Dear Faculty Colleagues,

I am pleased to inform you of an important opportunity you will be offered in the coming days to participate in a survey of faculty job satisfaction. This survey is part of a national program called the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education (COACHE), which has been operating from the Harvard Graduate School of Education since 2003. Participation will entail completing a 25-minute, web-based survey; your unique link to the survey will be emailed to you from COACHE in the coming days. COACHE will not use any name or email address for any purposes except for this research. Faculty with ≥ 0.5 FTE appointments will receive this invitation. Faculty having administrative appointments in a dean’s office or higher will not participate in the survey.

While there are many surveys that faculty are asked to complete, this one was designed to assess current job satisfaction compared to faculty at peer institutions. Your views are especially important to us as we strive to attract and retain exceptional scholars and teachers, increase the satisfaction of all faculty, and ensure that Washington State University (WSU) continues to be a great place to work. WSU faculty participated in this survey in the spring of 2022. Please find the survey results and action plan from that survey here.

In a process approved by Harvard’s and WSU’s institutional review board, COACHE will provide our institution with their summary analysis, as well as the confidential unit-record database, stripped of names and e-mail addresses. The data provided to WSU will be received and kept on a secure server by WSU Institutional Research (IR). Neither I, nor any other administrator, staff, or faculty member outside of IR at WSU will have access to the unit-record data. IR will explore and analyze broad patterns in the data to assist with planning and developing improved academic policies and practices across campus. To protect confidentiality and guarantee that the results of this survey cannot influence personnel decisions about individual faculty members, IR staff will disseminate survey results only with data aggregated in cells of five respondents or more, so that individual faculty and individual departments cannot be identified.

We welcome this opportunity to learn from an independent, research-driven, comparative study. We believe that WSU has the potential to be one of the best places for faculty to work, and with your help we can learn how best to support that goal. However, data from the Faculty Job Satisfaction Survey will be meaningful only if we have broad participation.

Within a week, you will receive an e-mail from COACHE (coachefaculty@opinioncast.com), directing you to the online survey. The survey is easy to complete. If you have any questions about this survey, please contact Douglas Call (Senior Vice Provost) at drcall@wsu.edu or 509-335-558, or contact COACHE at coachefaculty@abtassociates.com.

Thank you in advance by helping us through participation in this study.

Sincerely,

Elizabeth S. Chilton
Provost and Executive Vice President
Chancellor, WSU Pullman
Professor, Department of Anthropology