The National Science Foundation (NSF) has granted the Pullias Center for Higher Education $1.5 Million to develop and pilot a national survey that will provide a provide a contemporary understanding of postsecondary faculty in the United States.

The grant, given by the NSF’s EHR Core Research program within their Human Resource Development division, will fund the Faculty, Academic Careers and Environments (FACE) project. The work will be led by co-Principal Investigators Adrianna Kezar, Director of the Pullias Center, and KC Culver, currently a Senior Postdoctoral Scholar at Pullias, and soon to be an Assistant Professor at University of Alabama.

Over the next two years, the research team will develop and test the survey methods for an updated and expanded version of the National Survey of Postsecondary Faculty (NSOPF), last administered in 2004. The NSOPF survey served as the primary source of national representative data on faculty from 1999-2004.

The new FACE project aims to not only update the data, but to widen the survey collection to include more relevant issues that are known to affect faculty satisfaction, retention and productivity. These include DEI concerns, sense of belonging and tenure/adjunct issues.

“The FACE project will create the foundation for a full-scale data collection that will provide a contemporary understanding of postsecondary faculty in the United States,” stated Kezar. “This includes who they are and how their working conditions shape their opportunity to be effective.”

The Research Triangle Institute (RTI) will provide key support with development and data collection for the FACE pilot.

This project is part of the Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success at the University of Southern California. The Delphi Project is dedicated to enhancing awareness about the changing faculty trends using research and data to better support faculty off the tenure track and to help create new faculty models to support higher education institutions in the future. An initiative of the Pullias Center for Higher Education at the University of Southern California, the Delphi Project works in partnership with the Association of American College and Universities (AAC&U) and includes more than 30 representatives from across higher education. The project has received generous funding from The Spencer Foundation, The Teagle Foundation, The Carnegie Corporation of New York, and the TIAA Institute.