Fall 2020
Subcommittee members:
- Justin Wright (Associate Professor)
- Paul Magwene (Associate Professor)
- Steve Nowicki (Professor)
Charge of the subcommittee
The overall task of the AJED Governance subcommittee is to review the instructions and assessment tools of each reviewing / evaluating committee or team to ensure that we are just, equitable and transparent about the ways we evaluate, compensate and reward members of our department. At the start of the semester we were tasked with assessing how the department evaluates both existing and incoming faculty, graduate students, and staff.
Accomplishments
Faculty
Revised annual report form to include key sections on Promoting Inclusive Excellence, Mentor training, and mentoring metrics with respect to both graduate and undergraduate students. For AY 2020-2021, the performance review committee will provide a score for each faculty but this will not be weighted for decisions about raises in 2021. Starting in 2021, this will become a fourth category of the score, and faculty will develop and vote on how the proportional scores will change as a result.
Students
Worked with Graduate Affairs Committee (GAC) to institute a number of changes to the process of reviewing applicants to the Biology Graduate Program including developing a formal rubric for assessing applicant materials which includes a section on “Contribution to the Duke Community”; instituting implicit bias training for all GAC members prior to evaluating applications; and formalizing the procedure for interviewing to standardize the experience across all applicants. Next year, portions of the rubric will be placed on the Biology Website so that all applicants will have the opportunity to know how they will be evaluated.
Staff
Nothing substantial to report. For administrative staff this is largely an issue for the Departmental Manager (although it should be noted that there is now Administrative staff representation on the AJED Committee). For research staff there were discussions about how to increase diversity in hiring.
Future efforts
Faculty
One of the charges that was moved to a lower priority given the lack of hires in 2020 was to develop best practices for the hiring process. This charge will be prioritized again in 2021 if new hires are made possible. The work done to improve the GAC’s evaluation of graduate applications involved fruitful conversations that will inform our work in this area.
An additional area for future work is to collaborate with the Chair and Steering Committee to carefully read the Biology Faculty Handbook and Bylaws to look for areas that need to be revised and updated to reflect new practices and to ensure that all members of the faculty are receiving information in a transparent and equitable fashion.
Students
There is no current mechanism by which graduate students can provide feedback to the Department about the mentoring they receive. Work in this area is currently underway by the Department’s faculty. The sub-committee recommends that the Department develop a survey mechanism for graduate students to provide yearly feedback about the nature and effectiveness of the mentoring they receive. Several key questions need to be addressed if this is to be implemented including: is this a requirement?; anonymity; standardized survey vs. free text; how and by whom is the information collated, analyzed, used, and reported?; how would graduate students be assured that they would not suffer negative consequences for providing critical feedback about mentoring? The sub-committee recommends that AJED work with the Directors of Graduate Studies and the Graduate Affairs Committee, with representation from graduate students, in their ongoing efforts to develop such a reporting mechanism.
An additional future item for the department to discuss is whether to institute Individual Development Plans (IDPs) to help formalize the assessment of how our graduate students are progressing through the program. These IDPs are already required in NIH training grant sponsored graduate programs as well as all NSOE affiliated graduate programs (including UPE), so many of our graduate students are already using this process. In addition, the Reimagining Doctoral Education (RiDE) report from the Provost’s office has recommended that IDPs be required for all graduate programs at Duke.
Staff
A key issue for future efforts is faculty-research staff interactions. What is the perception of research staff in terms of inclusivity, equity, etc. in the Department and the University. Are there steps that need to be taken in how research staff annual evaluations are conducted to ensure equity?