A Call for Change: Rethinking Faculty Evaluations

Annual faculty evaluations are an important part of the academic process. They provide feedback to faculty on their teaching, research, and service, and they can be used to make decisions about tenure, promotion, and merit raises. Regular feedback and bidirectional communication among faculty and their chief is essential to faculty development, but too often the regular feedback faculty receive are focused on only one area of their contributions and does not paint a complete picture of faculty contributions. Further, one performance evaluation annually is not enough to promote regular advancement conversations among faculty and their chiefs, particularly in a large and complex division. In a biannual faculty engagement survey, the division received feedback from faculty regarding process changes that would benefit them during the promotion process. With these concerns in mind, Northwestern University Division of Cardiology redesigned its annual faculty evaluation with the following goals: (1) encourage conversation around faculty promotion and to focus the evaluation more on career development; (2) recognize all faculty contributions to the academic and clinical community at large and highlight qualitative contributions; (3) encourage conversation year-round among faculty, their section chiefs, and their division chiefs; and (4) better align with the university's timeline and faculty tracking systems. This workshop will demonstrate the new evaluation process and criteria and discuss how the expanded faculty evaluation process was integrated into administrative workflow.