of faculty contracts
and collective bargaining agreements make absolutely no mention of advising as
a faculty responsibility (Teague & Grites, 1980). Less than one-third of
campuses recognize and reward faculty for advising and, among those that do,
advising is typically recognized by giving it only minor consideration in
faculty promotion and tenure decisions (Habley,
1988). A more recent survey of first-year academic practices at close to 1,000
colleges and universities revealed that only 12% of postsecondary institutions
offered incentives or rewards that recognize outstanding advising of first-year
students (
In
a review of national survey data relating to advisor evaluation and rewards,
Creamer & Scott (2000) reached the following conclusion: “The failure of
most institutions to conduct systematic evaluations of advisors is explained by
a number of factors. The most potent reason, however, is probably
that the traditional reward structure often blocks the ability to reward
faculty who are genuinely committed to advising” (p. 39).
Provide strong incentives
and rewards for advisors to engage in high-quality advising.
Advising
runs the risk of being perceived as a supplemental, low-status, and
low-priority activity by college faculty because it typically does not carry
the same professorial status and resume-building value as conducting research,
acquiring grants, presenting papers at a professional conference, or engaging
in off-campus consulting. Even at postsecondary institutions that do not place
a high priority on research and publication, classroom teaching is typically
valued more highly than academic advising. Without any incentives to pursue excellence,
it seems unlikely that advisors will be motivated to invest the time and energy
needed to improve the quality of their work.
Faculty have only a finite amount of time available to them
to perform their three primary professional responsibilities: teaching,
research, and service. Given increasing expectations for faculty to publish at
many colleges and universities (Kuh, Schuh, Whitt, & Associates, 1991), while maintaining
their traditional teaching loads, it is reasonable to expect that the degree of
faculty commitment to academic advisement will be severely compromised by
institutional reward systems that place greater value on competing professional
priorities.
Before
we can expect to see substantive improvement in the quality of advising received
by undergraduate students, and concomitant improvement in their retention
rates, higher education administrators must begin to intentionally and
creatively redesign traditional reward systems to place higher value on
academic advisement as a professional responsibility. For example, professional
workloads could be intentionally reconfigured and funds reallocated to allow
faculty sufficient time to engage in true developmental advising—as
opposed to perfunctory course scheduling. Academic advising could be redefined
as a bona fide instructional activity and, as such, might be counted as
equivalent to the teaching of one course in a faculty member’s workload. If
advising were redefined and elevated to the status of college teaching, it may
even be possible to allow faculty with historically poor records of advising
performance the option of substituting an additional course in their teaching
load, in lieu of advising. This policy might serve to increase the likelihood
that faculty who do advise are those who possess a genuine interest in and
commitment to delivering high-quality advising.
Faculty
research and scholarship could be more broadly defined to include research on
the advising process, and such scholarship could be counted in decisions about
promotion and tenure in a fashion similar to discipline-driven research. Such
an expanded view of scholarship would be consistent with the late Ernest
Boyer’s call for a “new scholarship” that would include the scholarship of
“teaching” and the scholarship of “application” (Boyer, 1991). Also,
professional (non-faculty) advisors might be given the opportunity to advance
in rank from assistant to associate to full (tenured) status—based on the
quality of their advising and advising scholarship—just as faculty have been
traditionally promoted on the basis of their teaching and research.
Research
on factors that promote faculty change toward student-centered professional
activities indicates that two of the most common barriers to the change process
are the influence of educational tradition and limited incentives for faculty
to change (Bonwell & Eison,
1991). For high-quality advising to become a reality, advisors need (a) to know
that the institution considers advising to be a high-priority professional
activity that is equivalent in value to classroom instruction or research
publication, (b) be given the time to do it, and (c) to know that the time they
do devote to it is counted and weighed in decisions about their professional
rank, promotion, and tenure.