Office of the Provost

Dear Colleagues,

Since I started as your provost over 18 months ago, a primary goal in our office has been to prioritize how we support our people. This goal touches nearly every aspect of our operations, from communications planning and strategy, to the structure of our vice provost roles, to our partnerships within the schools and colleges and across the University. We have been retooling our approaches in several areas, including new faculty engagement and academic leadership development, as just a couple of examples.

As we undertake these efforts, it’s critical we do so in a way that is informed by the needs and input of those we serve. One such source that will be very valuable in our efforts is the COACHE Faculty Job Satisfaction Survey. The Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education (COACHE), a program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, is a research-practice partnership and network of peer institutions dedicated to improving outcomes in faculty recruitment, development, and retention.

In partnership with COACHE, we administered an anonymous survey to our faculty in spring 2020 at the start of my time here at UConn. Following that, the Provost’s Office worked with faculty representatives to collaborate on understanding the survey results and to look at areas in which we can improve. The data is also benchmarked against a small set of comparable institutions, allowing us to see specific strengths and weaknesses in comparison to peers. We will next participate in the survey in 2025.

We hope you will engage with this data to familiarize yourself with our strengths and weaknesses as reported by you and your colleagues. And we also hope this data will encourage dialogue about opportunities to best support faculty at UConn. I invite you to join one of our upcoming sessions to learn more about these results (sign-up information below).

The COACHE survey results provide really valuable information about the experiences of our faculty. The results indicated important areas of strengths and weakness. Regarding the latter, we obtained valuable information to help us understand less favorable perceptions of mentoring and the extent to which under-represented minority faculty find the University a less welcoming environment than their fellow faculty.

The full results of the survey are available on a SharePoint site via the Office for Institutional Research and you can log into this site here.

To provide an overview of the results and to answer any questions, we are holding virtual workshops at two different times. Sign-up information is available at the links below (requires NetID login).

• Monday, November 22, 4 to 5 p.m.
• Thursday, December 2, 12 to 1 p.m.

The presentation will be led by Phillip Hyman, MPA ’22, Provost’s Office Policy Intern, with Vice Provost Gladis Kersaint and Director of Academic Policy and Faculty Affairs Sarah Croucher available to answer questions.

We look forward to engaging with you on these important results.

Sincerely,
Carl

Carl Lejuez
Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs