(168b) Cultivating Support and Success As a Department’s First Permanent Non-Tenure-Track Faculty Member

In the fall of 2015, I was hired as the first permanent non-tenure-track faculty member in the Department of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Delaware. The position has brought many challenges but also many opportunities, and I was able to build on my past experiences as a visiting teaching assistant professor and non-tenure track lecturer at two other institutions to help define my position. Over the past four years, I have established roles in my department that make my job fulfilling and full of opportunities for growth.

I believe the University of Delaware is one of the “gold standards” in terms of logistics related to non-tenure-track faculty. Our treatment of this nontraditional track is evident even in the name: we are called Continuing Track (CT) faculty, to define us as something that we are (continuing from contract to often-lengthening contract), rather than something we are not (i.e., on the tenure track). CT professors share titles with tenured/tenure-track (T/TT) faculty, as well as a parallel promotion path; they are afforded sabbaticals every six years; they participate in faculty governance. Our status is further secured through the support of the American Association of University Professors, as well as a CT Caucus that works to improve the quality of life for all CT faculty at the university.

Being the first CT faculty member of a department came with its challenges: the right balance of teaching, scholarship, and service needed to be agreed upon, and the department faculty had to update our by-laws to align with the policies for CT faculty at the university and college level. I have relied on mentorship from CT faculty in adjacent departments (particularly chemistry and mechanical engineering) as well as T/TT faculty in my own department, as no one person has wholly worked under the same expectations as I have. My department chairs have worked carefully with me to ensure that I am given a workload that allows me to thrive as an educator. In this talk I will share elements of the creation and cultivation of my position as an assistant (and now associate) professor on the Continuing Track in chemical engineering at the University of Delaware that I believe to have impacted my ability to excel in ways that are different from, yet parallel to, our T/TT faculty.