Draft: Version 2.0
July 27, 2003
R.A.Brown

Ad Hoc Faculty Committee

on

Faculty Quality of Life

Introduction

In November 2002 the MIT Council on Family and Work reported to the faculty on the results from the Quality of Life Survey that pertained to the faculty. This survey found that faculty believe that the pace and pressure of being a faculty member at MIT have increased substantially over the last decades and that the workload at MIT is greater than at other leading research universities. The survey also found that there are gender and generational gaps in faculty members' perceptions of pace and pressure, with women and younger male faculty disproportionately reporting an overly intense work environment.

The Council on Family and Work recommended that the Provost appoint an Ad Hoc committee to delve further into the issues surround faculty pace and pressure and to recommend changes in MIT faculty policies and initiatives that will provide the best possible environment for sustainable faculty achievement and the best, sustainable academic community for our faculty, staff and students. Simultaneously, MIT has fostered a community of scholars where achievement and entrepreneurship flourishes at every level of the academic endeavor. These foundations of our culture have been highly valued and have been carefully fostered.

Charge to Committee

The Committee should undertake serious deliberations of the findings, suggestions and recommendations from the report of the Quality of Life Survey by the MIT Council on Family and Work. Specifically, the Committee should establish the magnitude of the perceived increased work load on the faculty and the institutional consequences of it . The committee should:

• Determine the root causes of the increased work load and resulting pace and pressure on faculty members. This investigation should highlight how these root causes might vary with age, gender, and field of a faculty member. Additional surveys, focus groups and other means may be used to accomplish this goal. To the extent possible this information should be benchmarked against similar institutions in order to understand any differences that exist at MIT.
• Understand how the work load felt by our faculty impacts the values MIT places on community and collegial interaction.
• Understand how our processes and policies for promotion and tenure interface with changes in family demographics among our faculty. An important issue is the interplay between changes in family demographics and the life-cycle of the academic career of a faculty member.
• Understand how pace and pressure limit the success of MIT's commitment to diversify our faculty.

Using this understanding as a foundation, the committee make recommendations that would improve the quality of life for the faculty. These recommendations may include:

• changes in MIT faculty policies that may help alleviate increasing pace and pressure.
• proposals for additional resources for our faculty members. These resources can take many forms, but could include additional academic support for the faculty and additional compensation and benefits that specifically address pace and pressure. These considerations by the committee must account for the preciousness of such resources and lead to a carefully reasoned list of priorities.

• The committee should understand how peer institutions address quality of life concerns for their faculty members.

I realize the large effort entailed in a deliberation of the issues which are integrated into the issue of faculty quality of life. In many ways the root causes and potential changes required are embedded into the fabric of MIT's culture. Even so, this fabric needs to be reexamined in light of the issues that face our faculty, both at home and at MIT. Institutional change is complex, especially of the type that may be required to fully address the issues surrounding a sustainable pace and pressure for our faculty. The deliberations of this committee will be the focal point for this debate and the findings will be critical to MIT faculty for decades to come.