Duke to Survey Faculty on Work Culture

Duke administrators know the numbers but not the underlying reasons on a series of issues critical to faculty members: Why do faculty leave? What are their needs for research and for teaching? How do they balance work and family life?

The university is looking at several initiatives to address these issues, and a new web-based survey of the faculty will help guide the process. Faculty members this week received a letter from Provost Peter Lange explaining the survey and encouraging them to participate.

"We've made a strong effort to collect information on faculty climate issues, but what we have does not tell us much about what lies behind the numbers," Lange said in an interview. "There can be many reasons faculty stay or leave or choose to come to Duke or don't. Neither do the numbers highlight issues we might want to address so that faculty do not choose to leave or not to come. The survey will be useful in giving us insight to how our faculty are feeling and thinking about their experiences here at Duke."

Recently, Duke officials started doing exit interviews with departing faculty members to get more information about why they were leaving, their perceptions of the institution's strengths and where officials might have been better able to help them.

This information has given officials an appreciation of Duke strengths and weaknesses, but Lange said a wider survey is needed to devise and implement good policies. These could include new mentoring initiatives, setting policies for research support, professional development programs for junior faculty and benefits addressing work-family balance.

"We will systematically analyze the data, seeking to identify aspects of the climate for teaching and conducting research, and more generally for being a faculty member. We will look at which aspects are strengths and which raise concerns that we need to address," Lange said. "We will look for general and local patterns and compare them both across units at Duke and, because the study will include multiple universities, across campuses. The latter is most important because it provides a degree of 'control' as we analyze the data."

The survey, which is adapted from one conducted at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is an extension of some of the concerns raised by Duke's Women's Initiative and the Faculty Diversity Task Force about the work climate for women and faculty of color. However, most of the issues raised by the Initiative and the Diversity Task Force apply to all faculty.

The Faculty Diversity Standing Committee, whose membership included several people involved in the Women's Initiative and the Diversity Task Force, developed the survey under the leadership of April Brown, chair of electrical and computer engineering.

Brown presented the survey to the Academic Council for review in January. After reviewing several models of climate surveys from other institutions, the committee settled on the MIT survey with some modifications specific to the Duke experience. The committee created two versions of the survey -- one for medical center faculty, the other for non-medical faculty.

"Assessing the climate for faculty generally is of great importance and will help us understand where we are strong in our institutional policies, practices and procedures that impact faculty success and opportunities and where we need improvement," Brown said.

All regular-rank faculty members -- some 2,500 people -- are eligible for the survey.

A majority of faculty are in the medical school, where work, mentoring and family issues have received attention under the new office led by Dr. Ann Brown, associate dean for women in science and medicine.

It will be important to get wide responses at all levels of faculty ranks and across university departments.

"As a practical matter, because many of the issues addressed in the survey play out at the local (departmental or -- in the medical center -- even divisional) level, we need representative samples from those local levels to be able to say meaningful things about what's going on there," said David Jamieson-Drake, director of the provost's Office of Institutional Research.

"The same reasoning applies to issues of faculty diversity by demographic categories and by faculty rank. To the extent that faculty and senior administrators are interested in evaluating responses along those dimensions, we need significant representation in each category."

The survey's sections include questions on career satisfaction; workload and environment; use of resources and services; and life outside Duke.

The survey responses are confidential, and officials said several measures were taken to ensure the website is secure.

"Provost Lange and Chancellor Victor Dzau support this survey, and they want faculty not only to respond, but to respond with complete candor," Jamieson-Drake said.

He added that steps were taken to ensure that individual responses can not be identified and that access to the results is restricted. Only aggregate data will be reported.

This isn't the first faculty survey done at Duke. Last year the Trower-Chait survey written by Harvard faculty members was distributed to junior faculty at Duke. The results provided a comparison on workplace issues between Duke and the other institutions in the survey, but again they pointed up the need for a more complete survey.

The survey also is different from the work culture survey being conducted throughout Duke Medical Center.

Lange said it is important for faculty members to participate.

"To the extent that we are able to work with the results to improve the conditions of work for faculty here at Duke, it should be of considerable benefit for faculty members to participate," he said.

"To make good and effective policy choices, we need data that are reliable and that reflect a wide range of responses from across the faculty."