ISU faculty presented the results of an ongoing six-year program researching the climate for current and new faculty members at Iowa State.

The ISU Advance program hosted a luncheon Tuesday in the Pioneer Room of the Memorial Union to present its progress.

The luncheon’s three speakers outlined the goals, problems and solutions that the program has been working on since its inception in 2006. The program will run until 2011.

The program leaders identified six key areas for evaluation and research: how faculty members feel about their workspace, mentoring from older professors, recruitment of quality faculty, the retention of current faculty, the ability to be granted tenure and family leave polices.

The program also looks at STEM fields – science, technology, engineering and mathematics – and the promotion and recruitment of female faculty within those fields, said Susan Carlson, associate provost for faculty advancement and diversity and professor of English.

Carlson started the luncheon off by recapping the goals and the current findings of the program, which has so far seen 71.5 percent faculty involvement through interviews and surveys.

She said the five-year program, which was funded by the National Science Foundation, was “designed to create an infrastructure at Iowa State for transforming structures, cultures and practices in ways that enable and support improvement and retention of a diverse, highly qualified and cohesive faculty in STEM disciplines.”

“Our Advance program is about institutional transformation, and we take a big step today in effecting lasting change,” she said. “In particular, the goal of this nationwide program is institutional transformation to lead to the recruitment, retention and promotion of women faculty members – including women faculty of color.”

At the end of its second year, the program has 30 faculty and graduate students working to identify “innovative, bottom-up initiatives focused on departmental work-climate issues,” Carlson said.

To do this, ISU Advance created surveys and disseminated them to two departments, the results of which were presented at the luncheon. Carlson said the ultimate goal of the program is to develop assessment tools that can be used by academic leaders and departmental chairpersons.

“The goal is to build better academic environments so that we can reach what the president and provost have identified as the number-one goal of the university – to improve, retain and promote excellent faculty,” Carlson said. “Hang out with them, and you will hear that over and over again.”

Lisa Larson, professor of psychology, presented the challenges departments face. The problems identified were spatial proximity and faculty issues, tenure and promotion, mentoring of assistant and junior faculty, democratic participation, recruitment, criteria for hiring or promotion, and family-friendly policies, she said.

Some faculty members interviewed complained about a large service workload preventing research, vague criteria for promotion and problems with a positive work environment. Some were confused about how to define excellence, Larson said.

Larson said some faculty members reported that being closer to senior faculty increased their chances for advancement and mentoring.

Other faculty were confused about family leave policies, she said, which can affect research and tenure.

“I think we can be confident in the results of what we are talking about today pertain to something we should be talking about informally, across faculty, faculty meetings, chair meetings and cabinet meetings,” Larson said. “Again, a lot of us are asking, ‘What are the issues here?’ And here are some of the issues that we can begin to tackle.”

Kristen Constant, associate professor of materials science and engineering, presented some of the solutions that have come out of the ISU Advance research. The strategies should change in order to enact effective mentoring, reward excellent work, improve tenure packages, streamline the process for recruiting faculty and make family leave policies less stigmatized and more transparent, she said.

“We’re trying to reshape these structures, practices and cultures for the purpose of improving recruitment, retention and promotion,” Constant said.