Mission Statement

The primary mission of the Faculty Center is to support faculty in their multiple roles as teachers, researchers, scholars, artists, intellectuals, and as members of the university and wider community. Critical to such support is the promotion of collegiality and tailored services to assist faculty at various career stages. Center services, resources, and activities are available to all university faculty--full and part-time, lecturer as well as tenure track. The Faculty Center promotes effective teaching, successful research and creative activity, career advancement, and faculty community and connection. The Center offers a variety of activities to advance these four broad goals designed to serve the needs of our diverse faculty and a diverse student body, including the following: 

Faculty providing innovative, effective, and equity-minded teaching and learning strategies in the classroom supports the campus’s values of being a student-ready campus. The Center’s teaching and learning programming and support resources allow faculty to further develop quality teaching and learning strategies in the classroom to benefit each student and uphold the values of classroom equity. The Center provides workshops, seminars, one-to-one assistance, and other activities that inspire reflection and action concerning teaching and learning. The Center supports exemplary and equity-minded teaching by providing a venue for faculty to share and collaborate on aspects of teaching/learning with colleagues. 

The Center supports faculty’s individual and collaborative creative and scholarly activities by helping faculty in defining their research and creative activity goals and encouraging them to seek funding. The Center supports faculty research and creative activities through writing workshops and institutes. Additionally, the Center provides events and other activities to help faculty meet research and creative activity goals in locating opportunities for internal and external funding and offers mentorship on best practices for sharing and presenting research and creative activity. The Center facilitates and fosters faculty networking with scholars and artists who share similar research and creative activity goals and interests.

Helping faculty of all ranks understand evaluation and promotion processes as well as performance expectations is vital to faculty career success and retention. The Center offers individually tailored support for faculty to prepare personal professional development plans, including assisting faculty in managing their service to the university and wider community. Helping faculty succeed in the retention, tenure and promotion process is a key mission of the Center and the focus of our regularly offered RTP workshops. Additionally, we provide individual consultation on topics such as setting professional goals, time management, understanding and responding to student feedback and course evaluations, and documenting and presenting contributions to teaching, research and creative activity, and service in the Working Personnel Action File (WPAF). Workshops on evaluation processes unique for lecturer faculty are also routinely offered to support faculty of all ranks in their professional goals.

Faculty Community & Connection