SIGCSE

Because We Teach...

Recruitment and Retention of [Teaching] Faculty

Notes

Attendees at the SIGCSE 2002 session on the SIGCSE Committee Initiative identified several general issues related to recruitment and retention:

How to encourage graduates to consider academic careers?
How to support beginning faculty (e.g., mentoring, best practices)?
How to retain good faculty?
How to handle contexts and constraints in hiring and retaining teaching faculty?
How to form and run a faculty-development program?
How to organize effective mentoring?

As a separate but related topic, through 2001-2002, the Computing Research Association (CRA) undertook a study of faculty recruitment and retention in computer science -- with funding from NSF. The study included several surveys of both Ph.D.-producing CS departments and non-Ph.D.-producing CS departments.

For Ph.D.-producing CS departments, these studies supplemented information from the annual Taulbee Survey.
For non-Ph.D.-producing CS departments, this study provided the first systematic survey of these departments -- beginning a base line for further discussion.

The intent was to understand more clearly the issues of recruitment and retention and to begin a discussion of how to address these issues. The results of this study should be available in the near future.

A SIGCSE Committee could build on the CRA work - either collaboratively with CRA or taking over some of that work now that CRA's NSF grant is complete.

created October 14, 2002 last revised November 9, 2002

For more information, please contact Henry M. Walker at sigcse@cs.grinnell.edu.