Helping Our Faculty Flourish through Participation in the COACHE Job Satisfaction Survey

Dear Colleagues,

Early next week, you will be invited to participate in an important faculty survey that will help us better understand faculty job satisfaction – areas of faculty concern, areas of success, and challenges facing our faculty as a whole. This survey is part of a national research partnership 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 a web-based survey that will take approximately 25 minutes to complete. Your unique link to the survey will be emailed to you from COACHE; however, the organization will not use any name or email address for any purposes other than this research.

While there are many surveys that faculty are asked to complete, this one was designed entirely by Harvard to determine current job satisfaction compared to faculty at peer institutions. This ability to compare findings across higher education requires that we deploy the survey exactly as published – including demographic questions that Baylor would not typically ask and may not align with our institutional stance on many issues. You need not answer any question that concerns you. Your responses are especially important to us as we strive to attract and retain outstanding scholars and teachers, increase the satisfaction of all faculty, and make Baylor University a great place to work.

The survey is completely confidential and will be handled through the COACHE project team at Harvard. Your privacy will be maintained in all published and written data, and your identity will be carefully protected in all information, including the summary analysis, that COACHE will share with our campus.

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

On February 10, you will receive an e-mail from COACHE (coachefaculty@opinioncast.com), directing you to the online survey. If you have any questions about this survey, please contact Lenore Wright at Lenore_Wright@baylor.edu or Jason MacGregor at Jason_MacGregor@baylor.edu, or COACHE at coachefaculty@srbi.com.

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

Sincerely,

Nancy Brickhouse, Ph.D.
Provost