Supporting and retaining faculty with diverse community, workload satisfaction, and feeling valued

Abstract

Higher education continues to struggle in efforts to hire, support, and retain diverse faculty. Using a conceptual framework that focuses on how environments contribute to faculty’s ability to thrive and do their best work as educators, we will explore how faculty structural diversity (a proxy for a diverse and inclusive community), satisfaction with work-life and within-work balance, and perceptions of being valued by their institution relate to their intentions to stay at their institution, the professoriate, or academia altogether. Join this session to discuss how these aspects of environment relate to faculty retention and to contribute to a growing collection of ideas about how to create community, workload satisfaction, and perceptions of institutional value for diverse faculty. Participants will leave this session with thoughts on how these issues manifest on their campus and ideas for how to assess and improve their own efforts to support and retain diverse faculty.