Our series on faculty technology at liberal arts colleges, begun in April with the Consortium for Faculty Diversity, continues this month with two members of the Provost Office at Bryn Mawr College. They’ll speak about the benefits of using Interfolio for both faculty hiring and advancement processes. Register to attend here.
A small private women’s college, Bryn Mawr’s needs and dynamics around faculty employment are a little different from those facing larger universities, and in some ways echo other liberal arts colleges Interfolio works with, like Haverford, Reed, Morehouse, Sewanee, and Amherst. The have a small staff, a heavy emphasis on teaching, and by far the majority of faculty positions are tenure-track. From a certain perspective, it might not seem so bad if they were to continue handling faculty hiring and promotion in a more manual way.
So what has compelled Bryn Mawr and their peers to take faculty personnel activities online? And what is important to them about this shift in thinking around how technology should help faculty?
In the webinar, we’ll hear from Erin J. Walsh, Assistant Provost for Administration, and Linda Butler Livesay, Faculty Appointments Coordinator, on their experience introducing Interfolio for hiring and promotion on campus.
Both Erin and Linda are familiar with the evaluation, purchase, campus roll-out, and ongoing use of Interfolio at Bryn Mawr. They’ll touch on a variety of things—among them, the point that as a distinct, somewhat quirky liberal arts institution, they needed technology that would be flexible enough to reflect their particular terminology, administrative structure, and policies. Get more details about the webinar here.
Why a liberal arts series? Basically, Interfolio’s liberal arts clients have played an influential role over the years in our understanding of the priorities and needs of shared governance and the academic committee model. Often having fewer administrative layers between faculty, leadership, and students, our conversations with liberal arts colleges have proven pretty indispensable in terms of seeing clearly what the core benefits of faculty-focused technology should be. It feels worthwhile to bring to the surface some of these schools’ experiences, as new kinds of digital experiences intersect in new ways with traditional (and nontraditional) faculty career models.