What resources are available, and what are the possibilities within an increasingly budget tight environment?

Nevertheless, often small steps and innovative institutional practices can make a significant difference in faculty development, and in support for shaping the next generation of faculty. Some universities provide modest research pools to faculty to cover expenses such as travel, books, small purchases, and the like. There is often tremendous inequity in access to research funds. As a result of outside offers or of the original recruiting offer from one's university, some faculty attain research funds significantly larger than those of faculty who have been loyal to the university and consistently producing for many years. A small pool of funds to help even this imbalance can make a big difference.

Release time is another important faculty development tool that often can be employed even at times of resource constraint. Institutional practices can vary on how to apply release time; different policies can have different consequences for allocation. At the University of Chicago, release time is supported not through the vehicle of a formal sabbatical policy (whereby faculty earn release by committing to teach at the university for a specified period of time) but by sufficient earnings of external (or occasionally internal) grants. The University of Chicago insists that faculty return to serve out their responsibilities as members of the intellectual community and as teachers by restraining the number of years that faculty may engage in release time over a specific period.

The University of Chicago also maintains a unique “workshop” system within at least two of its divisions (the humanities and social sciences). At last count, there were 70 of these intentionally interdisciplinary workshops. My own department, at last count, was involved in 18 such workshops, which vary from those which are nominally confined to political science (“Political Theory,” although it draws from fields such as philosophy and religion) to explicitly those which are interdisciplinary (“Program in International Politics, Economics, and Security,” which draws principally from political science and public policy). The workshops are venues for advanced graduate students to present their own work in front of their peers and faculty in a collegial environment. The university provides few resources, but the workshops have proven quite successful in advancing students to interesting and challenging appointments at academic and non-academic institutions.

The idea of “faculty development” must really mean, despite the hard times and the appeals of moving elsewhere or moving inward, the idea of moving upward and intellectually outward. The capacity for faculty development should flow from closer integration of our undergraduate and graduate students into the processes of our ideas, and of their own into ours.

Administrative Leadership

In the final analysis, we are extraordinarily fortunate at the University of Chicago to have had a series of deans of the division of social sciences who are, on the one hand, strong defenders of the interests of the department, wanting to see the department as a whole become the best it can be, and on the other, strict moderators of the division's budget. There is no one-size-fits-all solution to department management and faculty development in an era of resource constraints, but the single most important element to a successful department is effective academic leadership.