On October 28-29, 2016, The Chancellor’s Conference on the New Professoriate: Tenure, Diversity and Engagement brought together national thought leaders and Rutgers University-Newark faculty to engage in the difficult conversations facing higher education and our academic community. Our student body has outpaced the changing demographics across the U.S. The extraordinarily diverse student body of Rutgers University-Newark reflects the complex intersectional landscape of heritage, language, race and ethnicity, class, sexuality, faith traditions, and more. And we must meet the promise that our students and our community demand from us.

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Like our student body, we know that the professoriate of the future will also be diverse, and in every way possible; ethnically and racially, in their scholarship, and in their faculty lives. The current and future professoriate is made richer from increasing opportunities for people who historically have not sought or been hired for faculty positions. We expect that new members of the professoriate will come from many different kinds of communities, both geographic and intentional, that they will increasingly engage in scholarship with members of those communities and will be better prepared to teach a richly diverse student population. We also expect it to continue to be comprised of non-tenure track faculty (NTTs), part-time lecturers (PTLs) and professors of practice—a diverse faculty of dedicated instructors who often connect the institutional learning experience to the lived work experience outside academia. We expect a growing interest in publicly-engaged scholarship (as institutions across the nation are seeing and embracing) as our many publics continue to ask higher education to contribute high impact scholarship to meet the needs of a challenged world.  Those challenges are messy and will require collaboration across disciplines to tackle questions of significant importance.  The teachers and scholars of the New Professoriate, therefore, are a bridge to more experiences, fuller meanings and new possibilities. 

 

As we grow toward our aspirant selves, it is clear that we need to attend to increasing our excellence through consciously and intentionally diversifying our faculty and providing our faculty with the supports they desire and need for successful careers in teaching, scholarship and public engagement.

 

The day and half Conference on the New Professoriate encouraged broad conversations beginning by focusing on three current topics in higher education:

 

• Increasing Representation of Underrepresented Groups including issues of recruitment, retention of faculty of color, women in STEM, and maximizing the “diversity bonus”

• Embracing the Challenges of Today, including issues of solving complex problems, diversity as excellence in scholarship, and valuing and evaluating publicly-engaged scholarship

• Preparing a New Generation, including expanding the professoriate and preparing graduate students for diverse careers

 

The first evening kicked off the event in style with a jazz reception and opening remarks by Chancellor Cantor and Freeman Hrabowski, President of the University of Maryland-Baltimore County at 15 Washington Street’s Great Hall. The next day included four sessions and the lunch speaker, Tim Eatman, Dean of Rutgers University-Newark’s Honors Living Learning Community. Our speakers provided an inspirational and challenging context for our discussions, and the sessions provided opportunities for the speakers to engage in a conversation with the audience. The day concluded with a panel of academic leaders reflecting on the challenge of change.

 

Conference Organizing Committee:

Fran Bartkowski – Professor, English

Sherri-Ann Butterfield – Executive Vice Chancellor and Associate Professor, Sociology

Peter Englot – Senior Vice Chancellor of Public Affairs and Chief of Staff

David Troutt – Professor, Law

Bonita Veysey – Director of the P3 Collaboratory and Professor, Criminal Justice

Jerome Williams – Distinguished Professor and Prudential Chair, Business