A-HEC: How would you describe your faculty and how do they interact with students?

PP: They are distributed all around the country and increasingly around the world. We’re not quite there yet, but our goal is to have 10 percent of our faculty full-time, devoting all of their energies to Walden.

What I found when I first came to Walden as provost four years ago was a small faculty that kind of had an adversarial relationship with the administration. While I can’t hypothesize how or why that happened, I knew that it was not going to be possible to achieve what we had in front of us if we did not have a supportive faculty. Thus, my first initiative was around faculty governance and building the university’s confidence in the new administration and the (Laureate) company.

One of the things that characterizes our faculty is their longevity. Many of them have been with us for eight or more years. You can just imagine how they felt when the university was sold to a publicly traded company. One of the first things that needed to be done in making our plans was to do a faculty satisfaction survey. We needed to know their top three concerns. Their first concern was clearly communication with the administration and participation in the university. Our improved governance structure spoke to that. Another concern was compensation and we’ve addressed that each year, increasing the compensation in ways that we worked with faculty to identify. Their third concern was around the quality of the students. They were concerned that as we grew, we would be admitting lower quality students. That is a concern typical of the academic mind. People think that the highest quality institutions are those that accept the fewest people and reject the most. We, or course, believe just the opposite. To meet that concern, we developed some pretty robust admissions processes. Before, admissions had been done very ad hoc and not consistently. Giving faculty direct control over the admissions policies and monitoring of the admissions process allayed their fears.

I communicate with the faculty monthly about what’s new at the university and provide them lots of updates. We do faculty satisfaction surveys every year so we have our finger on the pulse of what are their concerns. One recent concern was around faculty development so we’ve made significant investments in research fellowships for faculty and created a faculty excellence fund where they can apply for grants for their own research projects, up to and including a sabbatical where they don’t teach for us, but we pay them anyway. I’ve also just established a vice provost office for faculty development so I’ll have somebody focused exclusively on faculty development at the university level. And we go around the country every year and I have five or six meetings in different regions of the country with faculty face-to-face so they get to know each other, they get to know me, and my staff.

We’ve also developed a much wider range of academic support services for students, including expansion of our library and research support, expansion of our online writing center and a more robust tutoring system for our students. We’ve developed writing courses for students, a whole array of learning support services around writing and critical thinking that we didn’t have before. We’ve developed tutoring courses in statistics and some of the quantitative areas that tend to most often trip up the students. That way, the faculty aren’t having to teach the students one at a time in developmental ways, but can refer them to the university’s resources.

A-HEC: When you are looking for faculty, are you looking for those who are experienced in teaching online courses? In terms of teaching criteria, what are your priorities?

PP: We feel that if someone has experience with online learning, that’s a bonus. Because we offer graduate programs, we’re primarily looking for faculty who have experience in mentoring research and working at the graduate level. Our second priority would be to look for faculty who understand and are open to working with adult learners. Only then, do we look at whether they have online learning experience. We have found that for faculty with strengths in mentoring research and working with adult learners, but little experience in online learning, it’s pretty easy for us to provide them with the right faculty development, which we have available. We believe that if people come with other kinds of online experiences, sometimes we have to help them ‘un-learn’ things in order to learn how to do it the Walden way. That’s why online learning experience is actually the third criteria we look for in hiring faculty.

Copyright 2006 Alliance for Higher Education Competitiveness.