Creating Promotable Teaching Ranks at a Research-Intensive Institution: Key Findings and Challenges for Institutional Change

While there has been much work on teaching faculty labor conditions, this issue has been less studied in R1 institutions, where increasing tensions and contradictions between the research and teaching missions of higher education raise particular issues for realizing equitable labor conditions. Since 2021, a multidisciplinary team of Rice researchers has been examining the impact of the University's reforms of teaching faculty labor conditions (NSF 21-21157), which included creation of promotable teaching ranks intended to increase job security and recognize and reward quality instructional faculty. This poster will present preliminary findings of our study based on analysis of the Survey for Non-Tenure-Track Instructors distributed to current teaching faculty in STEM and social sciences in December 2021, comparison of the NTT Survey to the Rice Tenure/Tenure-Track Climate Survey, and analysis of historical documents and oral history interviews undertaken over the past year. Despite the best intentions of a promotable teaching track, our study highlights the challenges of this job category in achieving equitable academic labor environments. On the positive side, the survey found that promotable teaching faculty's perceptions of influence are similar to tenure/tenure-track faculty and greater than non-promotable NTT faculty. Yet their perceptions of procedural justice are lower than both tenure/tenure-track and non-promotable NTT faculty, suggesting that benefits and performance metrics for promotable ranks have not been clearly articulated. Our historical analysis further documents how the slow and inconsistent implementation of the promotable ranks generated distrust among the NTT faculty. This study highlights the importance of making institutional changes while attending to the process of implementation (e.g., communication, uniformity, and transparency). As our goal is to develop a theory of change for advancing teaching faculty labor equity in R1 contexts, this poster raises questions about necessary organizational structures and stresses the importance of integrating multiple disciplinary perspectives.